jack

What do you do if you want to post a wide flat 101g envelope? According to the royal mail website you can't send it straight first class, it's too heavy. You can't send it large letter first class, it's too wide. And you can't send it first class packet because it's too thin.

What's wrong with that picture? First class packet rates apply if *any* of the four dimensions (length, width, thickness, weight) supernumerarynesses apply.

OK, you can deduce that after considering the page. It's the only way you'd ever design it. But (a) by that argument, they might as well just encrypt everything with a 20-bit key. You can deduce what that says, right? And (b) Sometimes bureaucracies polices do have to be complicated and counter-intuitive, so you can't always just assume it's the way you'd do it.

Why don't they just say what they mean? Then you wouldn't have to guess.

*gasp* *inhale* I also have a lot of objections to the pricing.

I the "ways to pay" section, there's half-a-dozen, including "first class stamps". You used to be able to use *any* stamps adding up to the required postage, nth-class stamps being valued at the current rate. I *assume* you still can. I bet it says somewhere. But I couldn't find it.

Surely more people have two first class stamps than one large letter first class stamp? And don't get me started on the idea of placing the weight boundaries so the prices are all simple multiples of each other!

OK, the site is *fairly* well designed. And ok, to be fair, I ought to know exactly how it works beforehand. And there is a convenient local post-office which I bet would have sold me whatever I needed. But a nice little tutorial on posting a letter wouldn't seem out of place -- someone has to do this for the first time, making it easy for them can only encourage them! :)

I had another several days worth of rant about mobile phones, market segmentation, confusopolies, complicated metaphors involving concatenations of pseudo-linear functions, jumentous companies, and other things that make my spell checker throw up its hands in dismay.

But I decided to talk about dragons instead. I know people whose animal is a panda, or an elephant. That has some individuality. Somehow dragons are too *obvious*. But hey, I have to accept I can do something well but not have to be the first, the only, or the best. I like dragons.

Why do dragons eat princesses? It's like in the matrix. Princesses are not a good source of nutrition, people. For starters, there's not very many of them. In LOTR there are no female characters at all (though there are a relatively high proportion of scions), Smaug would be toast. And humans aren't particularly interesting metabolically.

If you just want food, stick to cows. If they're eating for nutrition, Dragons are in an evolutionary dead end. Sea-serpents, crocodiles, fireflies, etc probably do better as a species, however badass a dragon is one-on-one. Princesses didn't even EXIST for millions of years, any dragon who could eat anything else would be at a great advantage.

No, it's a power thing. They get off on making the kingdom dance to their tune.

What do Dragons get from their food that isn't meat? They need to eat souls. (This is also why carnivores always have so much more oomph than herbivores, they recharge their mana an awful lot more. And why the more militant the religion the more specific the kinds of meat you eat. You may notice at about this point in the post that I'm making up things that aren't true.)

What is a soul? I'd normally say something else, but here I think we're talking about accumulated life experiences. There may be something else, but we're talking about that which is eaten.

Which is why dragons want princesses. There's two basic things you want out of life, adventure and luxury. Knights have adventure, but dragons don't have to form convoluted plans to find knights, they just have to sit down somewhere and demand princesses. Dragons want a taste of the high life, and they want to feel special, hence princesses.

Also notice dragons in stories are male. Female dragons are larger, more majestic, more intelligent, and generally so successful they don't hang around terrorising kingdoms. And all the stories are written by knights' bard squires, and jousting with a female isn't chivalrous to them.

That means the bards, like vampires, have a sexual metaphor thing going on, which means princesses. And preferably unmarried princesses, being so much more tragic. (And besides, life experiences of being married off to powerful ugly foreign potentates probably isn't a dragon's cup of tea.)

Do you think there's a story in this? I'm thinking reversing a few things, where the knight is the evil soul-eater, (who starts off just big and brash, but is shortly wearing all black armour, and then pushing back his visor to reveal only swirling darkness underneath) and the princess is the hero, and she and her family band together with the dragon to defeat him. Basically, I want to ask the_alchemist if I can rip off the royal family in her book.

I have experienced relationships. I've had personal relationships and business relationships. Longstanding and fleeting relationships. Family, friend, romantic and sexual relationships. I am an Adams! OK, not that.

Like most humans, and unlike the company designing this phone menu, I have some idea of what constitutes "a relationship getting better over time".( Read more... )

There are two sorts of people listening to "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. You may experience a delay.". People trying to achieve something in their life, and people who just want to listen to the message.

You might think the latter was just sarcasm. But even if there aren't any people, I think it's a sort of people.

And in actual fact, when writing the first sentence, I actually considered ringing back just to transcribe the message accurately, so it IS possible someone would just want to listen to the message.

If I go on, every sentence needing a sentence to explain it, this'll go on forever. Literally. It's called a Markov chain. Look it up, people. Unless one of the sentences is explained by a previous sentence. Or itself. But being explained by itself isn't really "needing a sentence to explain it". But then, a pre-existing sentence isn't either.

Anyway, there are two sorts of people. Almost all of them actually ARE experiencing a delay. Per se. Qua delay. Ipso facto. Et cetera. A very few of them may NOT be experiencing a delay. But no-one MAY be experiencing a delay. Why pay someone to record a message that is ALWAYS false simply by listening to it?

Why not go the whole hog and say something like "We are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment. This statement is false."? At least that would be an INTERESTING wasteful inanity.

If you don't know whether someone has your name on a computer in front of them or not, is there any polite way to spell it or offer to spell it?

* Trust them to ask if necessary. But then if they do need to write it down they often don't ask and get it wrong.
* Just spell it. This seems pushy, especially if they already know because the phone number, or first two letters, or whatever, is enough to bring up an existing record in their database, or aren't ready to write it down yet.
* Say "Can I spell that for you?" This is what I normally do, and has worked up to now, when someone said no, he was fine. No you're not! I'm sorry, it wasn't my choice, but there's no way of telling the spelling from the pronunciation.
* Say "It's an unusual spelling, if you don't know it already I'll have to spell it for you. I'm sorry this sentence is so long, but I have to explain that I'm not implicitely assuming ignorance on your part,"

Perhaps I should stick with #3. After all, it's reasonable that if someone assumes you can tell them it's unusual. But I have a particularly adverse reaction to people correcting assumptions, it always seems implicitely insulting.

Or go with 4. But it seems too much of a mouthful, that can't be fun for them either.

Mum, what do you do?

Me: *searches orange website for [blah]*
Orange: Please call this number
Me: *beep beep beep beep beep*
Orange: For options which are not available on our website, press 1
Me: *1*
Orange: Please visit our website "Orange.com" for your enquirey. If you're too stupid to know what a website is, [step by step explanation]
Me: GAH! Look I'll IMPLEMENT this function for you. FREE! If I could just use it. But there wasn't a button for that. So I'm in the queye.
Orange: ...move the mouse pointer up to the internet explorer address bar...
Me: Gah.
Orange: Hi!
Me: Hi.
Orange *is surprisingly helpful*
Me: Thank you.

I = me
U = utility company

U: bring, bring
U: I'm sorry, we are experiencing an unprecedented level of demand. Waiting times are likely to be extended. We recommend you call back tomorrow morning.
U: bring, bring
I: Uh, ballpark figure? Ten minutes? An hour? I'd actually be more likely to do it if you could tell me. You must know, you have n calls being serviced, and N waiting, and the average call length t, it's not hard.
U: *annoying hold music*
U: *fade out*
I: *look up hopefully*
U: *good hold music*
I: *look down sadly*
U: *stop mid-song*
I: Aha!
U: *We appreciate you waiting for us.*
U: *more hold music*
U: *fade out*
U: "Good afternoon! I'm Chloe, how can I help you?" is what you'll be hearing shortly (well, not that shortly) if you stay on the line.
U: *excruciating hold music*
I: *click*
I: Fuck.

( Cut for length )