Right now, I hate people.
25 Nov 2012 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouWell, not all people. Just people in the limited category of "people" and "selling stuff". Not to me, the selling part, that is. But people who sell stuff are proving themselves remarkably brainless right now. Almost as brainless as my neighbors in general.
As I've kind of danced around mentioning, there's an app. I built it (and some of you helped test it). It's live now. And boy is it collecting every twit in the city, and believe me, this city has 'em by the boatloads. All kinds of hijinks therefore must ensue.
Like the guy who has a legitimate reason for why he can't upload a file, but doesn't email the app-admin-contact (that would be ME). He just calls the head organizers and complains. When I email back with a suggestion of how to get around it, no reply. No attempt at even applying, so apparently he created an account and then decided he wouldn't bother checking the box that says he'd submit offline. He'd just complain about it.
Or the woman who wrote insisting that she not have to have an EIN to apply. My requirements say, "must have EIN". I explain, hey, an EIN is free, it takes only a minute or two, you can do it online. No reply. Meanwhile, I ask the organizers, so why do we require an EIN? A lot of back and forth and wasted time later, I get back the word that we don't need EIN after all. (Duh.) I email woman that I'm removing EIN requirement, thank her for helping me improve the app, and no reply at all. No application from her, either, and this is someone the organizers very much want to have as a vendor. I don't care either way but sheesh, at least reply to the damn email.
Or the guy who complained (at least to me, not organizers, this time) that the app insists he upload description, price, and image of everything he's selling. But he has like more than twenty things he'll be selling! (It's a juried review to be a vendor, hence the extra requirements for applicants.) Dude, you type it in once, and next year, you say, no change. So it's a little extra time this year. Don't blame me if they decline your app because you wrote "some stuff" and "from $1 to $10" and included a picture of your dog.
Or the various folk who have checked the box that they'll need electrical outlets, and how many. Three outlets? Okay, list what they're for, and the wattage of each (so we can calculate amperage). What do I get? "Fridges" and a single number. Where's the second and third outlets? Did you actually multiple the wattage by three, and do all the fridges actually have the same wattage? For that matter, why do you have three fridges? But anyway.
Or the guy who complained that he can't possibly be arsed to download "all those files" and then sign, scan, and upload. I'm like, dude, you're selling retail. You have a tax permit. You don't have an insurance form, you aren't selling food so you don't have a food permit, and there's only one form you have to download, anyway (no matter what you're selling). So it's one form to download and sign, and the other one you should already have. Oh, cry me a goddamn river. Seriously.
Or the woman who let auto-complete put in her husband's email instead of her business email, and wrote me asking why she didn't get confirmation. I went into the db, changed her email address to the correct one, and resent the notify to confirm her email address. Fifteen minutes later I received an alert... that she'd created a whole new account, from the start, with all the same info. I have no idea how. It's not supposed to let you enter the same email twice! Big huge blank on how that one got through.
Note to self: do better error-checking.
Note to self, part two: maybe it's time to flee back to the corporate world. Because all those corporate drones who messed up every webapp I've ever worked on in any means... really have nothing on these guys. At least corporate drones don't whine. Okay, not to me, but that's all I care about.
Maybe I'll quiz people ahead of time, and if they don't pass, they can't apply. IS THIS AN EMAIL ADDRESS: LALA@. IF YOU SAID YES, GO AWAY.
Don't EVEN get me started on the people actually organizing this. I love em, dog help em, but right now they're driving me crazy and it wasn't that far a trip in the first place. Honestly. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. If you want stuff for free, think back to what your site looked like when it was done for free (horrible) and the extent of your social media presence (none). That's what you get when you pay nothing: NOTHING.
Meanwhile, on the neighbor front, we've got a dog living in the 100-acre park behind my house. No collar, possibly fixed, and terribly skittish around people. Probably yet another cruel soul who decided easier to just dump the dog than find it a better home. A neighbor's been organizing a feeding station for the dog, and working on a way to catch it; she even set up a camera to get pictures of it (to help in determining whether it's lost dog or really was dumped). Her wildlife camera is seriously high-quality, getting some gorgeous shots (far better than mine!) and she's been posting them on the neighborhood elist.
What do we get? First, of course, there's the folks who take this chance to lecture us all about how leaving out food will encourage coyotes... to eat our cats. Uh. Logic says, err, at least the earth-logic I know, that if a) the feeding station is three-quarters of a mile from my house, and b) the coyotes are getting plenty of food the lost dog isn't eating, that they're not likely to think, oh, now I should go eat a cat. First, they're three-quarters of a mile away, and second, even if they did come down this way, they'd be like, cat? Why should I eat a thing that fights back when I could just have a bunny rabbit? Or maybe more of that delicious DRIED DIRT provided so nicely in a bright red bowl?
And then there was the guy who replied, and I QUOTE: "Because Coyotes Have RABES."
OMG NOT THE RABES PLEASE NO SPARE US
We won't even MENTION how roughly 75% of this entire neighborhood leaves out cat food for possums and raccoons. Hello, you want some goddamn rabies vectors? Let me introduce you to Bubba the Raccoon.
And then to cap it all, we've got some other guy, this one who freaking out that N is "keeping a dog in the park". And not on a leash, either! Because he was scared by a big dog, once, and this is really not okay.
So N replies, "it's not my dog; the dog was dumped." The idiot-neighbor's answer? "Was? So it's not there anymore?" *heddesk* I swear, the stupid in my email in the past week has had me astonished.
Footnote to all this: the woman who posted to "beware of your small animals!" Uh, what now? Turns out she saw a WOLF. Really! A real live WOLF! And is all panicked about it. Except the last time this state had a wolf in the wild was 1905. That's no wolf, that's just another coyote. And I'm still not sure what that has to do with being scared of my animals if they're under a certain poundage.
So despite the sudden and terrible drop-off into bleak depression middle of last week (and I don't even have family around to do that for me, I have to rely on the insanity of clients), I've been trying to write. Last stretch of the story, but then again, I'm guessing it must be lagging tension-wise because no one's reading anymore, that I can tell. Am I digging? YOU BETCHA. It's been that kind of week. I could use some reminders of if not awesomeness, at least tolerability. DO IT OR THE APP GETS IT. *bricked*
As I've kind of danced around mentioning, there's an app. I built it (and some of you helped test it). It's live now. And boy is it collecting every twit in the city, and believe me, this city has 'em by the boatloads. All kinds of hijinks therefore must ensue.
Like the guy who has a legitimate reason for why he can't upload a file, but doesn't email the app-admin-contact (that would be ME). He just calls the head organizers and complains. When I email back with a suggestion of how to get around it, no reply. No attempt at even applying, so apparently he created an account and then decided he wouldn't bother checking the box that says he'd submit offline. He'd just complain about it.
Or the woman who wrote insisting that she not have to have an EIN to apply. My requirements say, "must have EIN". I explain, hey, an EIN is free, it takes only a minute or two, you can do it online. No reply. Meanwhile, I ask the organizers, so why do we require an EIN? A lot of back and forth and wasted time later, I get back the word that we don't need EIN after all. (Duh.) I email woman that I'm removing EIN requirement, thank her for helping me improve the app, and no reply at all. No application from her, either, and this is someone the organizers very much want to have as a vendor. I don't care either way but sheesh, at least reply to the damn email.
Or the guy who complained (at least to me, not organizers, this time) that the app insists he upload description, price, and image of everything he's selling. But he has like more than twenty things he'll be selling! (It's a juried review to be a vendor, hence the extra requirements for applicants.) Dude, you type it in once, and next year, you say, no change. So it's a little extra time this year. Don't blame me if they decline your app because you wrote "some stuff" and "from $1 to $10" and included a picture of your dog.
Or the various folk who have checked the box that they'll need electrical outlets, and how many. Three outlets? Okay, list what they're for, and the wattage of each (so we can calculate amperage). What do I get? "Fridges" and a single number. Where's the second and third outlets? Did you actually multiple the wattage by three, and do all the fridges actually have the same wattage? For that matter, why do you have three fridges? But anyway.
Or the guy who complained that he can't possibly be arsed to download "all those files" and then sign, scan, and upload. I'm like, dude, you're selling retail. You have a tax permit. You don't have an insurance form, you aren't selling food so you don't have a food permit, and there's only one form you have to download, anyway (no matter what you're selling). So it's one form to download and sign, and the other one you should already have. Oh, cry me a goddamn river. Seriously.
Or the woman who let auto-complete put in her husband's email instead of her business email, and wrote me asking why she didn't get confirmation. I went into the db, changed her email address to the correct one, and resent the notify to confirm her email address. Fifteen minutes later I received an alert... that she'd created a whole new account, from the start, with all the same info. I have no idea how. It's not supposed to let you enter the same email twice! Big huge blank on how that one got through.
Note to self: do better error-checking.
Note to self, part two: maybe it's time to flee back to the corporate world. Because all those corporate drones who messed up every webapp I've ever worked on in any means... really have nothing on these guys. At least corporate drones don't whine. Okay, not to me, but that's all I care about.
Maybe I'll quiz people ahead of time, and if they don't pass, they can't apply. IS THIS AN EMAIL ADDRESS: LALA@. IF YOU SAID YES, GO AWAY.
Don't EVEN get me started on the people actually organizing this. I love em, dog help em, but right now they're driving me crazy and it wasn't that far a trip in the first place. Honestly. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. If you want stuff for free, think back to what your site looked like when it was done for free (horrible) and the extent of your social media presence (none). That's what you get when you pay nothing: NOTHING.
Meanwhile, on the neighbor front, we've got a dog living in the 100-acre park behind my house. No collar, possibly fixed, and terribly skittish around people. Probably yet another cruel soul who decided easier to just dump the dog than find it a better home. A neighbor's been organizing a feeding station for the dog, and working on a way to catch it; she even set up a camera to get pictures of it (to help in determining whether it's lost dog or really was dumped). Her wildlife camera is seriously high-quality, getting some gorgeous shots (far better than mine!) and she's been posting them on the neighborhood elist.
What do we get? First, of course, there's the folks who take this chance to lecture us all about how leaving out food will encourage coyotes... to eat our cats. Uh. Logic says, err, at least the earth-logic I know, that if a) the feeding station is three-quarters of a mile from my house, and b) the coyotes are getting plenty of food the lost dog isn't eating, that they're not likely to think, oh, now I should go eat a cat. First, they're three-quarters of a mile away, and second, even if they did come down this way, they'd be like, cat? Why should I eat a thing that fights back when I could just have a bunny rabbit? Or maybe more of that delicious DRIED DIRT provided so nicely in a bright red bowl?
And then there was the guy who replied, and I QUOTE: "Because Coyotes Have RABES."
OMG NOT THE RABES PLEASE NO SPARE US
We won't even MENTION how roughly 75% of this entire neighborhood leaves out cat food for possums and raccoons. Hello, you want some goddamn rabies vectors? Let me introduce you to Bubba the Raccoon.
And then to cap it all, we've got some other guy, this one who freaking out that N is "keeping a dog in the park". And not on a leash, either! Because he was scared by a big dog, once, and this is really not okay.
So N replies, "it's not my dog; the dog was dumped." The idiot-neighbor's answer? "Was? So it's not there anymore?" *heddesk* I swear, the stupid in my email in the past week has had me astonished.
Footnote to all this: the woman who posted to "beware of your small animals!" Uh, what now? Turns out she saw a WOLF. Really! A real live WOLF! And is all panicked about it. Except the last time this state had a wolf in the wild was 1905. That's no wolf, that's just another coyote. And I'm still not sure what that has to do with being scared of my animals if they're under a certain poundage.
So despite the sudden and terrible drop-off into bleak depression middle of last week (and I don't even have family around to do that for me, I have to rely on the insanity of clients), I've been trying to write. Last stretch of the story, but then again, I'm guessing it must be lagging tension-wise because no one's reading anymore, that I can tell. Am I digging? YOU BETCHA. It's been that kind of week. I could use some reminders of if not awesomeness, at least tolerability. DO IT OR THE APP GETS IT. *bricked*