I have it on good authority that this is not particularly pedagogically popular in Germany – preschool education is focused on social and playtime skills and some parents even go so far as actively trying not to teach their kids to read before they start school (my in-laws did this – and my MIL was a grade school teacher, no less! And for those fans of American Sesame Street, you wouldn’t really recognize it here – the educational content is in general only about social lessons and asking questions and it’s less than half-an-hour).

To each his own – this is a cultural thing – but I can hardly stop encouraging my kid who gets so excited when he sees letters he knows, can I? Besides, he’s got the challenge of two languages to master. If he can read in one of them before he starts school, so much the better for him. From experience, I’ll say this much – if a kid is going to be bored in school, holding him back only delays the onset.

(Two old ladies on the U-Bahn were shocked when he announced that there was an ‘A’ and an ‘H’ in the name of the station we were going through and said he wouldn’t need to go to school – I had to laugh at that. It’s a mindset, clearly, though one shouldn’t get the idea that I’m trying to generalize the feelings of 80 million people on the topic… I just find it surprising)

We aren’t pushing the reading thing any more than we’d push anything else on a 2-year old, but given this kid’s attitude toward books and reading, I am totally encouraging it as I would any other positive thing he were interested in, and culture be damned

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Hint: Turn your audio up to hear him, but be prepared to plug your ears when my loud-assed voice speaks…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kiddo needs a haircut too

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Here he is on the bus, saying “cheese” with a goofy grin and showing off his “ring pretzel” (no, that is not a euphemism for anything, it’s just what he called it):

Cheese!

Here he is, having escaped the stroller, riding on the U-Bahn:

Super T on the U6

This is just before he charmed two old ladies into flirting with him for most of the rest of the ride.

27 months going on 25 years, I tell you.

And is it just me, or does he look, I dunno, 5 or something in that last picture??? This is what I get for mating with a giant…

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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...)

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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.)

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