2019, eh? New Year’s Day Open Thread

And now apparently I can’t thank opposablethumbs without my comment ending up in the damn spam filter.

See what I mean?

If I weren’t still recovering from my own attempted murder and functioning on less than one hour of sleep I might have had a longer rant on that topic, but you’ll just have to wait for another day when I’m feeling a bit more energetic, which given the way things are currently going means probably not until Christmas. 2023’s, to be precise.

I had a lot of societally approved Big Life Events in 2018, which made it a pretty exciting year. The real significance of those moments lies in what comes after, though, so I’m interested to see where 2019 takes me. Maybe to a massive lottery win and then Disneyworld! Could happen.

@Scildfreja Unnyðnes,

Actually I was thinking it could be done right after each encounter. Like, when they’re finished with a sale, mark down if the encounter was Satisfactory or if it Sucked. Do that for every sales encounter/customer service call/etc. Then at the end of the month, tally up the total, and see what that says. In theory that should give a rough answer to how much confirmation bias is being encountered. In fact, there’s probably 10 billion flaws there that I can’t see, because of my own bias’.

@Snowberry:

I don’t know if it’s applicable to your circumstances, but one thing I’ve learned is that, if you need help from others, don’t act angry.

What about if I don’t need help from them (as in a charitable, non-obligatory act of assistance) but just for them to do their damn jobs, as previously agreed to in a written contract?

You’ll pardon me if I have trouble accepting the notion that I should (or even could) avoid being angry after having something of mine yanked away from me in mid-use without legitimate cause, or being blamed and summarily punished for something that someone else did and then having my attempts to defend myself and argue them (whoever “them” is) out of punishing me fall on deaf ears.

Let alone after suffering what can only be described as a murder attempt.

I’ve tried, but too often an actually angry person *explodes*

People might explode less if treated with more dignity and respect. (Swooping down out of the sky apropos of nothing, taking away all of my electronics for several hours without so much as a hint of due process, and shutting off my heat for long enough that it gets dangerously cold inside my own home, again without due process, is NOT treating me with dignity and respect, in case that wasn’t obvious. And even supposing I had done something wrong to bring this down on my head, aren’t I in a free country of the first world? Aren’t I supposed to get a day in court and a chance to present a defense before sentence is imposed? Isn’t it not only wrong but illegal to deprive a citizen here of property, even temporarily, and to attempt to or threaten to deprive said citizen of life, on a summary judgment without so much as a hearing? For that matter wasn’t the death penalty abolished here over half a century ago?)

In any event, in these situations I don’t want “help”. I want whatever was done to me undone, immediately. I want whoever did it, as soon as they or their representative is confronted with the fact of their error, to promptly say “Oops, my mistake!”, immediately press the button to erase the consequences of their hasty judgment, dust off my lapels, and apologize profusely while I immediately get back to whatever the heck I was doing before I was so rudely interrupted. How do I get that outcome? Instead all I ever get is excuses of some sort, or some sort of feigned bafflement and pretense that nobody did anything (even while I’m shivering in the dark, or otherwise surrounded by irrefutable physical forensic evidence that yes, somebody fucking did something), or some other kind of delaying tactic and strenuous effort at evasion of responsibility (usually on behalf of some corporation whose principals make more in an hour of playing golf, via passive rentier incomes such as owning that corporation’s stock, than I see in a year).

I’ve known a few people who don’t appear to be doing anything wrong, yet things constantly go wrong in seemingly nonsensical ways. And when I do things on their behalf, without them ever being directly involved… even if it’s something which works fine when I do it for myself, it *still* often goes wrong in seemingly nonsensical ways. No idea why.

Well that’s fascinating. It seems there’s a kind of “dark sector of the kyriarchy” then, some tiny minority of people (with me being one of them) who are even less visible than those with invisible disabilities, and who are being oppressed in a rather peculiar and unconventional way. This clearly needs further investigation. One conclusion that can be drawn immediately, though, is that if this minority is seemingly completely invisible and you can only learn that someone belongs to it by extended acquaintance, and yet people systematically treat members of it worse than everyone else and even do so sight-unseen over the telephone or in other ways, then there must be something that sets these people apart that is detected at an unconscious level and triggers an instinctive reluctance to cooperate and, at times, eagerness to sabotage. The devil of it is, I have a fair amount of STEM knowledge but no clue what form this signal could possibly take that explains every occurrence. Pheromones seem like an obvious candidate, but don’t explain systematically worse experiences with phone and online interaction. A subconsciously detected component in the voice pattern doesn’t explain being last on everyone’s priority queue on messenger apps or being systematically mistreated by business entities one has only interacted with online, or people cutting in line or otherwise being antisocial to you in public settings when you’ve (up to that point, at least) been silently standing there. And so forth. The only thing I can figure is that there’s multiple modalities involved. Pheromones and something in the voice, and at least one something-else as well so that it can trigger hostility over the internet without a microphone’s involvement, too.

And the effect, I am guessing, is to render the victim “socially invisible”. People can see that there’s an object there, so they aren’t much more prone to accidental (as distinct from accidentally-on-purpose) collisions with the victim, but the notion that that object actually has, say, a place in line and it would be rude to cut in front of them just doesn’t occur to people, because for whatever reason they failed to perceive that it’s actually a person standing there and not, say, some whirligig display rack of gift cards or whatever else might be roughly the size and shape of a standing human being and near a cashier line in a store but not something-you-can-be-rude-to, something your scripted response to is mere collision-avoidance.

This would also explain the fifth-wheel phenomenon: if the affected person doesn’t speak up (i.e., rudely interrupt), nobody is even aware of their presence, at least as a person who ought to be included in some way rather than a piece of furniture one avoids barking one’s shin on but otherwise ignores. Of course, if the affected person does interrupt, the interruption engenders hostility. Worse, the people who had been ignoring them may suddenly realize they’re a person that they’ve been rudely ignoring and be embarrassed, and then react defensively and become hostile in a victim-blamey way like “why didn’t you let us know you weren’t just a funny-looking extra chair?!” Some sort of face-saving exercise, even though unnecessary when every single other person in the room with them (other than the victim, of course) is equally guilty of the same faux-pas.

It’s a workable theory, anyway. I will have to think on it some more. What should we call ourselves? The Invisibles? I suppose on the plus side it might open up career opportunities in fields like espionage and whichever subset of the police are primarily responsible for conducting stakeouts. I wonder if one of us has a higher survival rate in the event of being drafted into the infantry and sent into some pointless meat-grinder war in the middle east? If the enemy soldiers mistake you for a tree rather than a target until you’re right in among them opening fire that might be quite the advantage. On the other hand it should be easy for an Invisible to evade conscription. It might not even require conscious effort on their part, as they might simply be overlooked in the first place and never called in for evaluation, to say nothing of the ease of disappearing quietly.

And those ideas suggest ways to find more Invisibles, including ones of the past, in historical records. Anyone whose feats of stealth or similarly are famous would be a candidate. Was there ever a bank robber who could just walk into a busy establishment in the middle of peak business, walk back out with a wad of cash, and the first anyone realized anything had happened was when they went to count the money at the end of the day? If so, it goes to show you don’t need some techno-wizardry or mutant superpowers to pull off such things. Being socially invisible, i.e. registering as a non-person object by default when not the focus of another person’s attention, more than suffices. Of course one must then wonder if there is a technical means to achieve the same weird pseudo-stealth if you weren’t born with it … or to get rid of it if you don’t want to be erroneously perceived as somehow-unremarkable ambulatory furniture everywhere you go.

@Scildfreja:

And finally, on further reflection I must take philosophical issue with a statement you made earlier:

Your logical conclusion at the end of your list-of-causes is that there is something between you and the rest of the world that twists your intentions as they express in the world.

It’s you

I don’t agree that it is me. To the extent of “it’s part of your body” your hypothesis may be correct, but me is that thingy that makes my choices and decisions. Anything that’s in between that thingy and the rest of the world and is sometimes not correctly communicating (in either direction) between the two is, by definition, not me, for the simple and straightforward reason that it could not be altering my decisions if it was me, it would be making them instead. Put another way, your hypothetical thingy is outside of my control, even if it might be physically some part of my body. That it ever acts against my wishes alone suffices to establish its separateness.

I disclaim responsibility for its errors, just as an epileptic is not guilty of assault if during a seizure their thrashings cause their fist to contact someone’s nose. There is no mens rea, no desire or intention, let alone conscious choice, on their part to throw a punch at a nose, unlike the case with some brawler throwing a punch in a barroom fight.

That having been said, if this malfunctioning filter exists how does one go about getting the darn thing repaired?

@Surplus,

Have only been able to skim, and will have a longer reply for you when I’m able. As I said in the original post – I’m sorry if it sounded like an attack. I was being pithy and sharp for rhetorical purposes. So I apologize for that.

You’ve actually given me a lot to think on in your last post. See, I’ve had more than a few friends and acquaintances who’ve had similar problems that I’ve helped out, and no one’s really reacted the way you have. So I’m gonna do some more thinking on it and see if I can cook something specific up to your situation, okay?

Have a restful night and I’ll try to have something for you tomorrow <3

That sounds … unlucky.

Does roughly that amount of bullshit get shoveled at you every single day, or just once a month or so?

This is really dismissive. Lots of people already told you that they share your experiences but you ignored them and doubled down. There are lots of people here who suffer more but who can accept that it is not a conspiracy against them. Yeah it is shit for you that you are cold when the power is put and that you have to restart the computer. but why are they trying to kill you and not the elderly lady who will be much more vulnerable to the cold? Why are they trying to kill you and not the diabetic person who has insulin which was not refrigerated for 9 hours? Why are they trying to kill you and not the new born baby who is not strong against the cold? The checkout closes for you one or two times, what about the black people who get followed around the shop from the moment they come inside to the moment they go out? What about travellers and Roma who are refused service every every? Who cant even go inside some buildings? But I guess that’s just their fault for being black or being travlers? You just want the privillages that should get for every “normal” white person, right?

There were cyber attacks on my country where people *intentionally* made a power cut, to hurt us, to attack government and stop operation. There are people intentionally planting mines, arresting people and torturing them for the “extremism” of wearing Ukrainian colour on their school back (this happened to a 16 year old child in Donetsk), but because smart phones and touch screens are not perfect it means there is a conspiracy against you? that someone is abusing you?!

I am trying to be kind before but what you say is so insulting and so self-centered I can’t even believe it. It is not abuse that your comment does not show first time. It’s not abuse that a check out operation needs to go for their break. It is not a conspiracy that tools suck and don’t work sometimes, even if you say you are not clumsy, tools are not perfect.

Today what happens to me? I spilled hot soup on myself even though I am always careful with soup when we are rolling, one AB didn’t follow my very clear instructions and made a job which should take 1 day now take 2 days, the computer in the deck office stopped working for *no reason*, I got extremely sick on the bridge this afternoon even though I know I didn’t eat anything which will make me sick, whenever I want a time of peace and quiet someone else comes with another problem which I need to fix, every time I think I finished a job there is always something unexpected which happens. And that is just the things I remember. I am sure if I was looking for every thing which didn’t happen 100% how I want it to happen every day, first time, then it will feel like a conspiracy, but that is not the truth.

@Nequam:

My apologies for the delay in responding; I’d love you to share your soup recipe, if you please (I’ve never yet tried hot-and-sour (noodle soup.)

@Valentin Emigrantski-Ragamuffin:

At a local Filipino restaurant, I’ve had a side soup that I initially thought was made with pickled mustard greens; it turned out to be collards in a vinegar broth–reminiscent of sauerkraut, and a tart refreshing counterpoint to a rich meal of pork adobo and squash-and-green-bean stew. (A cursory Google search suggests the name ginisaang for the latter; I’m not yet versed in Pinoy culinary vocabulary.) That said, the Mama Sita mix sounds like something I ought to try; thank you for the recommendation.

@Surplus to Requirements:

I’m not confident of my ability to respond to you without somehow joining the ranks of your tormentors, but you are noticed and acknowledged.

@kupo:

The CSR’s job is to be a mouthpiece for the company, not to bend to your whims. They’re often given extremely limited information and solutions to offer.

OK, then whose job is it to actually fix things for the customer, and how do I get that person’s number? When something like that happens I want to be able to punch a few numbers in my phone, get directly ahold of a person with the power to actually press undo on whatever mistake the company they worked for just made, and get them to actually press undo.

The only numbers I ever see publicized are the ones that seem to be for the employees whose job is, apparently, to give customers the run-around and cover for their employer to permit the latter to drag its heels and evade accountability (while making bank) for as long as they can get away with before returning to doing what they were supposed to have been doing all along (and thus resuming incurring their normal operating expenses).

I don’t want to play that game. I just want the company in question to immediately resume doing the job I contracted with them for them to do. I don’t care about what will maximize their shareholders’ revenue, or whatever reason it is that they will sometimes on a whim single out a customer and temporarily deactivate service for them (while continuing to charge them whatever monthly, rather than metered, charges they charge them, of course). Yes, I know they’d rather drag their heels and extend the outage for as long as possible to milk the non-metered part of their fees while not incurring their normal costs for providing service to the affected customer. I simply don’t care that that’s what they want. I’m not paying them to do what they want, I’m paying them to do what I want.

I do wish there was a way to hurt a corporation* or make it feel guilt or shame for its choices. Or, failing that, some regulation forcing corporations to make their chief human decision-makers, the ones who actually made the choice to cause me harm, available for members of the general public to bend their ears, as a social-contract downside that would go hand-in-hand with the upside of being able to make millions of dollars in their fucking sleep. It would be nice to be able to vent directly at the entity actually directly responsible for treating me in an abusive way in the first place. But they never seem to make the appropriate target actually available to be reached by the average Joes and Josephines who they like to maltreat, do they?

* Yes, I am aware of the concept of taking my money elsewhere. Unfortunately not an option much of the time due to oligopolies and concentrated markets these days. Particularly with the services that are the most disruptive if they discontinue or otherwise capriciously fiddle with them, as utilities are pretty much invariably monopolies or close-to. And of course their insulation from market-based consequences is precisely why they love to capriciously toy with their customers in the first place: partly because they can make more money by having deliberately shoddy service, lowering their costs without lowering their monthly rates, but I’m guessing at least partly also simply because they can, because it lets them be playground bullies. The same people who at ten were going “Hey the nerdy guy with the glasses! Let’s tackle him to the ground and rub snow in his face! The teachers will look the other way like always as long as we don’t do it too close to right in front of them!” are at forty going “hey the nerdy guy with the glasses! Let’s turn his internet off for forty minutes and record his calls to the customer service line ‘for quality purposes’ aka we’ll listen to them later and have a good laugh — all the way to the bank — as he gets increasingly desperate to have normality restored!”. And at ten they were captain of the school baseball team and coercing or using daddy’s money to pay other kids to sit their exams for them, and at forty they’re raking it in in their sleep when they’re not melting the entire economy down for the lulz while getting even richer shorting relevant stocks, before soaking in a nice round of TARP bailout money a small fraction of which the SEC will claw back later as a settlement of their insider trading case.

I suppose what it will take is a socialist revolution to fix all this nonsense. In the meantime, while waiting for the starting gun to go off, would you mind telling me who should I speak to to expedite having normality restored? If they really must make some extra money by arbitrarily and capriciously interrupting random customers’ service from time to time, to please the fatcats on Wall Street, how do I convince them to always pick some other customer and leave me alone? Some comparatively wealthier customer, maybe a middle class one with a nice suburban house and two cars, who can more easily afford random and capricious service outages because they have data on their phone or a generator in their back yard or at least a wood fireplace for fricking heating?

To reference a different article: how do I make myself look like the poisonous frog rather than the yummy one, the one they’ll leave alone instead of subjecting to harassing service outages in their predatory quests for both dollars and lulz?

Oh, that’s right, I have to be the guy in the suburban house with two cars in the garage and the financial clout to get things like backup generators and expensive backup data plans, because that would mean I am also the guy with the money to hire an expensive lawyer and go after them for breach of contract or some such cause of action and, if not take them to the cleaners, at least make harassing me painful and expensive and a lot of paperwork they’d prefer to avoid.

So basically I’m screwed, because being the poisonous frog is expensive … and the local power company now has figured out that I’m unable to fight back effectively, as evidenced by the rapid slide in QoS I’ve been getting from them since early summer. They toyed with me a fair bit before … but sometime in 2018 they decided I’m a safe target who can be subjected to longer and more frequent outages with impunity. So now I’ll never get even close to the service I’m theoretically paying for, until I move (expensive again!) and it takes a while for the new utility company to figure out whether I’m safe to eat or poisonous. 🙁

This is really dismissive. Lots of people already told you that they share your experiences but you ignored them and doubled down.

That’s not how I would characterize it. I think the point being missed here is that the nuisance things that happen to you occasionally, perhaps once or twice a month, happen to me daily, and the kinds of spectacular clusterfucks that completely wreck your entire day, that happen to you perhaps once or twice a year, happen to me weekly.

It’s not just that they happen. It’s the frequency. And the difference, the place where I have it much worse, is the frequency.

You just want the privillages that should get for every “normal” white person, right?

Yes, but I want everyone to get those privileges, not just every sufficiently-wealthy-their-lawyers-are-feared-by-the-bullying-types white person. And I resent the implication that I’m somehow being racist for demanding that I get the bare minimum of what I’m paying for when I’m paying for something.

Note: not special treatment. Not anything extra. Just exactly what it says on the tin, whether that be 7Mb/s up and 500Kb/s down, or 120VAC@60Hz, or a widget with xyz specifications, or being freaking served in first-come-first-served fashion when I get in line for something. Just what their flyer promised, and/or the continuation of their own past performance. Nothing exceptional and nothing that isn’t demonstrably inside of their own capabilities.

It’s remarkable how low our expectations have all become, that it’s viewed as somehow being snotty/privileged to demand what ought to be the bare minimum acceptable quality of service from the businesses we patronize, by demanding that for our money they deliver, if not what they promised, at least the same damn thing they delivered without complaint yesterday and every day last week.

Neoliberal propaganda has really done a number on this civilization if even in one of the more progressive spaces I’ve found the response to my suggestion that maybe, just maybe, a company that did a customer-hostile but Wall-Street-pleasing action might actually be in the wrong, is to suggest that I’m expecting too much and should check my privilege.

There were cyber attacks on my country where people *intentionally* made a power cut, to hurt us, to attack government and stop operation. There are people intentionally planting mines, arresting people and torturing them for the “extremism” of wearing Ukrainian colour on their school back (this happened to a 16 year old child in Donetsk), but because smart phones and touch screens are not perfect it means there is a conspiracy against you? that someone is abusing you?!

Oh here we go. The Oppression Olympics. Some people are subject to worse oppression than socially isolated people of limited financial means who are also white and male, so socially isolated people of limited financial means who are also white and male had best take a number, sit down, and shut up until the worse oppressions have all been fixed.

I’m sorry, but that’s not how intersectionality works.

It is not abuse that your comment does not show first time. It’s not abuse that a check out operation needs to go for their break.

On an isolated case-by-case basis, you would be correct. When there is a systematic pattern of these things disproportionately happening to some people rather than others, you would no longer be correct. If the cashier goes on break right before a random person’s turn, c’est la vie. If the cashier keeps going on break right before black people’s turns, you’d have good evidence that that cashier was racist, or at least acting on unconscious bias. So what is it if the cashier keeps going on break right before a less visibly-different but still identifiable specific subset of people’s turns, Snowberry’s “invisibles” say, or people whose clothes or other things give hints they are lower on the socioeconomic totem pole than the “average” white collar dude with equity in a suburban house somewhere and a car to call his own?

@all:

I’m sorry my tone is offputting. The whole situation is frustrating though. Again I am not asking for much — usually just what was already theoretically agreed to, and/or what “they” had no complaints about providing (for a price) until five minutes prior when they suddenly and unilaterally decided otherwise without going through such legal niceties as calling me up first and asking to meet to renegotiate our contract…Mostly I’m just asking to have the experiences that would be considered “normal”, instead of this gnarled and stunted mockery of a “life” that I have been having while most of the people immediately around me actually did get some approximation of what they were promised: a white collar job if you get the education for it; some degree of dignity in how they are treated by others, individual and corporate; if not love, then at least a shot at it; friends and companionship; not having to do everything unaided and alone!

Which actually raises another point: the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, such as people above have described, affect a person in my circumstances far more than they affect you. Other people have resources and reserves they can draw upon. Other people have someone close by whose place they can crash at and who have a wood fireplace, or are outside of the area affected by a blackout. Other people have a network of friends who loan each other money to help cover unexpected expenses from time to time, at zero interest without a rigid repayment schedule. Other people have more money, or have interests that can be carried out at 9 pm when it’s dark and the stores have closed without need for electrical power, or have any of a number of backups and alternatives for any of a number of things. Other people can afford to miss the bus because the next one will be along in 30 minutes rather than 24 hours. Other people can afford to be knocked unexpectedly out of participating in $(obligation) by $(ridiculous_problem_or_timing_conflict) because they have someone they can count on to cover for them (and vice versa).

I do not have any of those things. I do not have a whole lot of other things, either, things even I don’t know that I don’t have in all likelihood, because I don’t know the rest of you do have them.

So maybe, just maybe, I’m justified in asking that those “slings and arrows” that are aimed at me be reduced in number even to below the levels that are aimed at everyone else, rather than just to equal those levels. (Plus, I have 40+ years of extra helpings that I ought to be compensated for — even to end up equal to everyone else I’d need to have a much lower amount of this stuff for a couple of decades before it went up to the levels experienced by everyone else.)

If you want me to list all the other problems i am currently dealing with in my life, so we can battle it out over who has it worse, i am not going to.

You missed my *point*. We all have a level of “this is bullshit, but w/e i can deal with it”. All of my misfortunes today (there were a lot) really wore me down, because i don’t have a high level in that today.

In days where i have a higher level, my response wouldn’t have been to tell the one cashier to tell their manager that if one of your *two* cashiers (who both have a line) has to go out of service, they should call another one to the front.

I would have just grit my teeth, and dealt with the extra wait.

Sometimes my level alters daily. Sometimes i am in a low point, and i Can Not Deal for like… months.

Your power going out was extreme bullshit. That shouldn’t happen, especially in Canada in winter. That was a mistake that needs to be rectified, and maybe you’re owed a refund or something? But if you try to get it… Know that *everyone* will have difficulty getting what they are owed. It doesn’t matter how in the right you are, the company ultimately doesn’t care, unless it is a public relations thing.

It’s shitty, but it’s life.

I don’t know if you remember, but you have behaved similarily in the past on this blog. You gave a few details, and then demanded we give you a magic solution to your problem. Anything less was treated with hostility, from you.

I’m sad to see you repeating the pattern. This might be a reason people are less willing to offer you advice in communities you are a part of. No one can offer a complete foolproof solution. We can only try our best.

Will you recognise the effort it takes to do so?

That’s not how I would characterize it. I think the point being missed here is that the nuisance things that happen to you occasionally, perhaps once or twice a month, happen to me daily, and the kinds of spectacular clusterfucks that completely wreck your entire day, that happen to you perhaps once or twice a year, happen to me weekly.

People are telling you they happen daily, I am telling you. but you are not listening. you have confirmation bias and you can’t accept that anyone is suffering more than you, even when they are directly telling you. You make big assumptions about other people’s life and experiences based on *no evidence* at all. That is really problematic and selfish.

It’s remarkable how low our expectations have all become, that it’s viewed as somehow being snotty/privileged to demand what ought to be the bare minimum acceptable quality of service from the businesses we patronize, by demanding that for our money they deliver, if not what they promised, at least the same damn thing they delivered without complaint yesterday and every day last week.

it is not expecting bare minimum service which shows your privilage – it is assuming that you have the worse experienced of everyone when that is demonstrated to not be true at all.

Neoliberal propaganda has really done a number on this civilization if even in one of the more progressive spaces I’ve found the response to my suggestion that maybe, just maybe, a company that did a customer-hostile but Wall-Street-pleasing action might actually be in the wrong, is to suggest that I’m expecting too much and should check my privilege.

I think most of us (and me) agree that capitalism is wrong and unjust – but what I don’t agree with is that the bad effects of capitalism are specifically happening to attack and abuse you.

The Oppression Olympics. Some people are subject to worse oppression than socially isolated people of limited financial means who are also white and male, so socially isolated people of limited financial means who are also white and male had best take a number, sit down, and shut up until the worse oppressions have all been fixed.

I am not engaging in “oppression Olympics” I am trying to give you perspective, to remind you that the problems you face, which are valid and annoying, are not the worst in the world. And I can see easily you are very distressed by them, and that is okay, but what is not okay is acting like they are *specifically* to attack and abuse you, that your neighbours and town-mates have even worse experienced, that there are people in the world with worst experience and they don’t try to claim that it is intentional, that it is a conspiracy against them. Even if you don’t mean to, it seems like you are self-absorbed and only care that the problem happens to you, and that there can’t be any worse problem. It is not “oppression Olympics” – it’s a reality check.

And generally – most problems in life can t be solved with a switch or even go back to how they were before. It is not that simple – there are always factors that you don’t know about. The person in customer service is still a person – maybe they have the same experience like you? Again and again unfortunate, annoying and totally bad things happening every week. I don’t know how many people or how many times we have to say that *the same things happen to us* for you to understand, that this is not something specifically to attack you, that this is just the nature of life, uncontrolled world, uncontrolled circumstances. Even computers and code can do things we don’t design them to do, even if we make a model for as many outcomes as we can – there will always be a chance for unexpected events mistakes and tragedy. You make assumptions about people’s life, and ignore evidence which contradicts your beliefs, and that is not fair

Surplus – When my other post eventually shows up, this response to kupo is EXACTLY what i am talking about

In the meantime, while waiting for the starting gun to go off, would you mind telling me who should I speak to to expedite having normality restored?

How would she even BEGIN to know that? We don’t know where you are, other than a smaller ontario town/city. We don’t know your provider. We don’t know your local MPP, or television station, or anything.

You come here looking for an answer we simply can not give.

You have to call them. Make them want to help you, get transferred up the chain until you are annoying enough that you will get your recompense.

That’s what you do. It sucks, but unless you have cash (fair to say that few of us do) that’s what it is.

There is a marketplace on this, might be worth checking out. If you watch it, you’ll see that even the *expert* doesn’t always get what they want.

Our internet sometimes goes down daily. At work, the program i need can crash hourly. If it was windy or rainy, we could randomly lose power at my last job. My buses are always late, or i just miss them, no matter what i do. People listen to loud music. Stores are closed when they should have been open.

That’s just life. It’s shitty, but we are all stuck with it.

Re: what Valentin was saying – you called it a conspiracy to deliberately abuse you. Valentin pointed out where this would be true, and how it probably isn’t true for you. It’s just shitty, shitty luck. He wasn’t playing oppression olympics, but pointing out where a conspiracy to commit abuse is currently happening.

Just saw @Rhuu’s post. Thank you! You are the first to actually acknowledge that what happened to me was wrong. I don’t know what you win for that, beside extra respect (above and beyond the basic level all people are entitled to by dint of being people); I really don’t have much to offer. Sorry.

Surplus to Requirements says:

You’ll pardon me if I have trouble accepting the notion that I should (or even could) avoid being angry….

Snowberry suggested that you could avoid acting angry, not that you should avoid being angry. Did you misread what Snowberry said? Or do you not understand the difference between being (how you feel inside) and acting (how you express yourself outwardly)?

That’s a serious question, by the way. I do know people who have trouble differentiating.