Both of my phones have been going on the fritz lately. The one with the answering machine in the kitchen now radiates a bizarre buzzing sound that renders all incoming messages so garbled that they sound like something spat out of an Enigma encoder. My secondary phone in the office also refuses to recharge handsets placed on the base station – no doubt in a sign of solidarity with the kitchen phone’s obvious strike tactics. They haven’t yet changed their ringtones to “We are the Union, The Mighty Mighty Union” but I expect that to happen any day now. Obviously my only recourse was to replace them with cheap, non-union labor.
So among the many purchases made at Target on Thursday was a new two-handset phone that will hopefully serve me well for a year or three before it too breaks and needs to get replaced. My post-college life has been a parade of cordless phone after cordless phone, with each one lasting about 18-24 months before something goes wrong and it needs to get replaced. It doesn’t matter how much I spend or what brand I buy (believe me, I’ve tried all of them) so now I just shoot for the cheapest one available at the GHz range I’m looking for. This time I’m trying the 5.8GHz range, because I think my new neighbors downstairs have some sort of white noise transmitter that is creating all the static on my current phones. Obviously, they are spies for Al-Qaeda.
Naturally, once I returned home I looked up the phone I purchased on a bunch of “Hey Consumer, Bitch Here” websites. These sites exist for no other reason than to give joe shmoe the feeling of empowerment from being an “expert” in something. Whether it’s Amazon.com and its “top 100 reviewers” or anyone at all on epinions.com, there is a movement sweeping the nation to make people feel more important than they really are. Bitch about a crappy product in person and you’re a whiner, but if you do it online then you’re "a critic". My favorite part about it is the feedback option these sites give me, where I can indicate whether I “found a review helpful”. So not only can I review the product, but I can also review other reviewers? Oh boy! Sign me up for more of that!*
Sheesh, no wonder the country is obsessing so much about developing new ways to avoid changing the toilet paper roll. Friends, people have completely lost all perspective. Hopefully bird flu will take care of all this, wouldn’t it be nice if this mutation we’ve all been hearing about made it so that the virus only infected the terminally stupid?
* In case you were wondering, my new phone apparently "sux big time". Oh well, it won't matter it'll still only last 18-24 months.
So among the many purchases made at Target on Thursday was a new two-handset phone that will hopefully serve me well for a year or three before it too breaks and needs to get replaced. My post-college life has been a parade of cordless phone after cordless phone, with each one lasting about 18-24 months before something goes wrong and it needs to get replaced. It doesn’t matter how much I spend or what brand I buy (believe me, I’ve tried all of them) so now I just shoot for the cheapest one available at the GHz range I’m looking for. This time I’m trying the 5.8GHz range, because I think my new neighbors downstairs have some sort of white noise transmitter that is creating all the static on my current phones. Obviously, they are spies for Al-Qaeda.
Naturally, once I returned home I looked up the phone I purchased on a bunch of “Hey Consumer, Bitch Here” websites. These sites exist for no other reason than to give joe shmoe the feeling of empowerment from being an “expert” in something. Whether it’s Amazon.com and its “top 100 reviewers” or anyone at all on epinions.com, there is a movement sweeping the nation to make people feel more important than they really are. Bitch about a crappy product in person and you’re a whiner, but if you do it online then you’re "a critic". My favorite part about it is the feedback option these sites give me, where I can indicate whether I “found a review helpful”. So not only can I review the product, but I can also review other reviewers? Oh boy! Sign me up for more of that!*
Sheesh, no wonder the country is obsessing so much about developing new ways to avoid changing the toilet paper roll. Friends, people have completely lost all perspective. Hopefully bird flu will take care of all this, wouldn’t it be nice if this mutation we’ve all been hearing about made it so that the virus only infected the terminally stupid?
* In case you were wondering, my new phone apparently "sux big time". Oh well, it won't matter it'll still only last 18-24 months.
Comments
Maybe the wiretaps are interfering with your signal.
NPR STOP WASTING MY TIME WITH YOUR FILLER PIECES ON HOW JOE CITIZEN FEELS ABOUT ANYTHING!!!!!
I am a human and these stories are not interesting; therefore they cannot be human interest stories.