That’s Pretty Dumb

I was putting on a Wiggles DVD for my girls yesterday when a line in the insanely long copyright notice caught my eye.  Something about “Kipper” (another show we watch).  I wanted to see why it would mention him, so I tried to rewind.  Too late, the DVD was already at the main menu.

I rebooted the DVD player and got ready to pause it on that screen.  It came up, I hit pause and I was greeted by the “you can’t press any buttons here” symbol in the corner of the screen.

So, not only is the copyright notice contain WAY too much text for even a speedreader to read in the three seconds it’s up there, you can’t even pause to read it all if you want to!

My next move would have been to get a camera, get ready, snap a photo, blow it up on my PC and see what I could read, but seriously - that’s the only way to do it?  Seems like someone got something a little bit backward there.

We saw this sticker on a package of pita bread in the kitchen.  I thought it was odd that it didn’t mention the year, but it wasn’t a big deal — if you were in August, 2008, you’d know it was expired.

Then my wife pointed out the date.  How many September 31sts have you been around for?

I saw this ad in a local paper here today.  It’s got a few issues (nearly invisible link to their site, and the site is just “coming soon”), but the biggest is the screen.  The scan doesn’t do it justice, but the blue is the exact same as the “blue screen of death” that we’ve all seen.

It says to me, “bring your computer here and this is what it’ll look like”.  Oops.

My wife ran into Office Depot the other day for some basic supplies.  On her way out, she was handed a menu with a brief “check this out”.  It’s a nice looking menu and the prices seem reasonable.  Only problem - nowhere on the sheet does it say what restaurant it’s for!

Also, for those of you that think “it’s probably right next door to Office Depot”, you’d be wrong.  The nearest two restaurants are Chili’s and Honeybaked Ham, and this menu is certainly from neither of them.

I hope the guy didn’t waste too much time handing these out…

This was pretty funny.  We ordered a handful of things online from Office Depot and one item was a box of paper clips.  Just a small box of 100 paper clips — small enough to easily fit in your pants pocket.

For some reason, the paper clips were shipped separate from the rest of the order.  That’s understandable, given stock quantities, warehouses, etc.  But check out the huge box it came in (with the paper clips on top):

Sure enough, the contents were:

1. A small box of paperclips.
2. A ton of inflatable bags to hold the paperclips in place.

We got a bit package the other day. It was something for my wife - a bunch of old maternity clothes being returned to her, I think, so she could give them to someone else. Needless to say, it was a heavy box.

64 lbs, to be exact. That’s why UPS put a big yellow sticker on it that said “CAUTION - Heavy Package Over 70 lbs”. On the sticker they filled in the “weight” box with the correct “64.0 lbs”.

My only guess is that they wanted to make sure we knew it was very heavy, but didn’t have the right sticker to put on it. Close enough, I guess…

I got an e-mail from Yahoo Answers a few days ago with the subject line “A little thank you…”. Here is the full message:

Where is the “thank you” in that message? The whole thing is about why I should be using Yahoo Answers even more.

FWIW, I think Yahoo Answers is pretty neat. I use it from time to time and try to answer some questions. I figured that since I use it sometimes, they were thanking me for that. I guess not…

We’ve used SunTrust for years, and overall we’re quite happy with them.  Our issue lies with their apparent trouble in updating their own system.

The first case of this was about a year ago.  Three times in the course of a month, we’d try to pay for something (usually a meal) and our card would be declined.  I knew we had plenty of money, so I’d call them and they’d unblock it.  It was blocked “for our security”, which is fine - I appreciate them being proactive.  The dumb part was that when they blocked the card, they’d call me to let me know — but use an old number of mine that I haven’t had in years.  Every time, I’d have them update it to a new one, but the next time they blocked the card they’d use the old number again.  I eventually called and got escalated high enough that someone was able to change it in a way that would stick.

A similar thing just happened with our checks.  I tried to order new ones online, but couldn’t because our address had changed.  I called them up, explained that, verified the address, and placed the order.  The new checks arrived yesterday at our new address — printed for our old one. :)  I have no idea how they still have that address.  They verified the new one on the phone, they sent the checks to the new one, and I changed our address online with them about 10 months ago.  Anyhow, they’re re-printing them now…

I’ve not looked close enough at this plan to see if it’s anything that parents should do, but I have no confidence in their ability to keep track of money. Check out this chart they show during their commercials:

The bar on the left represents $10,000. The one on the right represents $20,000. Notice anything strange? The bar on the right is nearly three times as large as the bar on the left, not just double the size.

Here are the same charts, only zoomed in and measured. The numbers represent the height (in pixels) of each one. You’ll notice that the one on the right is more than three times the height of the other.

I realize that the one on the left is set back a little bit, but not nearly enough to cover that kind of difference. Also, I have to say that I got this idea from an old article on cockeyed.com that dealt with Quicken in almost the same way.

Some friends of ours were staying in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, so we went down to visit them. We went swimming and let the kids play for a while, then went up to their room so we could figure out where to eat.

Their room was up on the fifth floor. When we got up there, they warned us to keep our daughters away from the railing. It turns out that the bars around the rail are wider than your average 3 year old and they could easily slip through and fall five stories into the atrium.

Is that just a lawsuit waiting to happen or what? Other than that, it was a pretty nice hotel, too.