I have been intending for a while now to write a scathing rant about how crap the service industry is and how much of a hassle it is to deal with a burglary but the combination of being warn down by various employees and contractors from the council and the insurance company, my having been ill all day, and the Christmas music I've been listening to all afternoon has somewhat lessened my fervor. The council has been particularly useless as they took ages to schedule an appointment to fix the door frame and then at the last minute after having made and rescheduled several appointments to perform a range of duties finally showed up only to asses the damage, not to actually fix anything. After making a further appointment to fix the frame (after having tried to talk us out of fixing it at all) they then tried to reschedule until after Christmas and when we insisted that the work needed to be done before we went away for a week (more than a month after the original burglary) they instead came around and put wood filler over the splintered wood and then sanded it in hopes that we would be pacified. This 'fix' had the bonus side effect of leaving a rather strong and unpleasant smell in the apartment presumably from some sort of fast acting drying agent in the filler. The locksmith will be coming around tomorrow to have an attempt at strengthening the locks and frame with several external devices but I can't say that I'm particularly encouraged or really all that hopeful.

When we have tried to suggest to the council that we should have a new door installed ourselves they are quite happy to point out that the door and frame are their responsibility but when it comes to actually being responsible they are somewhat lacking in interest. Of course during this entire episode they have been invoicing us for major works to be done on our building despite the scaffolding being nowhere in site (scaffolding being the chief signal that the work is beginning and that they are allowed to bill us) but I suppose that is the topic of an entirely different rant.

The insurance company, doing their best to avoid being outdone, has been mailing our claims forms to the wrong address. In a fit of efficiency they have created a database to hold our mailing address for these types of occasions which differs from the billing database which has our correct address. They also have a particularly spectacular system of printing emails and then re-scanning them into the database adding a one week processing time to any information such as proof of purchase that they receive over email. They are also quite fond of calling us on our home number while we are at work so that no progress can be made on our claim until they finally reach us at home on Saturday. Hopefully I'll have the voucher for a new laptop before the weekend so I can get one before we start traveling for Christmas but I'm not really holding my breath.

Now that I've gotten over the initial shock of having someone else break into my house I would definitely say that all of the inconvenience and frustration of dealing with incompetent workers and ridiculously inefficient systems and processes has turned out to be much worse than just the initial loss of property. I have no idea how people with less flexible jobs cope with these situations. On several occasions Kim has had to come rushing home from work in the afternoon to meet a workman or inspector or reschedule weekdays he'd planned to work from home because of a broken appointment.

cake belongs on a plate

not on a napkin

I have a whole new appreciation for the land of the free and the home of the brave and the country where your frosting doesn't come stuck to a bit of textured paper.

So at work we get free fruit. Yay!

But they cut the stems of the bananas so short that they are impossible to peel!!

So at work we have a sort of cafeteria with free food and all of the drinks are served in paper cups. While I certainly don't object to free food it does seem that there are hundreds of paper cups thrown away every day when people could be using re-usable mugs. Only increasing the problem is the fact that most of the beverages people drink are hot and as I'm sure you are aware hot drinks make paper cups hot so many people take more than one cup to keep from burning themselves on the way to their desk. All unfortunate but hardly rant worthy.

Last week those little cardboard sleeve things appeared next to the cup dispenser and I thought "well that's nice at least people can stick to just one cup at a time". Only they don't fit! The sleeve only fits about 3/4 of the way onto the cup and then it sticks down past the cup about half an inch. What's the point of that? You can wedge the sleeve onto the cup enough for carrying it but then you can't put it down without risking an paper-cup-hot-coffee-instability accident.

I have been meaning to add some rants to my blog for some time now and the select-a-size marketing scheme is one that we can all experience rage about together.

Several years ago in the US paper towel companies came out with paper towel rolls where the paper towels are about half as long as regular paper towels. This is a fine idea because it makes it easier to use less for smaller jobs because the perforation lines are closer together so you don't have to manually tear the paper towels in half if you want to use about 6 inches worth of paper towel.

The problem arises when they start with the select-a-size marketing campaign in which they suggest that I can now use the appropriate amount of paper towel for a given job which I was not able to do before. Paper towel users have always been able to use as many sheets as they wanted. I have, on occasion, used several large, absorbent paper towels at once to clean up a large spill. I have also on occasion torn a paper towel in half to clean up a tiny spill. I do not appreciate the paper towel manufacturers claiming that they have now empowered me with the choice of selecting the quantity of paper towel that I will use for cleaning up a mess as if I was not able to think to make that choice myself before select-a-size paper towel rolls.

And now that this has become a standard marketing campaign other products are jumping on the ban wagon with items like custom slice cheese. I don't want my cheese slices to be half as wide, I actually want them to be 1.33 times as big since nice bread is often a bit wider than normal bread and often requires an extra third of a slice. And I don't quite understand why the cheese people feel that they are now suddenly offering me the power of choice when they have been offering sliced cheese for ages. Surely that is providing a selection service over having to eat a whole huge block of cheese all at once. Maybe the bread people will start offering half slices of bread as choose-able bread bits and we'll be caught in a downward spiral of bread and cheese companies trying to out do each other with increasingly small portions of their product under the guise of quantity select-ability.