{"id":1903,"date":"2009-10-07T04:08:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T04:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/07\/2009-10-7-american-business-is-eating-itself-exhibits-1-2-html\/"},"modified":"2009-10-07T04:08:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-07T04:08:00","slug":"2009-10-7-american-business-is-eating-itself-exhibits-1-2-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/2009-10-7-american-business-is-eating-itself-exhibits-1-2-html\/","title":{"rendered":"American Business Is Eating Itself: Exhibits 1 & 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"Middle<\/a>
Friends,<\/p>\n

Today I arrived at work and found that the niggling negligible nabobs of network negativity had decided that the company’s web filters needed to block bobtherieau.com<\/a> as a “Personal or Social Networking” site. Under this logic, isn’t every site personal? Doesn’t somebody own or operate everything? Isn’t whitehouse.gov<\/a> a personal site? You know, if you think about it. It’s certainly become a social networking site, hasn’t it? But I digress.<\/p>\n

I have theories, of course, about why this stifling of admittedly stale content has occurred. Either my cohorts in the IT Department thought it would be a laugh. Maybe they’re trying to be “fair” and block everybody’s personal site equally. As far as I know, that number equals zero, plus one. The final exciting supposition is that I’ve finally been noticed by the pinhead websurfers at Websense, Inc. LLC. WTF. F-U. Maybe I really am somebody! (to be blocked. -ed<\/i> Yeah, that.) As always, crackpot theories are welcome in the comments.<\/p>\n

\"Welcome<\/a>In other brain-dead idiocy news, I spent some quality time at a Verizon Wireless store to get a phone fixed today. Monica immediately threw open the battery cover and condemned the phone as wet, out of warranty, and not replaceable. Oh, unless I’d like to pay $300 for a similar phone (not a replacement, which I found a curious distinction) or enter into a new two-year contract on behalf of the company for a free-ish new phone. It was at this point where I mentioned that she might as well be speaking Mandarin while I could only understand Cantonese. She’s surely writing about this exchange on her Myspace page right now, mentioning that I’m the biggest jackass in the history of her limited contact with humans.<\/p>\n

Her third option was to bring an old Verizon phone in and have the service transferred for free. This, being cheaper than $300 by about $300, I bit and rushed back to the office to retrieve some old clunker.<\/p>\n

On my return, one of the store managers took my case. He cloned the phone giving trouble, then tried “one more thing,” and fixed it. For free. That’s it. Ms. Wage Slave’s answers involved money for Verizon. The manager spent his time with customer service. It seems to me that if people aren’t persistent, they’re gonna end up with a much lighter wallet when the walk out of that place. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest some training for all of their staff.<\/p>\n

Yeah, it’s nutso.<\/p>\n

– bob<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friends, Today I arrived at work and found that the niggling negligible nabobs of network negativity had decided that the company’s web filters needed to block bobtherieau.com as a “Personal or Social Networking” site. Under this logic, isn’t every site personal? Doesn’t somebody own or operate everything? Isn’t whitehouse.gov a personal site? You know, if … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “American Business Is Eating Itself: Exhibits 1 & 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,39],"class_list":["post-1903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-punditry","tag-this-day-in-nonsense"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bobtherieau.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}