Tag: Annoyances


CRTs Suck


There needs to be a law where all CRTs are instantly banned. It’s 2010 and they have become completly useless. There’s absolutely no reason why any kind of display needs to have a huge ass bulky tube that shoots electrons onto a piece of phosphorous coating… It’s madness, and it’s been around since the 1940s.

I went to my living room to watch some TV, turn it on and hear the loudest, most annoying high frequency tone in my life. It drives me mad and it’s so loud I can’t even watch it. You don’t get that with LCD and OLED displays. It enraged me, because everyone else in this house is old and can’t hear it. Plus the pixels are huge. Awful.. Just awful.


Now Verizon is pissing me off


Dear Verizon,

I do not appreciate you LOWERING my internet speed. For a few years. I have had the 20MBPS downstream package, which ran at 20.3MBPS. How nice of you to go over slightly. A few days ago, the company announced speed increases for all, especially in competitive markets. The new low tier is said to be 25MBPS/15MBPS. Nice. However, not only has my speed not been increased yet, but it seems that a few hundred KBPS are missing off my downstream. I now max out at 19.3 MBPS. This is unacceptable. Is this how you make room for the extra bandwidth you are giving away? I’ll be expecting 25/15 by the end of next week.

love,
Portfolioso

Edit: Verizon says nothing is wrong. True, nothing is wrong, except for the fact that some engineer throttled my speed and didn’t inform the morons answering the phones.


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.


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