Thwart Deform
I’ll shop here just because they have a certain ganache.
This post contains my patented Tort Reform Quiz For Dummies. At last you can find out if you support tort reform or not! You’ll find the short quiz after the introductory crap. Wade on!
POW!
The punch landed bone-jarringly hard and the boxer in the red trunks suddenly ate canvas, a little puddle of drool forming quickly under his bloodied face. The referee counted it down then, with so sign of movement, called the fight. It was a knockout!
The blue corner jumped up and down ecstatically. “Way to go, champ! Way to go!”
The red corner carried their fighter back to their corner, balanced his lifeless body on his stool, and also began jumping up and down. “Wow, what a fight! You took ’em to the cleaners, champ! You really flayed ’em!”
Erm, what? Meanwhile the monkeys are flying in from the East chanting, “Oh wee oh! Oh wee oh!”
Such is the way of politics these days. Is my example a little extreme? Perhaps, but sadly not by much.
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Demonically Repossessed
This is a true story…
It all started when I loaned a friend a hammer. A hammer is a tool typically used for driving metal objects known as nails into various materials like wood. Or so I’ve heard.
For the purpose of this story let’s assume I actually owned a hammer.
If we wanted to (and were sufficiently sick in the head) we could think of this loan as a transaction. The hammer represents the principle, my friend is the debtor and I must be, of course, the bank.
It isn’t too hard to assume my friend is a debtbeat deadbeat and never returned the bloody thing. Amazingly, even though I dunned him many, many times, and threatened to assess late fees of 1.5 percent on a monthly basis.
Finally that worthless so-and-so left me no recourse. After consulting my voluminous and most accurate scribbles documentation, I looked up his address and drove across town. I was literally seeing red. My goal? To retrieve the hammer and write the dude off as my friend.
I kicked in his door, tore the place apart, and, having found my precious hammer, I got the hell out of dodge.
The only problem? I made the totally understandable mistake of going to the wrong house. The hammer I repossessed wasn’t even mine. In my defense, it was of similar design. Oops. My bad.
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From the Abyss Dev Team: The Pre-Gen Taser
How many times has this happened to you?
– You’re at the grocery store checking our with your groceries when an elderly person starts a conversation with your checker and suddenly you’re standing there bored and ignored
– An elderly person rams your car when parking and when confronted merely shrugs, never apologizes and walks away
– After waiting patiently in line at the restaurant to pay the check an elderly man walks up and sticks his ticket in the face of an employee who takes care of him first
Frustrating? Hells yes. Like a helpless idiot you take it each and every time. And there’s nothing you can do about it, right?
Well now you can!
Introducing the new AbyssCo Pre-Gen Taser – specially calibrated and balanced to meet the unique needs of the geriatric set. This little device works just like its big brother, but is perfectly suited for use on the generation that came before you.
The Pre-Gen Taser is not available in stores and comes with our lifetime guarantee that it won’t interfere with pacemakers, won’t fry hearing aids and prevents the embarrassment of dentures being ejected. All this with the peace of mind that you’ll be long gone by the time your target regains his wits.
How It Works
Our patented Pre-Gen Probes are softer and have been specially designed to protect elderly targets and deliver a debilitating shock that is perfectly age-adjusted for needs of elderly miscreants. And an oscillating energy pulse is used to bring your target down slowly which helps prevent unsightly hip injuries.
With the optional Medi-Alert addon pak (sold separately) the Pre-Gen Taser will provide the added service of checking your target’s pulse, blood pressure, and medications – and automatically alert the nearest hospital if your target has any conditions that existed prior to the tasing. You’ll be solving an annoying problem and help save lives – all at the same time. Here at AbyssCo we call that a win-win!
Next time it happens, and it will, you’ll be ready. Pull out your Pre-Gen Taser, back away from your target a few paces (to protect yourself from released fluids), point and shoot! It’s just that easy!
Pre-order yours today and take charge* of your personal power* in the future!
* Pun intended.
You shall not email
One of the primary functions of an ecommerce company is to take orders over the phone. These orders are placed by people who are too chickenshit and/or stupid and/or obstinate to do it themselves over the internet.
A common theme among these people is that they don’t like to tell you their email address. As if that could somehow be used against them in some terrible way or as if just a single extra piece of spam would be the tipping point to ruining their lives.
So these folks call up on the telephone to place their orders. And thus begins what I like to call a dance that leads to the creation of order records that are rife with errors. Did you say F or S? M or N? Another commonality these people have is that they like to speak quickly and don’t like repeating themselves. One thing is certain: By the time we’re done transcribing what was said there are errors.
Then we ask, “Can I have your email address? That is where we’ll send the order confirmation and the tracking number so you can track your own shipment.”
“What do you want that for?” the customer will ask warily.
Sigh. We’ve been down this road a million times. “I just explained all that.”
“Will you spam me? Will you sell it?”
“No,” I say for the 27th million time in my life. “We only send you emails pertaining to your order. We never sell, give away or lease email addresses to anyone. Ever.” The truth is we’re too horribly inept, unorganized and understaffed to do anything proactive like work our email lists. So by default your email is very safe with us whether you trust that or not.
“Well, you can’t have it! Won’t tells you, we will. Never!”
Fine. Whatever. Shut the hell up, okay?
The email enables, among other things, the order confirmation. This is a little bit of info, sent to the email address, that confirms things like what’s in the order, the amount charged, and where the order will be shipped.
Not once in my illustrious 10-year ecommerce career has a customer ever received this order confirmation, carefully checked it, then called in to report an error. At least not before the order has shipped. They’re real good about doing so the next day once it’s too late. “Wowie! You guys sure ship purdy fast.”
The order confirmation email is a vital part of the process to find, intercept and fix costly errors before an order has shipped. Before we ship fixes are free. After we ship fixes are expensive.
Then, these same people who claimed not to have an email address will call us every day for an update on their stuff. “Where’s my order now?” they’ll demand to know.
“If you provide your email address I could send the tracking information along and you could track it real-time all by yourself…” I helpfully suggest.
“No. We do not wants that! Just tell us where our precious is located now. Track it for us, you will. Yesssssssss!”
Nothing says job satisfaction like extra phone calls from idiots made possible through customer paranoia. All over their oh-so-sacred email address, of all things!
What gets me is that when you ask for the credit card information, they have absolutely no problem with that. They’ll hand it over like it’s a red-hot potato. They’ve been well trained to be efficient customers in the consumption machine. They know we need the number itself, the name on the card, the expiration date, the billing address, and the “security code” on the back. Har.
And they’ll willingly line up to hand over this information to a complete stranger on the phone. Yeah, like that’s any safer than transmitting the information across the internet.
A lot of customers call in out of fear of putting their credit card information into the computer and/or the internet. So they give it to us over the phone. We then promptly do two things that would probably fry their bacon. First, we write it down on a piece of paper. (Everything required to complete a credit card transaction on one handy document. Isn’t that nice? Which would never have happened if they just ordered themselves.) And the second thing: We then punch all of that credit card information right into that same damn computer and/or internet.
Ha ha! And they thought they were being safe. Not only did we just do the one thing they had hoped to avoid, but it passed through an extra human along the way. Talk about safety!
So here’s to you paranoid customers! Keep being magnificent.
Hyppo and Critter: Personal Restraint
As a blabbermouth blogger I relish the irony of posting this one…
Shouts from the Abyss 
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