Month: June 2009


Verizon Wireless Voicemail Sucks


Part 2 in the series on ripping apart Verizon Wireless (even though I still like them): Their voicemail system sucks. It takes 4 years, has 400 menu options and never works right. When you go to leave someone a message, I have to wait an extra 25 seconds after their greeting is over to listen to the annoying woman telling me to talk after the beep or ask if I want to leave a callback number. 1) I already know I need to talk after the beep, this is how voicemail worked since 1983 and 2)What the hell is the point of leaving a callback number if you show up in my missed calls? There is a skip button for the greeting, but I always forget it because it’s different for every wireless company. And can’t we get a British woman to read the menu options? Their accents are hot. No, we get an annoying nag that grinds on my nerves.

Second annoyance: I call voicemail, listen to my message and hang up. Two seconds later, my phone is beeping, vibrating and flipping out that I have a new voicemail. Um no I don’t, I just listened to it idiot. The problem here is that Verizon only flags the message as old only if you listen to the whole thing OR press 9 to save or 7 to delete it. I never do this because it wastes my time. What the system should do is mark the message as old once you begin listening to it. Sometimes I get the jist of the message after 5 seconds and want to hang up and call back ASAP rather than hearing the person ramble on.

Fix it, Verizon.


Twitter Gone Private


I regret to inform my fellow stalkers that I had to protect my Twitter updates. This isn’t because I don’t want strangers reading it – I could care less. There has been an abundance of spammers in the past few days and I am sick of being followed by accounts that take my tweets and re-tweet them on other people’s Twitters with spam links. I will probably undo this in a few days, but for now, this is one solution. So if you’re the Editor in Chief or the General Manager of the Mirror who refuses to join the Web 2.0 revolution and get a Twitter account, now it looks like you’ll have to in order to read mine or be in the dark. Sorry.

Verizon Wireless has you by the balls


I love Verizon to death because their service is decent, but their phones are WEAK. I want to be able to use an iPhone, an Android, or the Palm Pre – or anything revolutionary like that. I don’t want the crappy ass Blackberry Storm which sucks and forces me to to spend an extra $25/month for a data plan. I certainly don’t care that the Storm 2 is coming out. So what does Verizon have that’s semi cool? Nothing.

Last December, I was going to get the LG Dare or Voyager but then decided to keep my money. Why? When I looked at the phone, it was all eye candy. The software on the phone was unchanged from my current phone, which is over 2 years old. You’d think LG would learn from Apple and Palm to release something revolutionary where you can download open source apps. You know how many Verizon Wireless phones have Wi-Fi? One. And it’s over $300 because it’s a Windows Mobile Smartphone. It’s because they want to make you pay $40 more per month for their data plan, not connect to Joe’s wireless network for free.

Verizon Wireless’ CEO Lowell McAdam is a liar, a fool and doesn’t know how to keep up with the coolest technology. He complimented Motorola, which is struggling to turn around shrinking phone sales. Why are the sales shrinking? Because they’re making phones. No one wants phones. Everyone wants smartphones – for cheap, and with a lot of features. McAdam also said that Verizon Wireless would carry the Pre within six months. This is a downright lie, since Sprint’s CEO disclosed the exclusive contract with Palm to keep the Pre on Sprint only until the end of 2009. “We like what we see and we will, in fact, be bringing Android devices to the marketplace in the near future,” McAdam said. You better – because we’ve had it. And when you say Android devices, we mean smartphones. Not a stupid flip phone from 2004 with Android software and crippled Wi-Fi.

It all comes down to money and corporate contracts. They were too cheap to pay royalties to Apple for the iPhone. The huge marketing campaign and fuss was over the Storm, and it was a flop. Sprint grabbed the Palm Pre. Apple is releasing the iPhone 3GS, which has its own userbase. You fail Verizon – get your shit together, because I’m not a fan of your phones right now.


Headphone Wires


You know what pisses me off to no end? Headphone wires. They are by far the biggest pain in the ass waste of my time ever. No matter how carefully and neatly I wrap them around my iPod, they always manage to get tangled into the worst possible knot. I don’t think I could actually knot the wires as much if I tried. I mean seriously… You take the wire and wrap it around the iPod in circles. You’d think it would just unwind the other way. But no.

I just spent 10 minutes getting these headphones untangled and I must have taken out 6 knots and fished the plug thing and the earbuds through various loops 20 times. This should not be happening every single time I put the iPod away. This is not helpful when you already spent an hour in traffic to get 15 miles since the parkway is closed because the sewers suck ass and cause the roads to flood due to never ending rain brought on by fucked up jet streams and you have to go through one-laned side streets with two minute traffic lights on each corner. (Run on sentence much?) I just want to listen to damn music already. FML


You Are Educated, Now Act that Way


I was about to go to bed since I need to get back on normal time, but became enraged when I was browsing through a certain social media website and saw someone typing LYk dIsSSS oMGGggggg!!!!!1 What enraged me more was that the person was a well educated, college graduate. Yes folks, this is the type of trash that is getting hired. I ranted about this back in 2005. While reviewing that post, I realized that I was talking about high school girls st the time. Yes, it still makes you look dumb, but looking back, I can cut them some slack. The moment I saw a college grad do that, my blood boiled at our ignorant society and utter stupidity.

Years ago, I wrote a program that does that to a computer. It spams the capslock key on and off so that the typing lOoKS LIkE tHIs. It is a prank and is designed to piss people off. By no means is this supposed to be used for any other purpose and the fact that people go out of their way to do this is sickening.

Apparently, people go out of their way to do this. Does it make you cooler? Please comment and let me know what the purpose of this is. Enlighten me. The only thing I can think of is that it makes you look like a fucking dumbass, so stop doing it. I hope your future employers read it it and not hire you due to your flagrant stupidity and feeble grasp of the English language.