Don't look now, but…

I am now, again, a couple of months behind on the Torsten posts. I just started working again, so, eh, give me a break

Worse, I still have a Facebook account. And lately, it seems everyone has been adjusting their profile pics to old pictures, and so I figured I’d play along. And then I decided I enjoyed the picture so much I’d put it up here.

I’m a year or two older than Torsten in this (badly scanned, and not by me – it’s not my original) picture, but for the first time, I can totally see he’s my kid.

This’ll have to tide you Torsten fans over until I get time to put up birthday, Christmas, and all sorts of other pictures. Just think of it as Torsten with dark hair. And a dress. And mouse ears.

Christmas, 197*. (Hint: whatever year it is, it means I'm old...)

I’m sure most UPS employees are fine people with a stressful job. I should say, however, that next to search queries for how to get rid of U3 on a thumb drive, the most popular query for this site is “UPS sucks”, because, well… my experiences with UPS have not been all that great, and apparently other people haven’t been having fantastic experiences with them either.

The problem is that because a lot of businesses only ship with them, they’re often the only game in town (because they’re cheap), so it’s not as if anyone has a choice in terms of using them most of the time.

I certainly never chose to ship with UPS when I had other alternatives. Your mileage may vary of course, but in recent years, my experiences with UPS were not good. Don’t get me wrong – some individual delivery drivers have been kind and helpful and diligent, and it is a shame that what I generally presume to be a bad customer service model (rather than individual drivers) means that there’s more focus on the substantial negatives people experience than the people who do a good job. That’s unfortunately the way of the world.

Buuuuuuuuut…

A gentleman referring to himself as “Mr. Big” (overcompensate much, dear?) from Florida (specifically, 76.108.125.137 , which resolves to a dynamic Comcast IP (c-76-108-125-137.hsd1.fl.comcast.net) - West Palm Beach, perhaps?) chose to demonstrate how classy some of UPS’s employees really are by leaving me the following message this morning:

you people are idiots,, please dont use ups,bunch of retards,,first off unless you live in complete filth in the ghetto , or THE SHIPPER PAID TO MAKE SURE WE DONT LEAVE THE PACKAGE WITHOUT A SIGNATURE then you are outta luck,we cant leaveit,, the last thing we want to do is go back to the same stop the next day, as for the sea cow that said ‘ oh,, thats terrible the driver would not bring the package up for the pregnant woman” boo hoo,, we have on average about 190 stops a day and everyone we deal with has a bad back, is crippled,, old,, pregnant, retarded, some reason why they want us to do more than we are paid for…jerks,,, ups has been around 100 yrs and is still payin its employees well and makin a ton of money….HA HA HA

Hmmmm. So UPS, is this the public face you want to display?

Complain about UPS on the Internet, get told you’re a a retard, and a jerk, a sea cow for sympathizing with a pregnant woman,  and get (really, so eloquently) informed that UPS has been around forever, is making loads of money, and you, the customer, can suck it?

My personal suspicion, given the number of hits I get for UPS sucking in various forms, is that businesses that use their model of making customer service effectively unavailable (and having a standard set of falsehoods used as a delay tactic for angry customers) which don’t also provide reasonable service to their customers will eventually collapse under their own weight, though it may take a while. If you’re the only game in town by virtue of being the cheap choice of online retailers, it takes a while for customers to decide to pay for more expensive options or to simply stop using particular services until they start offering multiple shipping options. When we still lived in the US, I often opted for 2-day FedEx, USPS or DHL when it was offered, even if it was more expensive, to avoid having anything important go via UPS. I wanted to ensure I actually got what I asked for when it was supposed to come and didn’t waste multiple days waiting for it or find it stolen (by the way, “Mr. Big”, I didn’t live in the ghetto – I lived in a city. Cities are densely populated and not all people are scrupulous, as you surely know from *ahem* personal experience). If companies like UPS continue to go for increased profit margins at the expense of actually providing the service they’re paid to provide (delivering when they say they will deliver, not lying about having tried to deliver it afterwards, etc.), they will eventually run into problems, though I do suppose the lesson of the U.S. economy in the new millenium is that you can lie for a damned long time – at least long enough to run off with the profits, leaving employees like our friend here screwed.

Anyway, I should state, for the record, that I didn’t post this because I’m somehow upset by it – I’m actually amused.

Especially since Mr. Big — whose charming (and certainly fake) email address was, incidentally, entered as “slapyousideways@yahoo.com” — got here by searching for the following phrase: “why working for UPS sucks”.

UPS, you may want to have a chat with some of your Floridian employees about 1) how not to represent your company, and 2) how to be less stupid on the Internet.

Just sayin’…

(1.14.2010 – and it appears we have another winner on the employee list. Of course, it could be the same dude coming through a Tor server (don’t think I didn’t see that), but if not, welcome, “bossman” from somewhere near Valencia, CA… you’re the next contestant on the Circle of Jerks ™! – pun intended.)

I apologize. I was trying something out with the assumption that the number of false positives would be smaller than n, where n is a number I actually care about. I was close-to-wrong, and so removed it for the time being.

I had to do something kind of unpleasant which may have broken some things here. I apologize in advance to anyone this impacts, but since anyone it impacts probably won’t see this for more than a second or two, well… sorry about it anyway.

Needless to say, I am surprised. I’ve never crossed the 50k threshold this early, though to be fair, the story is far from done, as I knew it would be. Still doing my best not to look back at how crappy what I’ve written so far is, however…

So I was sort of vaguely excited that I would get to start writing earlier than, you know, the entire continent of North America this month (I always try to write a few words around midnight on October 31/November 1st to get started), but I had a headache last night, so I said, “Eh, screw it. I’m recovering from the Bacon Plague, I shouldn’t push it,” and went to bed with a clear conscience.

And then I got up and planned to write, but we three had a Sunday morning cuddlefest in bed once C awoke, and, eh, nothing beats that.

And then I realized I didn’t have my LaTeX environment set up on this desktop the way I wanted to start writing, so I did that…

And there was some Torsten-wrangling, and a bath, and some breakfast, and…

And now it’s 12:45 pm. The usual NaNo procrastination appears to be well underway, because I haven’t written a word.

(To be fair, no real procrastination is involved except for this post – this is just a typical weekend day with kids, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I just want to get writing, because this novel is a very tiny part of what I plan to get done this month!)

Last night I released all five Torsten letters necessary to be caught up into the wild, completely unproofread, and that’s how they’ll stay for a while, much as it galls me.

Why?

Because today, today is November 1st. I have something else to save my writing energies for, and as soon as Papa gets up to take the little guy, I’m off to the races

Dear T-is-for-Torsten-but-also-for-Trouble,

First of all, can we have a big WOO HOO for Mama, who is finally caught up with her Torsten posts?

I thought we could. Woo hoo!

Of course, if I asked you to say, “Woo hoo, Mama!” right now, you would in fact say “Woo hoo, Mama!”, which is great, except that you are asleep and I want to keep it that way.

In any event, you are one busy kid these days.

You are obsessed with Mama and Papa’s computers, especially if they are on and you are not supposed to be touching them. Mama has taken to running TuxType for you so that you can at least productively destroy my keyboard (and also, she likes to hear you say, “Tux eat fish? `licious??” while she’s making breakfast), but you are something of a chaos machine these days, and you are just as likely to pitch my mouse (repeatedly) across the room to assess its aerodynamic properties as you are to use it to do something bad to whatever program I am running (and you have figured out that there is a correlation between what you do with the mouse and what happens on the screen, so we are in trouble).

Torsten takes over Mama's machine

read more…

Dearest Torsten,

Unfortunately, this is the second time I’ve had to write this post, because Zoundry Raven, which is now really not on the list of my favorite blog editors, ate all of my changes and wouldn’t let me save.

This means, practically speaking, that I am not going to write it all again – not because I don’t love you, but because I want to be caught up with Torsten posts.

This month has been much less of a change than the last because we’re been getting all settled here, but it’s still been a change.

See, you’ve been spoiled for a while now, having both Papa and Mama with you during the day for a couple of months, and this month, that came to an end as Papa went back to work.

Now, Papa is wildly happy with his job, and that makes everyone happy, but for you and I, there’s been some adjustment period. Mama hasn’t had to be home all day with a toddler with no outside assistance since her own little brother was three, and that was almost thirty years ago, so it doesn’t count as recent experience. The days are sometimes hard to fill, and you are much busier and much more capable than you were before we started with Sherice that it’s just a whole different ball of wax.

Cute, even with a few tears

read more…

Dearest Torsten,

This was a huge month.

At the start of this month, we had verifiable good news – we’d be moving to Munich! Of course, by then, you were all comfy at Oma and Opa’s, and quite frankly, we were dreading pulling up your roots again, but it would have to be done, and so we were eager to get it done and over with as soon as possible.

read more…