sweasel.com

XP Pro is actually very stable. Now, if you saw the XP Home Edition logo on your ATM, I would recommend you start swimming right now, while the Atlantic is somewhat warm.

It may be stable, but it ain’t working, are it? Constant in the darkness, where’s that at?

Cheer up o wise weasel! You can do it. While in London, check out The Ministry of Silly Walks for me.

Don’t worry, Weasel. You’re not alone. Everyday that passes it feels more like a Franz Kafka novel here in the States.

Well Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac use Windows ME…or hadn’t you noticed.

Windows ME… Isn’t that coded in GW-BASIC?

Weasel, old chum,

Like my friend, Kenny Kwok (a night janitor in the Chinese embassy in Bosnia before he lost his job), used to tell me, “Cheer up, Voyska, things could get worse..”

..so I cheered up and, sure enough, things got worse. Anyway, you could have walked up to the ATM, put your card in, made a deposit or whatever, and the screen could have displayed one of those kiss-of-death GPF (General Protection Fault) dialogs that say something like:

“This program has performed a general protection fault
in module BANKROBBER.EXE at 0008:0048AF21”

“If the problem persists, contact the program
vendor.”

Then you would (and the rest of the customers) would have been really screwed. Unless, of course, the bank had Dr Watson set as the default debugger. Then they could have sent the log to Microsoft and gotten the problem solved in, oh, two or three weeks. But would you have been paid interest on the money you just deposited?

As Bluto Blutarski in (in Animal House) said to Flounder, “My advice to you is start drinking heavily.”

Look on the bright side, Stoaty – At least The Man you’re turning the cash over to isn’t D’uh One. It’s a whole new collection of misfits and malcontents!

There … now don’t you feel better? 😉

Aahhhahahahha…XP SP1.

oh, it could be worse. My boss told me to call Verizon because there was an extra $5.16 charge on the phone bill. (I kindof knew going in it would be more cost-effective to just pay it to the nazis), but no, I called. The first two barely English speaking girls tried to tell me it was a valid charge. So I had to turn on bitch-mode and demand to talk to the manager.

(The manager’s name was Hero which I thought was highly ironic). He said, “Yes, I’m on page 4. Yes, I can see where it says you have 150 free hours of usage. Yes, I can clearly see your usage is 2.58 hours. I can see it is a bad charge but there is a process you see.”

That was on Thursday. Friday I got a follow-up email stating that because I’m very good at being a bitch, they have fast-tracked my request for the BUSINESS ANALYST to handle my case.

Monday I got an email from the Business Analyst who says that he can clearly see that it is a bogus charge and will now begin to investigate the problem, and will get back to me.

This is really happening. I do not make this shit up! What happened to the good ol days when the verizon lady could just take off the charge? We now have 5 people involved and 4 days and counting, and yet no-one has actually taken the charge off yet. Grrr. And people wonder why I’m such a bitch.

When, as seems near certain, NuLabour get turfed out by the Tories, and Cameron fulfils his pledge to abolish ID cards (which is not without the bounds of possibility), where does that leave those, such as you, who are being used as guinea pigs for the ID card?

It wasn’t that long ago that quite a few ATMs ran NT4, or even IBM OS/2.

OT but I saw on CNN that over on your side of the pond the Speaker for the House of Commons is stepping down over some “scandal”. I couldn’t tell if it was a big deal or not nor what the scandal was about. Could y’all enlighten us?

Interesting question, David Gillies. I’m guessing, nothing happens. The civil service rolls on no matter who’s in office and I don’t expect things to change course. In fact, there’s a bit of an imposture going that will likely keep things rolling in this direction. They are really cracking down on immigration from “outside the EU” to please the British public. And, as far as I can tell, the British public does approve. Sadly, it isn’t what they think it is.

All those Somalis and Iraqis and Albanians people find so annoying? Technically asylum seekers, not immigrants. Totally different body of law (and, I believe, largely controlled from Brussels).

Immigration from outside the EU is Aussies and Kiwis and Yanks and Canucks. And Indians and Pakistanis and some others. But not, for the most part, the things people most want to cut back on.

I’ve been meaning to post about the scandal, Enas. I’ve been very wrapped up in following it. In brief, MPs from all parties have been abusing their expense accounts for years. Which is no surprise to anyone, but the Telegraph got hold of a CD with the actual receipts on it.

MPs are only supposed to claim for those expenses absolutely necessary for them to maintain a second home in London. So, in the middle of all this financial hardship, seeing everything from the extravagant (giant plasma TV’s worth a couple thousand pounds) to the ridiculous (a 5p shopping bag and Tampax — for a male MP) has whipped people into a frenzy.

To be accurate, the anger and frustration have been bubbling along for ages and this just lanced it. There will be a LOT of MP’s who stand down over this, in all parties. And it’s shifting some power to the minor parties, including the egregious BNP.

Oh, and Speaker Martin (kind of their Nancy Pelosi, but the office is more revered and supposed to be FAR less political) was not only an expense fiddler and a promoter of expense fiddling, but also spent a hundred grand trying to knock away a Freedom of Information request on these receipts.

Ah so. Thanks for the info. Sounds kinda like the rubber check thing congresscritters were doing here a few years back. How many MPs are saying the equivalent of “I was shocked! shocked!! to discover such things were going on here”?

Mind shuffling over to make some room on the bitch-bench Wendyworn?

That’s the sort of battle I seem to have to fight every day and I swear it is the primary cause of my blood pressure problem.

I have this theory that the more bullshit a company spouts about its ‘customer care’, the more it simply couldn’t give a damn. It just wants to take your money, by computer and never, ever actually have to provide any backup service.

When we have finished hanging the politicians, next we start on the utter bastards who created and run the call centre culture.

There will be no mercy.