Now and again people have said to me, “You need help.” And I’m not just talking about people who read this blog. They mean it in a caring way I’m sure and indeed there are occasions when a little help would be very welcome.
This is especially so in business. In these cases you are even willing to pay for that help, but you still have the problem of letting people know that you have a job for them.
So what do you do?
You advertise the available positions, of course.
Sounds easy?
Well, for most of us it is. For the intellectually challenged not so much.
Take a look at this lot below and you’ll see what I mean.
I did a short series a few months back about some of the stupid laws stupid politicians had made. They were quite funny and most of them dated back many years, they just hadn’t been taken off the statute books.
That excused the old laws, maybe.
But they are still at it even today!
I know that you shouldn’t expect too much when a group of uninformed and irresponsible people go out and vote to elect a smaller group of uninformed and irresponsible politicians, while most people stay at home. But we call that democracy these days. And in what passes for normal times you can get away with it.
But these are not normal times we are living in. America, and most of the western world, is in desperate trouble economically. We need help from our politicians.
Help to stimulate economic growth; help to make it easier to do business in and from the US; help to protect us from cheap inferior crap being imported that has destroyed local jobs and industries; help for entrepreneurs to establish new wealth generating businesses; and help from the socialist bureaucratic nightmare that is completely out of hand.
As regard the stupid laws, these days most of them center around ways that bankrupt governments, whether national or local, can think up to extract more and more from the people who elected them.
Currently US bureaucrats are frantically trying to think up another way to tax the internet. Previous attempts failed because of public outcry, but sooner or later they will do it and who will it help? Everybody who isn’t in business in America and the EU probably, because it won’t apply anywhere else!
The mantra of these idiot bureaucrats is to make America more productive and prosperous by making America less competitive and poorer. It sits nicely with their other mantra of solving economic woes by extracting more and more tax from less and less income. Neither works and never will.
What prompted this rant?
Well only the unbelievable fact that the idiot politicians in Maryland have decided to tax rain.
What????
Tax what????
Yes, you read it right, the idiot politicians in Maryland have decided to tax rain.
They call it by a fancy name, of course, the “Impervious Surfaces tax”, or ”storm water management fee”, but what it in effect does is to charge Maryland residents for rainwater that falls on their property.
Naturally, the bureaucrats are dressing up this latest money grab with the lie that it is for the benefit of the people. It’s bit like a pick pocket excusing his theft by saying he was relieving you of the burden of carrying your wallet around in your coat pocket. And it makes just as much sense!
Thankfully, however, there seems to be a few with a working brain left in local government. Anne Arundel County Executive Laura Neuman, for example, vetoed the tax proposal which unfortunately won’t kill it, but will give a little bit of breathing space.
But if the residents of Maryland are “chicken” enough to fall in line with this new tax – and so far it seems most of them have been dumb enough not to even notice it at all – then it won’t be the end of it.
Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who guided the passage of the storm water tax earlier this month, despite efforts from Republicans to dismantle the bill, has already been responsible for implementing 37 other taxes and fees since taking office — at a cost to residents estimated at somewhere in the region of $3.1 billion annually.
Does anyone really think an idiot like this is going to let the people have air and sunshine for free???
A relative quick and funny post for the start of a new week. Always helps a bit to add a bit of humor to Mondays, I think.
This one is about 911 emergency calls. You would imagine that 911 calls would be made by serious people about serious events, that’s what the lines are set up for. But also because of their nature you don’t have to be qualified to use them.
When the intellectually challenged make a 911 call, the results are just about the same I reckon as when they make ordinary calls – unbelievable!
Here are a few examples.
Enjoy!
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller: I heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the brown house on the corner.
Dispatcher: Do you have an address?
Caller: No, I have on a blouse and slacks, why?
– – – – – – – – –
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller: Someone broke into my house and took a bite out of my ham and cheese sandwich .
Dispatcher: Excuse me?
Caller: I made a ham and cheese sandwich and left it on the kitchen table and when I came back from the bathroom, someone had taken a bite out of it.
Dispatcher: Was anything else taken?
Caller: No, but this has happened to me before and I’m sick and tired of it!
– – – – – – – – – –
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is the nature of your emergency?
Caller: I’ m trying to reach nine eleven but my phone doesn’t have an eleven on it.
Dispatcher: This is nine eleven.
Caller: I thought you just said it was nine-one-one
Dispatcher: Yes, ma’am nine-one-one and nine-eleven are the same thing.
Caller: Honey, I may be old, but I’m not stupid.
– – – – – – – – – –
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What’s the nature of your emergency?
Caller: My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart
Dispatcher: Is this her first child?
Caller: No, you idiot! This is her husband!
– – – – – – – – – –
Dispatcher: 9-1-1
Caller: Yeah, I’m having trouble breathing. I’m all out of breath… Darn……I think I’m going to pass out.
Dispatcher: Sir, where are you calling from?
Caller: I’m at a pay phone. North and Foster.
Dispatcher: ! Sir, an ambulance is on the way. Are you an asthmatic?
Caller: No
Dispatcher: What were you doing before you started having trouble breathing?
Caller: Running from the Police
– – – – – – – – – –
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller: Hi, is this the Police?
Dispatcher: This is 9-1-1. Do you need police assistance?
Caller: Well, I don’t know who to call. Can you tell me how to cook a turkey? I’ve never cooked one before.
– – – – – – – – – –
Dispatcher: 9-1-1 Fire or emergency?
Caller: Fire, I guess.
Dispatcher: How can I help you sir?
Caller: I was wondering…does the Fire Dept. put snow chains on their trucks?
Dispatcher: Yes sir, do you have an emergency?
Caller: Well, I’ve spent the last 4 hours trying to put these chains on my tires and… well.. do you think the Fire Dept. could come over and help me?
He hasn’t been blind all his life but from his late teens, when he was training to be an architect, he started to lose his sight due to an inherited disease and eventually it went altogether.
To his credit he hasn’t let it stop him leading as full a life as possible. Although there have been good and bad results.
For example, he insists on helping around the house but on one occasion he picked up a kitten along with the dirty clothes and promptly dumped all in the washing machine. Both the clothes and the kitten were clean at the end of the washing cycle, but the unfortunate kitten was also dead.
He also tells a story about doing some shopping at a time when his sight was almost gone, but not quite. He was in a local pharmacy and queued up at the counter waiting to hand over his prescription. He waited and waited, but the pharmacy assistant kept ignoring him. He could hear other people getting served, but never him. He waited and he waited and he waited some more, but nothing. The girl behind the counter just kept ignoring him.
Finally his patience just ran out. He was angry. He thought he was being deliberately ignored because of his disability and that other ‘seeing’ customers were being allowed to jump the queue. He spoke to the assistant who was standing right in front of him. She didn’t respond. Then he spoke louder. Still no reaction. Then he started to give forth some abuse which included a good bit of strong language. The other customers in the pharmacy all stopped what they were doing and watched what was going on.
People were a little embarrassed. Nobody intervened except for one gentleman, who walked up to my friend, put his hand on his shoulder and said quietly buy firmly, “Come over here son, and this other person will attend to your order.”
He found out later that he had been patiently queuing up in front of one of those body and head mannequins that was sitting on the counter and which the pharmacy was using to display a ladies wig, and had been hurling his abuse and angst at it and not to a real person at all.
A few incidents like that aside, he has coped quite well. He has compensated for his lack of sight by developing an extremely good memory and equally good recall. I think that proves that the more you use your brain the better it works.
What a pity so many people these hardly use theirs at all!
For a lot of years his way of designing houses was very laborious. He would plan the whole thing out in his head and then give verbal instructions to his son who would dutifully draft out a sketch of the proposed building. It was slow and tedious for the recipient of the instructions, although he reveled in the task himself – a little bit too much and too long for most people’s liking if truth be told. I know because I was the unfortunate recipient of the drafting instructions on a couple of occasions.
And then a possible solution hit me like a brick.
A Lego brick actually.
I bought a few large base sheets and he got himself some small Lego bricks and from then on he was able to draft his own floorplans, and to scale using each little brick as equivalent to one foot or whatever. It worked well for him and gave him a bit more freedom to plan and re-plan without involving anyone else in the process. I don’t know whether he still uses it or not, but I kind of hope so.
Now, what sparked this blog post in my head wasn’t him at all. It was a video that I watched recently. It’s not about architects either, but it is about someone who is blind. And it is also about the power of words which as a blogger and writer I appreciate, as I’m sure many of you do too.
“If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.”
Robert Cringel
I have been involved with computers for many years. I remember using mainframe machines with data inputted on punch cards and bits of flimsy tape, and the machines, which in those days had no monitors, they were just glorified teletype printers, chugging (and I mean chugging) out the results that would have meant absolutely nothing to the uninitiated.
In the grand scheme of things all that wasn’t really so long ago, and at the time it was cutting edge technology and terribly exciting, although now it seems so archaic.
In those days you didn’t quite have to be a nerd or a geek (but it helped) although you did have to have a certain level of education and understanding of mathematics and computer science to be able to make the machines do what you wanted them to do. Or try to, they were a bit temperamental. These machines were also horribly expensive and were to be found only in universities and larger companies, thus, whilst people did get themselves into tangles now and again, there was usually someone on hand to help out.
Then along came the personal computer revolution, which we are now well and truly in the midst of, and which has changed the world forever.
Thousands of new companies were spawned out of this revolution, hardware manufacturers, software manufacturers, various support and service industries. People were churning out all sorts of stuff, a lot of it rubbish, some of it good, but all of it difficult for the beginner to use. Before the advent of GUI personal computers were not user friendly at all. Therefore at some stage in the proceedings those who bought them would get stuck or something would go wrong.
Thus were born the infamous computer “help lines”.
Here are a couple more non video examples that I hope you will also enjoy.
Right Click
Tech Support: “I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.”
Customer: “Ok.”
Tech Support: “Did you get a pop-up menu?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech Support: “Ok. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech Support: “Ok, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?”
Customer: “Sure, you told me to write ‘click’ and I wrote ‘click’.”
(At this point I had to put the caller on hold to tell the rest of the tech support staff what had happened. I couldn’t, however, stop from giggling when I got back to the call.)
Tech Support: “Ok, did you type ‘click’ with the keyboard?”
Customer: “I have done something dumb, right?” —-
Blank Screen
Allegedly this is the transcript of a recorded conversation between a caller and a computer helpline. It’s a few years old now, but still amusing.
Tech Support: May I help you?
Customer: Yes, I’m having trouble with WordPerfect.
Tech Support: What sort of trouble?
Customer: Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away.
Tech Support: Went away?
Customer: They disappeared.
Tech Support: Hmmm. So what does your screen look like now?
Customer: Nothing.
Tech Support: Nothing?
Customer: It’s blank. It won’t accept anything when I type.
Tech Support: Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?
Customer: How do I tell?
Tech Support: Can you see the C prompt on the screen?
Customer: What’s a sea prompt?
Tech Support: Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?
Customer: There isn’t any cursor. I told you, it won’t accept anything I type.
Tech Support: Does your monitor have a power indicator?
Customer: What’s a monitor?
Tech Support: It’s the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it’s on?
Customer: I don’t know.
Tech Support: Well, look round the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?
Customer: …yes, I think so.
Tech Support: Great! Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged into the wall.
Customer: …yes, it is.
Tech Support: When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back, not just one?
Customer: No.
Tech Support: Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable.
Customer: …OK, here it is.
Tech Support: Follow it for me, and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.
Customer: I can’t reach.
Tech Support: Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?
Customer: No.
Tech Support: Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?
Customer: Oh, it’s not because I don’t have the right angle, it’s because it’s dark.
Tech Support: Dark?
Customer: Yes. The office lights are off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window.
Tech Support: Well, turn the office lights on then.
Customer: I can’t.
Tech Support: No? Why not?
Customer: Because there’s a power outage.
Tech Support: A power… a power outage? Aha! OK, we’ve got you licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?
Customer: Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.
Tech Support: Good! Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store that you bought it from.
Customer: Really? Is it that bad?
Tech Support: Yes, I’m afraid it is.
Customer: Well, alright then, I suppose. What do I tell them?
Tech Support: Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.
.
fasab 