The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Yet another idiotic made up story

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Buddy:
Way back in my hand-to-mouth student days, Oral-B ran a promotion where they would give a free toothbrush in return for sending in two original UPCs.
For whatever reason, they didn't require sales receipts for proofs-of-purchase and stupidly, the toothbrushes they sent back were exactly the same with UPC as the one sent to them. The only restriction I could see in the rules was that it was limited to one toothbrush per person at any address. You can see where this is going.

I found a dollar store selling them really cheap, then sent in the UPCs, altering the name and address very slightly, like apt 123 vs #123 vs unit 123, Street vs ST, etc., each time so that they wouldn't match exactly in their database, but would be delivered okay.

When I got the toothbrushes, I resubmitted the UPCs from those toothbrushes and got half as many back, and kept repeating, until eventually until the lone brush arrived. Postage wasn't too bad in those days, so I ended up with 2n-1 toothbrushes for like n/2 investment.

Having a high quality unused clean toothbrush around could make or break whether a certain someone would stay the night ;) As long as she didn't see how many other toothbrushes there were, then that might look creepy...

Wow! That's bordering on sociopathic. Why on earth would somebody go to all that trouble to get a bunch of toothbrushes? Unless, maybe, they are a member of the Osmond family.

amischiefr · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

The Nerve:
Anonymous:
Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".
The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

Yeah, but that's what management likes. For a while I tried to interpret the needs of my users, but then I realized that if I was really as interested as they are in selling toilet paper, then I would be a toilet paper salesman. In my experience, all individual thought is punished, so I implement exactly what is asked for and I can never be blamed for flawed logic.

Now that I think about it, I actually learned this lesson before in high school working at Dairy Queen. The manager insisted on a specific spelling of a promotion on the sign. The spelling was wrong, and when I put the letters up, I corrected it. No amount of arguing could convince her that spelling it correctly was better than "her way," though, and I had to go out and redo the job, spelling it incorrectly.

And you sir are a tool. Blindly conforming to specs written by half wits that understand the business but not computers is just plain stupid. When you work for a bank, you are responsible for the code that goes out. If the specs are wrong YOU need to find it and correct it.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

amischiefr:
The Nerve:
Anonymous:
Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".
The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

Yeah, but that's what management likes. For a while I tried to interpret the needs of my users, but then I realized that if I was really as interested as they are in selling toilet paper, then I would be a toilet paper salesman. In my experience, all individual thought is punished, so I implement exactly what is asked for and I can never be blamed for flawed logic.

Now that I think about it, I actually learned this lesson before in high school working at Dairy Queen. The manager insisted on a specific spelling of a promotion on the sign. The spelling was wrong, and when I put the letters up, I corrected it. No amount of arguing could convince her that spelling it correctly was better than "her way," though, and I had to go out and redo the job, spelling it incorrectly.
And you sir are a tool. Blindly conforming to specs written by half wits that understand the business but not computers is just plain stupid. When you work for a bank, you are responsible for the code that goes out. If the specs are wrong YOU need to find it and correct it.

So you're "that" guy. The guy who doesn't understand why the users complain each time a new revision of your software rolls out. The guy who refuses to make a simple change that would make the user's life easier and that they ask for repeatedly just because you deem it to be "non-standard." You're the guy that avoids the user, instead going to lunch with other programmers with whom you can share tales of the stupidity of those who consume your product. I know you well. For all I know, you're the guy in the next cube who all the users are praying will get fired or promoted.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Anon:
Wow! That's bordering on sociopathic. Why on earth would somebody go to all that trouble to get a bunch of toothbrushes? Unless, maybe, they are a member of the Osmond family.

Hey, free toothbrushes. Once I had my stash, I was surprised by how often someone would need one. They didn't last long.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

The Nerve:
You're kidding, right? Have you ever noticed how the US is about 20x bigger than the UK? I'm talking throughput here.

What, there's more than a billion Merricans now?

That said, "efficient" may indeed imply to wait 10 days to deliver a letter between two rarely connected locations, just waiting until there's enough to bother --- inefficient would be to carry each letter in a separate car to each door.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Machtyn:
The Nerve:
Now that I think about it, I actually learned this lesson before in high school working at Dairy Queen. The manager insisted on a specific spelling of a promotion on the sign. The spelling was wrong, and when I put the letters up, I corrected it. No amount of arguing could convince her that spelling it correctly was better than "her way," though, and I had to go out and redo the job, spelling it incorrectly.
That's actually a potential sales point. How many people are you going to have walk in and tell you your sign is incorrect and then likely buy something? A few. How many are going to come in and congratulate you on correct signage? Probably 0 (unless misspellings are the norm).

Like I now congratulate anyone who uses the word "loose" in the right context.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

God, I was just having it out with an SA about that two days ago. We have an application that sends an email. PersonA fills out a request (form) in the system and personB gets an email. However, the email does not contain any of the required fields from the form except the name. We explained that if the fields were required then the information would be useful in the email, an ended with, "like the justification field". Next release the email had added justification, no other fields. Sigh.
We tried to explain that it would be nice if they understood what we were trying to do and took some initiative, to no avail. They are afraid of "not coding to spec", so everything must be explicit.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Anon:
Buddy:
Way back in my hand-to-mouth student days, Oral-B ran a promotion where they would give a free toothbrush in return for sending in two original UPCs.
For whatever reason, they didn't require sales receipts for proofs-of-purchase and stupidly, the toothbrushes they sent back were exactly the same with UPC as the one sent to them. The only restriction I could see in the rules was that it was limited to one toothbrush per person at any address. You can see where this is going.

I found a dollar store selling them really cheap, then sent in the UPCs, altering the name and address very slightly, like apt 123 vs #123 vs unit 123, Street vs ST, etc., each time so that they wouldn't match exactly in their database, but would be delivered okay.

When I got the toothbrushes, I resubmitted the UPCs from those toothbrushes and got half as many back, and kept repeating, until eventually until the lone brush arrived. Postage wasn't too bad in those days, so I ended up with 2n-1 toothbrushes for like n/2 investment.

Having a high quality unused clean toothbrush around could make or break whether a certain someone would stay the night ;) As long as she didn't see how many other toothbrushes there were, then that might look creepy...

Wow! That's bordering on sociopathic. Why on earth would somebody go to all that trouble to get a bunch of toothbrushes? Unless, maybe, they are a member of the Osmond family.

There are a bunch of web sites devoted to sending away for free stuff. I tend to get my free toothbrushes from the drugs stores when they have "use the Sunday coupon" and our coupon deals. Yes I too have a draw full of extra tooth brushes.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

all your THE SLUG are belong to us

Brian follower of Deornoth · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

RBoy:
ISO9001
Who cares if it works right, just as long as you documented how it works.

+1

No. +1000.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Tom Woolf:
So, the USPS does not get items to their recipients within 2-3 days. That makes them inefficient?
Name any other entity that can take a small physical item and deliver it to any one*** of 300 million people, many of them thousands of miles away, for less than half a dollar.

Sure - across town may take longer than you want, but think about it - East Coast to West Coast for under a dollar. You can't beat that.

*** In a perfect world, that "any one" would be the one person you specify. In boog's situation, I suppose it becomes "anyone"...

Sound like the Jerry Seinfeld script Where else can you hand a piece of paper to someone and tell them to hand deliver it to any one in the country, for <what postage was at that time>

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Snopes.com indeed says this is true. But I liked even more the footnote sent off at the bottom of a bank's newsletter:

"You owe your soul to the company store. Why not owe your home to Wells Fargo? An equity advantage loan can help you spend what would have been your children's inheritance."

http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

I know with my NetFlix DVDs by mail, I usually mail them one morning, they receive them that afternoon and I have more disks the next day. Unless they decide to ship the disk across the USA, then it takes 3-4 days.

This is why most of the local video stores are going under in my region. I would spend more time and gas driving a few miles to rent a DVD.

Silfax · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Mama Mia:
If you build highway bridges do family members ask you why their car is dripping red stuff? Since, after all, you work "in transportation"?

The dripping red stuff is from all of the pedestrians that cousin Reggie mowed down while going postal.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Address mix ups can lead to embarassment and fatalities/property loss.

Embarassment: An officer shows up on your doorstep in response to a domestic violence call. (Happened to a neighbor)

Fatality/Property Loss: An ambulance or fire truck goes to the wrong place. (Different neighbor on the SAME street. Their house was ashes by the time the SECOND fire truck made it to the correct address. The fire house is only 3 miles (~4km) from the on-fire house.)

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

The Nerve:
Mason Wheeler:
AdT:
Are you calling spammers the "direct mail industry"? Well then I have some other suggestions:
drug cartels = recreational substances industry weapons manufacturers = peacekeeping utilities industry hired killers = thorough resolutions industry

Junk mail is not spam. Spammers, especially in the last few years, are parasitic criminals who use malware to make other people's computers do their work for them. Direct mailers, on the other hand, actually pay for what they send themselves. In fact, as a few people have already pointed out, they even pay a bit more than their share, which enables the postal service to deliver mail we actually care about at affordable rates.

There were attempts to create a national "Do Not Mail" list similar to the "Do Not Call" list, keeping you from telephone solicitation. It failed. Why? Because the Postal Service could not afford it! So I'm stuck with trash getting sent to my house so that the people who send trash can keep sending trash. Luckily, I also pay taxes to the city AND pay them for trash pickup, so I get it on both ends.

Another thing I loved about living in the Netherlands. You had three options for mail delivery. Just your mail, mail + advertisement, mail + advertisement + junk mail. You had a notification thing next to your mailbox telling the mailperson what type of mail you would accept. Downright practical. The local grocery store didn't have to print as many flyers because they knew how many people wanted them, so no waste.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

I'm having a party I'm going to kick myself in the balls I'm a big bad boy and I'm having a party. Come to my party, come sing along come see me kick myself in the balls I'll treat you to a funny sight, and I won't be fakin' it. I'm doin' it tonight! Watch me kick myself in the balls. Watch me and you'll laugh! I'm having a party, so please come along. We'll have a really great time! I'm going to kick myself in the balls Gonna kick 'em at hyper-speed! I know how to party, just wait and see. Gonna kick myself in the balls tonight at my party! Gonna kick myself in the balls tonight. Then I'm gonna kick my dog in the balls!

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Who is John Galt?

Coyne · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Can you say, "Extra-extra large refund to the clients who 'paid extra to get pre-release access'"?

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Ed:
Have you actually sent anything via 1st class recently? It takes up to a week: they downgraded it when they introduced 'Special Delivery' so that people would opt to pay even more to get things on time.

I received yet another package the other day from Indiana, USA to British Columbia, Canada. It took all of 3 days and was shipped standard (1.49 postage as it was bubble packed and shipped internationally)

I often get standard shipped mail in Canada from the USA within a few days of ordering.

Why is it so slow within the same country if it is so quick to cross the border?

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

only me:
The Nerve:
Mason Wheeler:
AdT:
Are you calling spammers the "direct mail industry"? Well then I have some other suggestions:
drug cartels = recreational substances industry weapons manufacturers = peacekeeping utilities industry hired killers = thorough resolutions industry

Junk mail is not spam. Spammers, especially in the last few years, are parasitic criminals who use malware to make other people's computers do their work for them. Direct mailers, on the other hand, actually pay for what they send themselves. In fact, as a few people have already pointed out, they even pay a bit more than their share, which enables the postal service to deliver mail we actually care about at affordable rates.

There were attempts to create a national "Do Not Mail" list similar to the "Do Not Call" list, keeping you from telephone solicitation. It failed. Why? Because the Postal Service could not afford it! So I'm stuck with trash getting sent to my house so that the people who send trash can keep sending trash. Luckily, I also pay taxes to the city AND pay them for trash pickup, so I get it on both ends.
Another thing I loved about living in the Netherlands. You had three options for mail delivery. Just your mail, mail + advertisement, mail + advertisement + junk mail. You had a notification thing next to your mailbox telling the mailperson what type of mail you would accept. Downright practical. The local grocery store didn't have to print as many flyers because they knew how many people wanted them, so no waste.

So, I wonder what would happen if I just left the mail I don't want in the mailbox with the flag up. Would it be returned to the original sender "postage due?"

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

I've done that before. You get a business reply envelope from one of those credit card offers, then stuff all of your other junk mail into it and send it. And when I say stuff, I mean 3/4" thick, have to tape it shut stuffed. I haven't gotten a credit card offer in two years :)

Jaime · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Jay:
Mason Wheeler:
Maybe I just got lucky--hanging around here enough could easily convince me of that--but I work at a place that's actually sane and reasonable. One time I got requirements for something and I looked at it and said, "I could improve on this." So I did. I made it more user-friendly and intuitive than what the spec asked for.
The boss was a bit surprised, since that wasn't what the spec asked for, but I talked it over with him and convinced him that it would work better. He asked for a few modifications, which I implemented, but my basic idea ended up in production. A few months later I heard back from Sales how much all the clients who had updated to the latest version loved the feature I'd set up.

I guess it just depends on the culture of the place you're working at.

That's great, but let me add the -- perhaps obvious -- caveat that you don't want the developer to decide to improve on the specs without talking to the user. No matter how obvious it is to me that something in the specs is a mistake, I talk to the user (or talk to my boss who talks to the user or whatever). There have been plenty of times that something that seemed obvious to me was, in fact, not at all what the user wanted. Sometimes things that seem like obviously dumb mistakes in the specs turn out to be part of a bigger plan that I didn't know about, or required by law, or whatever.

You're missing someone... The user typically has no idea how the automate a process, regardless of how well he knows the process. Talking to a business process automation specialist and/or a user interface design specialist is much more important than the user. I can't even count how many horrible design concepts my users have come up with. I usually talk with them, get an idea of what they are trying to accomplish, and come back with a clean-slate design. Then we go back and forth a few times to find what best suits them. I always see the users as the primary approver, but usually not a strong influence on the design. I see a lot of user-generated specs that are literally impossible. They asks for things like bills to be sent out on the first of the month, but also to have a feature where if a service is used for more than four days a week, we automatically bill at the weekly rate. So, the current week still may not have enough data collected to decide if we are billing daily or weekly at the time the bill is to be generated.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
the Royal Mail ... routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

Not that great of an accomplishment, really. Google says Land's End to John O'Groats is 837 miles (about the distance from DC to St Louis). This would be, theoretically, the farthest any post would need to travel by land. More common would be London to Edinburgh, a more manageable 405 miles (about the distance from Milwaukee to St Louis). Compare this to the 3,500+ miles between the corners of the continental US. A few days isn't intolerable.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

baron:
I've done that before. You get a business reply envelope from one of those credit card offers, then stuff all of your other junk mail into it and send it. And when I say stuff, I mean 3/4" thick, have to tape it shut stuffed. I haven't gotten a credit card offer in two years :)

I just don't pay my bills. I don't get credit card offers either :-)

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

OldNews:
Ed:
Have you actually sent anything via 1st class recently? It takes up to a week: they downgraded it when they introduced 'Special Delivery' so that people would opt to pay even more to get things on time.

I received yet another package the other day from Indiana, USA to British Columbia, Canada. It took all of 3 days and was shipped standard (1.49 postage as it was bubble packed and shipped internationally)

I often get standard shipped mail in Canada from the USA within a few days of ordering.

Why is it so slow within the same country if it is so quick to cross the border?

It isn't; it's just people bitching about a non-existent problem because they've already changed their facebook status and there's still 3 hours left in the work day.

JamesQMurphy · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

pallen:
To THE SLUG

Hi, Frisco.

But who is John Galt?

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Why did he not delete his mother's address from the database?

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

One thing to remember about any mail you get...

The importance of the mail is inversely proportional to the amount of printing on the envelope.

So, if the letter has ALL sorts of writing on the outside of the envelope, it almost assuredly be totally ignored.

Also note that "Presorted Standard" is really junk mail, paying for that nice "forever" stamp we all love.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Marvin the Martian:
The Nerve:
You're kidding, right? Have you ever noticed how the US is about 20x bigger than the UK? I'm talking throughput here.
What, there's more than a billion Merricans now?

Since when does size == population?

The UK is 243,610 km^2 to the US's 9,826,675 km^2. 20x is low. 40x is a lot closer. The US's population is "only" about 5x the UK's.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

MmmBop:
“You didn’t include a photo for the company president’s profile, so I used one I found on Google”

Actually -- that particular example occurs very often, at least at my clients. 'Oh, we don't have a picture of that <insert-object>? Well, let's find one on Google then...'

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Marvin the Martian:
What, there's more than a billion Merricans now?

Nawww, we just run up various forms of national and government debt as if there were a billion of us to pay it off.

da Doctah · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

toth:
Not a WTF. They were actually addressing mail to the superhero known as THE SLUG, but they don't know exactly where he lives, so they're sending mail to every address they can find.

I assume the Slug Signal searchlight on the roof of police headquarters wasn't working?

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

HR:
Who is John Galt?

I am. But good luck finding me.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Herby:
The importance of the mail is inversely proportional to the amount of printing on the envelope.

So true! And, you can use the same technique for your SPAM filter. The more capitals and EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!! the less chance of it being anything you care about.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

What the hell is THE SLUG????

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

It is never ok to think good things about Australia post. Getting a letter from one side of Sydney to the other has often taken me two weeks.

As others had said, i could literally have walked there and back in that time. Let's not forget driving there and back.

It gets even worse with AusPost international, where you buy the 3-4 days worldwide and they don't get your EXTREMELY urgent package to New Zealand (wow, so far....) for 4 weeks.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Visage:
Anonymous:
Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".
The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

See screwy requirement

Implement as written

Deliver to customer

'Oh, you didnt want it o work like that?. Let me just work out a quote for you based on your revised requirements...'

?

Profit.

FTFY

Captain Oblivious · 2010-07-20 Reply Admin

It seems to me that the Real WTF is that the customer asked for a special string in the "name" field and forgot to use a regex to set their own slug.

-- | The Real Captain Oblivious. -- | Accept no imitators. Except for Captain Normal Form.
-- | He's the same guy.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

OMG - I soooo love this. (substitute your own valley-girl accent, please)

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Craig:
Anonymous:
The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.
Not that surprising. We have a generation of developers who are learning their craft by cutting-and-pasting code they find on the internet into their application without understanding what it does. The chuckle-head who implemented that probably posted to Experts Exchange for code on how to do it and then pasted the answer they got directly into the application.

Nah - expert's exchange needs you to sign up, but there's a plethora of sites that don't require signup to answer questions...

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

ExSpurt:
Craig:
Anonymous:
The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.
Not that surprising. We have a generation of developers who are learning their craft by cutting-and-pasting code they find on the internet into their application without understanding what it does. The chuckle-head who implemented that probably posted to Experts Exchange for code on how to do it and then pasted the answer they got directly into the application.

Nah - expert's exchange needs you to sign up, but there's a plethora of sites that don't require signup to answer questions...

Yahoo answers...?

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Caffeine:
Stop it! Your comments are starting to make me think positives about Australia Post, which simply isn't allowed (and yes the country sizes compare nicely.
This reminds me of a time when I was testing a new mass customer email system in a real rush. I tested it once, then went to send it to everyone (10K customers) but hadn't saved the text. No probs, I'll copy it from the test email I received.

Sure enough all emails started with: Dear <real customer name> Dear <my real name>

The size of Australia might compare, the population is still only about 1/16th though, so while the distance Mr Letter has to travel might be comparable, the volume of mail is significantly less, and therefor sorting effort required is less.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

airdrik:
prionic6:
The real FAIL is working at a place that sells personal data, most probably without consent or with swindled consent.
Except that selling a service that does mail merging using publicly available name and address data hardly counts as an invasion of privacy - the information has been made freely and publicly available in phone books for years. There's nothing wrong with buying (or selling) access to a digital copy of the information provided by those books.
WTF 1: nobody double-checking the requirements to make sure that they entirely satisfy the user's needs/demands/requests (this should have been part of the requirements gathering process and was the cause of the great failure in the article). When the process is properly streamlined for a large organization, there's nothing wrong with a process saying to implement and test the requirements exactly as specified. If the requirements were wrong and never corrected then that 'bug'(feature) will propagate all the way through to the end product. WTF 2 (TRWTF): The company getting the pre-release (read: beta) copy and not double and triple-checking its output before mailing it (I trust that company and everything they do, and I'm sure that their software never has bugs because they told me so).

FTW: Reggie's mother getting junk mail from the company using the pre-release version.

I've read a few similar responses, and can only conclude that few people here actually work in IT (or at least no in a large disOrganization).

Response to WTF 1: In an ideal world, yes, but it simply doesn't happen. Every job I have had has had too much management to know what is going on, and BAs that tend to understand the business perfectly, and the technical side hardly at all. In this situation, if they double check the documents, the SLUG stuff miught make perfect sense, even though we humble developers can only guess that it might mean houses with Single Lock-Up Garages (or something)...

Response to WTF 2: I have never seen a perfect test run that catches every problem before deploying to the real world. I used to work at a place that was very big on SixSigma (the obvious one). One of the major problems I had with SS, was the way my part of the organisation (and I suspect the whole organisation) measured Cost of Quality (COQ) vs Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ). Specifically, I remember seeing a slide on Bugs vs Potential Bugs - and therein lies the problem. If I am aware of a potential bug, I have probably programmed against it. I can't measure potential bugs that I can't imagine happening, so any metrics taken on how good software is in terms of Actual vs Potential Bugs is a crock, because it should have no (known) potential bugs (pre-release)

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

ExSpurt:
Craig:
Anonymous:
The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.
Not that surprising. We have a generation of developers who are learning their craft by cutting-and-pasting code they find on the internet into their application without understanding what it does. The chuckle-head who implemented that probably posted to Experts Exchange for code on how to do it and then pasted the answer they got directly into the application.

Nah - expert's exchange needs you to sign up, but there's a plethora of sites that don't require signup to answer questions...

Ummm, no Expert's Exchange does not require you to sign up. I guess you never figured out to scroll all the way down to the bottom? Duh.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

Buddy:
Having a high quality unused clean toothbrush around could make or break whether a certain someone would stay the night ;)

It's true. She did.

2010-07-20 Reply Admin

JamesQMurphy:
pallen:
To THE SLUG

Hi, Frisco.

But who is John Galt?

John Galt was phone.

2010-07-21 Reply Admin

OldNews:
Why is it so slow within the same country if it is so quick to cross the border?

If it's being sent to another country, we don't care if it contains anthrax.

2010-07-21 Reply Admin

Cliff Clavin:
The Nerve:
My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

Umm, the government does NOT subsidize the post office. At least not in the US.

As for others comments on 1st class mail, I find that I generally get it with 1 day if it's within 50-100 miles and 2-3 days tops if its beyond that. Not bad really.

Actually, it is subsidized just not "directly". It has a number of tax exemptions and gets property very cheap from the government. And a real big hand out in that it is illegal to compete with them for non-parcel service (delivery below $1.)

Similar to Snail Mail

Leave a comment on “Similar to Snail Mail”