Tag: Suckage

Things that totally suck

Techno-Woes, Part 17

Technology

One would think that the Gods Of Technology, having bricked my new laptop (bought in January 2025) and caused me to have to buy a new one, would have done fucking with me.

One would be wrong.

Last week, I picked up my phone, to feel and see this:

Yup.  The old case, she splody like an IRA bomb or Al-Qa’eda IED.

“Oh,” said the T-Mobile tech person when I brought it in to the store, “that’s the battery.  They do that.  How long have you owned the phone?  That long?  Wow, and the battery only went phut now?  You’ve been lucky.  Anyway, you’re going to need a new one.  No, not just a new battery — a new phone, because they stopped making this model about four years ago.”

Fortunately, I long ago made the command decision to pay a little extra on my monthly bill for a replacement phone deal, should Bad Things Happen.

So I picked up the New Phone yesterday.  Why only yesterday?  Because these phone stores no longer carry any actual stock, you see — unless you’re a New Customer, in which case they’ll whip one out and empty your bank account in a flash.  But a replacement phone for existing customers?  Oh no, we’ll have to order that one, and it’ll take a week or so, sorry about that.  At least I got an upgraded model, for no extra cost.

Blessedly, the transfer of all my stuff from Old & Broken to New & Shiny only took about 5 minutes, mostly because I didn’t bother transferring any photos (having already backed them up).

I guess that 5+ years usage out of one of these “smart” phones isn’t that bad — although considering that I barely use the fucking thing (compared to everyone else in the universe), I would have thought it would last much longer.

But back to my store visit… I wanted to have a clear screen protector installed.  Sorry, we don’t keep those in stock — but we can order one for you.  One of those rubber-like protective cases?  Nope, sorry, but if we order those for you, they’ll get here in a week or so.

For fuck’s sake:  what happened to the concept of one-stop shopping and customer service?

(I should add that the staff at said store were helpful and knowledgeable in the extreme — even for Southern Nice People, they were exceptional.  They’re not to be blamed for policy decisions like in-stock items.)

Anyway, I have the new thing, and it seems to be working okay.  Let’s just hope it lasts longer than that godawful ASUS piece of shit laptop.

And the next time I go to a mall (2026, if my existing shopping trend continues), I’ll just swing by one of those little kiosks and get the screen protector and safety casing there.  Life is too short to worry about shit like that.

ASUS Delenda Est

Technology, Two-Minute Hate

Quick recap of my laptop woes:

  • Several weeks back the thing bricked on me.  One minute typing, the next thing black screen, totally dead and unresponsive.  All efforts to revive are fruitless, including long chats with online support staff.  Off to Best Buy (an ASUS repair facility).
  • The Geek Squad informs me that they don’t do any warranty repairs on ASUS machines that they themselves have not sold.  Nice.  So I send the thing to ASUS, imagining fondly that since I only purchased this POS in January of this year, that it is still under warranty.
  • It isn’t.  [50,000 very bad words redacted]  So I tell ASUS to return the brick to me, because I’m not comfortable having repairs done at a remote location (Indiana, incidentally) when, if I’m going to have to pay for the fucking repairs, I’d prefer to have the job done locally.  So off I go to Micro Center (Dallas).  This was yesterday (Monday) morning
  • Micro Center gets on it right away — I mean, I got a sitrep text message only an hour after I got back home.  That’s about the only good news.
  • Apparently, the motherfuckingboard is kaput.  On a brand-new computer.  Cost to replace:  $380 (part) + $150 (labor).  For a machine that cost around $500 new.  But:
  • None of Micro’s vendors have the board in stock, and ASUS themselves are looking at a 4-17 week resupply time.

My options seem to be:

  1. Grit my teeth and have the repair done, continuing to stumble along for the next 2-4 months on my old HP laptop with its occasional freezing-up, malfunctioning keys and broken chassis.
  2. Buy a new replacement machine* from Micro Center — average cost for a similar-to-my-ASUS machine, about $600-$700 which I don’t have.
  3. Try to reinstall my whole fucking life onto  some other (secondhand) laptop, of which a couple of you generous souls sent my way, but which I cannot get to function.  (I have the best Readers on the Internet.)
  4. Migrate to New Wife’s desktop PC, which is tucked away in a dark corner of our tiny apartment, and has NONE of the features of any laptop, and by that I mean a decent keyboard, sufficient power and storage, Win10 (okay, I can live with that), all while I’d have to sit on an ancient office chair which will cause me to have back problems, guaranteed.

To say that I am angry does not begin to describe my mood right now.

And oh, by the way:  if anyone out there is thinking of buying an ASUS machine in the near future;  DON’T.

*New Wife has okayed this option, but it still sticks in my craw.

From Comfortable Heritage To Modern Banal

Corporate Wokism, Marketing / Advertising

We’ve all seen how modernist logo design has turned the proud familiar into simplistic trash:

…and of the recent Cracker Barrel rebrand we will not speak, as they’ve been forced into a U-turn.

Now if one thinks of modernistic Philistines and Wokery Gone Mad in the civic sense, it’s hard to imagine a better example than that “blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup”, Austin TX.  Who have “progressed” from a traditional city seal to… well, a 1970s-era representation of a homeless person’s tent shelter:

Bloody hell.  It’s an encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the Left:  ahistorical, simplistic and ugly.

Another Sick Asshole

Bad News, Psychos

So the sicko responsible for the recent Minnesota school shooting has been identified as some trannie or other.  Most notable about this sorry tale has been the response from both sides of the political debate.

To the Left, of course, it’s all about eeevil gunsgunsguns and How They Should All Be Banned.

To the non-Left, is just another example of how the Great Trannie Craze has unhinged kids’ minds.

I’m indifferent to both camps.  Of course, the “Bans Guns Now!” bullshit doesn’t work for me for all the usual reasons (stop me if you’ve heard them all before):  gun bans don’t work because evil people will always find a way to get them, and a universal gun ban would be impossible to implement and/or enforce, etc.

I’m also scornful of the “Trannie-ism Poisons Minds” mantra.  I mean, yes it might well do that — and there seems to be an awfully high percentage of recent mass shootings / stabbings recently committed by trannies, despite the efforts of the police and Leftists to disguise the trend — but the simple fact of the matter is that the cause of mental illness is largely irrelevant.  Some asshole might go on a spree because his girlfriend just left him, because he can’t get a girlfriend (the “incel” syndrome), because he recently got fired by the company where he ended up playing his reindeer games, because the victims are part of a group he hates, because a black dog told him to do it… or just because it was Thursday.

The reasons for the atrocity, therefore, are less important than the outcome of the the thing:  innocent people got killed or wounded by some sick asshole.  And looked at clinically, the weapons used (guns, knives, bombs, whatever) are largely irrelevant:  whatever the tool selected, bad things happened.

Everyone seems to be obsessed with discovering the motive of the sicko, when in fact the motive is irrelevant:  whatever drove the male/female/combination mass murderer to go all Texas Tower on innocent people, there’s not a whole lot we as a society can do about it.

And that’s the tragedy of the thing.  Bodyguards all over the place — whether the Secret Service, police or Rent-A-Cops — will tell you that the hardest situation to prepare for is the Random Sicko because he gets to pick the victim(s), the place and the time.

As I see it, the only way one can try to prevent the mass shooting/stabbing/clubbing event is to be alert, be prepared and to be armed — whether as individuals carrying a gun, or by extension as an organization employing an armed security service.  It may not be possible to prevent the atrocity, but it may be possible to contain it.

It really sucks that a Catholic school such as the one in Minneapolis should have to do the latter just to safeguard the children it’s looking after, and it sucks that I should have to carry a gun and three magazines to the supermarket on every visit, but that seems to be the way of the world these days.

Fiddling & Fraud

Corporate Fuckery

I see that Walmart has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar:

A very high-ranking Walmart executive was allegedly tossing American tech workers aside while pocketing massive bribes to bring in Indian H-1B workers from shady “visa mills.” And once again, the globalist lie about “filling jobs Americans won’t do” is blown to pieces.

This scandal was never about talent shortages or innovation. It was about greed, lining pockets, cutting costs, and selling out the American workers who built Walmart into what it is today.

It should come as no surprise that the corporation whose business mantra is all about the lowest possible prices should treat their own workforce any differently.

I’ve written about this whole situation before (Screwing Americans and Racial Preferences), so to say I am unaware of this bastardy would be some kind of understatement.

But I’m now well past the point of just observing such things and shaking my head about it.

Here’s my suggestion to the Trump Administration.

  • find out how many of these fraudulent H-1B visas were given to Walmart employees since, well, forever;
  • calculate the average annual salaries of each of those jobs, if held by U.S. citizens, and multiply those dollar amounts by the number of frauds;
  • add three zeroes to that aggregate;
  • fine Walmart for that amount, with a massive daily penalty for non-compliance;
  • then go after every other company which has benefited from this kind of fraud, and sue them in identical fashion (ahem Google etc.).

Or just go through the all finance and HR departments and in classical Roman fashion, randomly select one in ten employees for summary termination* (the original meaning of the word “decimation”).  Repeat the process on a monthly basis.

A precondition for the above is the immediate “reshoring” of all fraudulent H-1B visa holders, along with their families.

I’m sick of us pussyfooting around this nonsense, and I’m pretty sure that a large number of Trump supporters feel the same.

* I first wrote “execution” but some people may have a problem with this because Krool & Hartless, Kim.

Just In Passing

Bad News

I know that the London Daily Mail is an awful publication.  If you want to read reports that one of the Kardashians has changed the color of her nail polish or how some barely-known “celebrity” is experiencing post-divorce trauma, then the DM is the paper for you.

So why do I read it?  Because unlike the conservative newspapers Over Here, it isn’t all politics, all the time — which is almost as boring as another article wherein Amanda Holden gets to show off her skinny (“toned”) body yet again.  I like me a little diversion of the salacious kind, but only as an occasional counterweight to all the earnest political crap.

Every so often, however, the DM surprises me with coverage that is not only relevant, but excellent — and often, their reportage on events Over Here arrives earlier than that from US newspapers, which makes no sense at all.

However, just the other day I noticed something interesting.  There was a blizzard of coverage in conservative US outlets about what I referred to the other day as “flaggism“, so I went over to the Daily Mail to see what their take was on the situation.  I mean, thousands of people all over Britain protesting the migrant hotels, Union- and St. George’s flags being hung on lamp posts and painted on the roads:  this is news absolutely worth covering and talking about, because it’s a really important issue in British life at the moment.  So what did the DM say about it all?

Nothing.  On the day in question, there was not a single article devoted to the topic.  Nor was there one in the Sun, and in the august Times of London?  Not one either, but there were two on Taylor Swift’s engagement.  Even the conservative (by UK standards) Telegraph had only one report on the unrest, and that was an analysis of how a single town‘s unrest may cause an election party switch at some point in the future.

One would almost think there was a conspiracy… but then again, I’m not too surprised. The British population (and its mainstream media), it seems, would rather gorge themselves on the details of Taylor Swift’s engagement or the Beckham family’s feud than concern themselves with an issue that is of vital national consequence.

Morons, the lot of them.