USPS sucks the big one.

Remember how I ranted about UPS failing at customer service? Of course they still do, but now it seems that I basically have no good options when I need something shipped.

It’s like there’s a magic forcefield around my address. First they failed to deliver my parcel because I wasn’t home. Okay, my bad; it was a Saturday, and I was taking a mini-vacation to hang out with fellow heathens, granted. So, I called up the 800 number on the notice and asked for a redelivery. It turns out that this business of “the driver will deign to leave the package at your door depending on his mood at the time” is NOT unique to UPS. So I said, okay, I guess I’ll have to be here to be sure, so I asked them to redeliver the next Saturday.

You know what happened on Saturday?

I sat in my apartment until after 5 PM, waiting for someone to arrive at my door.

Nothing happened. Nobody arrived. Nothing appeared in my mailbox except the latest DVD from Netflix.

Now, during the afternoon in question, I got impatient, called up my local Post Office, and asked what was up. They said my stuff wasn’t on the shelf, so it must have been on the road.

It never transitioned from “the road” to “my address,” so I was feeling pretty rage-addled on early Saturday evening. Since yesterday was a holiday, I couldn’t call up again until today, and found out that it was, once again, on the road. The person who’d picked up the phone couldn’t give me details, but mentioned something about the carrier having been unable to “get in” to something which I will assume is my building, which makes me wonder: how exactly DO they serve people who live in this type of residence?

Anyway, I was cautiously optimistic as of this afternoon that just maybe, this time I’d get my stuff. By now you’re probably giggling at how nuts I am, expecting something different to happen while conditions remain the same, and you’d be right. In my defense, being crazy is a coping mechanism when you have the goddamn Postal Service forcing you to guess at the hoops you’ll need to jump in order to gain access to your (desperately needed*) new clothes.

As of tonight, I have a crisp new notice in my purse (better than nothing, to be honest), which is helpfully marked on the front, “Too Big.” Meaning, I suppose, my parcel is too big to fit in the lockbox with the special key? Yeah. That, I guess. Which means two things: a) I will need to visit the local Post Office tomorrow morning and breathe fire until someone puts my too-big parcel in my hands, and b) I still don’t know what the fuck went wrong on Saturday.

A little digression: the local PO used to be within easy walking distance of my neighborhood, which made it moderately less inconvenient. I still won’t call it convenient, because either way, I’d have to miss at least a couple of hours of work to get in line and claim my stuff at the counter, but the new location is out in the sprawl, and it’s a tricky place to drive into from my direction. This sounds very First World Problems, but the thing is, the new location is within walking distance of far fewer people, it’s not an easy walk for anyone, and it’s bound to be an annoying drive for pretty much everyone. Moreover, the local PO is nowhere near my commute to work, so it delays my workday even longer, and when I am late to work, shit tends to pile up. The ultimate point is that I shouldn’t have to go there at all. There’s a PO near my work for when I need to send packages, and when packages are sent to me, then they should be DELIVERED. If they absolutely MUST have me drive out to Sprawlville to stand in line, then they should fucking tell me so on the first try.

There’s still one way in which USPS doesn’t suck as hard as UPS, which is that they keep stuff at their facility longer. The UPS facility is also a lot farther out of my way than the PO, but if I lived in Laurel, that might not be the case.

Seriously, though. I wanna know what the fuck happened on Saturday.

*I say “desperately needed” because I’m accustomed to having very little disposable income and, consequently, I rarely ever buy new clothes. My wardrobe has the wear and tear to show for my frugality, so this latest purchase isn’t about treating myself, it’s mostly about looking halfway decent at work. I’m doing better now in terms of disposable income, but I still haven’t unlearned my aversion to changing rooms.

“There’s a chicken back there!”

Bwahahaha!

In case you’re wondering, “Mirë” means “good.” “Shumë mirë” means “very good.” Yes, conversations like that are a regular thing over there.

I would merely add, “Ç’do, çun?!” (“Whaddyou want, boy?!”) However, because they apparently did not involve any curmudgeons like me in the making of the video, they have kept it good-humored.

And on that note…

While I’m at it: I still find it rather disturbing that I keep hearing about Snooki’s romantic and reproductive life, too. She can get married, or not, she can have babies, or not, she can be a single mother or married and childless, I don’t care, I just don’t see why it has to be news.

I would like to be able to go places online without hearing about Rush Limbaugh.

This kind of behavior could probably be characterized as a compulsion. He got raked over the coals, and continues to get raked over the coals, for spending three days saying disgusting shit about Sandra Fluke and all other women who would like to have their insurance plans cover contraceptives, so you would think he would quiet down for a little while to give the public a chance to forget about how much he hates successful women. However, he is now spewing ridiculously vitriolic nonsense about Tracie MacMillan on the grounds that she is a young (30something) unmarried white woman who has a BA (I mean, wow!) and is doing well in her career as a journalist. No, seriously, that’s what he says:

What is it with all of these young single white women, overeducated — doesn’t mean intelligent.  For example, Tracie McMillan, the author of this book, seems to be just out of college and already she has been showered with awards, including the 2006 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.  Social justice journalism.  This woman who wrote the book on food inequality, food justice, got an award for social justice journalism.

I think it should be established by now that Rush has some serious issues with women. His mentioning her race in this example is I think not really a sign that he feels any less hostile to women of color who achieve similar success, so much as that she’s yet another white woman who has failed to spend her young adult years having white babies for her white husband. Having a BA makes her “overeducated,” like she should apologize for having gone to school. He goes straight from “overeducated doesn’t mean intelligent” to talking about Ms. McMillan’s success as a journalist. His rant is only about one rung above word salad, so the guy apparently can’t help himself. He sees a smart young woman with professional success and no husband to give her permission, and he runs off at the mouth for millions of people to hear.

With that in mind, I sure hope the sponsors and affiliates continue to run screaming away from him, because his show can only lose so much advertising revenue before it becomes a non-show and Rush Limbaugh no longer has a job. I want him to be out of a job so that I will no longer have to hear about him. I don’t think that he won’t be replaced, or that his successor won’t be equally obnoxious, but the point is that his successor would not be him. I have had more than enough of browsing Facebook and seeing this idiot and his asshattery sprayed all over my feed. This is not a criticism of my friends, it’s just a fact that as long as he has a radio show, he will continue to spray his turds all over the airwaves, and as long as those turds have airtime, I will have to smell them whenever I get online. I would like to be able to look at Facebook, Twitter and Jezebel without getting a daily dose of his latest compulsive misogyny. And it seems that the only way for that to happen is if he is no longer on the air.

UPS fails at customer service. I mean completely, utterly fails.

I’m sure this qualifies as “First World Problems,” but the thing is, I was born in the First World and I don’t really have any usable prospects of living anywhere else. My family is here, my job is here, and accordingly, my residence is here.

My residence is the problem.

We now return to our regularly scheduled snark.

I’m all finished talking about Iggy (or at least I’ve posted all the pictures I ever took of him), and there’s another 5 days until the next Sunday afternoon. Unless you want to see me use this blog as therapy and talk about how I was harassed almost daily by some of the neighborhood kids for more than half of my Peace Corps assignment (and you probably don’t want to hear about that), I’ll just have to go back to making fun of ignorant bigots.

For example, there’s this little nugget on Microaggressions, aka The Daily WTF:

“I hear these Spanish and Oriental kids speaking and I think they must speak English because they go to school and have to communicate with their teachers.”

Oh, for Pete’s sake.

First, there’s the matter of vocabulary. Do we still need to say this, in 2012? RUGS are Oriental, people are ASIAN. And when the perpetrator labels kids s/he obviously doesn’t know as “Spanish,” you should assume that most or all of the youngsters in question are not actually from Spain.

More importantly, this is the kind of complaint one only hears from monolingual Anglophones who’ve never visited another country. The issue is not that the Asian and Latin@ kids in question can’t speak English and therefore are not integrating into American society. The issue is that they can sometimes be heard speaking languages other than English.

It must be so, so difficult, to have to live in a country that allows people from non-Anglophone countries to immigrate and doesn’t force them to give up their native tongues altogether. It must be so uncomfortable to hear young people saying things you don’t understand, and demonstrating abilities that you don’t have. (I mean, they speak more than one language. Scary.) It must be so confusing to be reminded that other countries with other languages exist, and that people do not always stay where they were born.

How dare they.

 

By all means, poke the fuming Monster with sticks.

“Patience is a virtue” can roughly be translated as “You should be SMILING when someone else’s stupidity is wasting your time!”

Fuck this “patience” bullshit. The problem is not with the person who is visibly (though not vocally) annoyed about a needless delay caused by someone else’s obliviousness. The problem is with the obliviousness. Either get out of the way or don’t make it any worse.

 

Bad, bad Monster

Every time I see a mention of Crazy-Eyes Bachmann spouting off about this, the first thing that comes to my mind is: “Oh, does that explain her?”

Which is a pretty awful way to think, because I’m sure no decent mentally disabled person would ever want to be compared to her.

 

Classist, hostile control freak lectures stepson’s fiance on good manners.

As much as I lecture here on etiquette, I think it’s important to remember that behind every rule of good manners there should be some connection to the real world, and when the times change enough that those connections no longer apply, then the etiquette point in question needs to be reconsidered. The purpose of good manners is ultimately to make other people comfortable. If you’re using “manners” to make someone feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, then you’re doing it wrong.

There’s a post on Jezebel today about an email (which may or may not be real) that a British woman received from her fiance’s step-mother, and, assuming it’s real, it is a fascinating display of how proper etiquette is so easily abused. There are a lot of comments on the article saying, “Well, her tone is out of line, but it’s good advice she’s giving and the daughter-in-law-to-be is obviously very rude and needs to learn some things.” This is assuming that the recipient really is as obnoxious and ill-intentioned as the letter makes her out to be, and I would argue that the letter writer exhibits an attitude that begs a critical view.

Now, maybe this is just a culture that I don’t sufficiently understand. After all, I’m a metropolitan mid-Atlantic American; we’re not sufficiently concerned with manners for the South, and not sufficiently concerned with gentility for the North, and we’ve long since lost our British ancestors’ sense of propriety. Meanwhile I’ve been spoiled by the Albanian sense of hospitality, and I will tell you what, there are parts of that culture that make me tear my hair out, but they make a genuine effort to make their guests feel welcome and comfortable. I guess that’s a gene that’s been repeatedly reinforced in the Albanian population but conspicuously absent from some parts of the British upper crust.

So, let’s go over this sucker point by point. Weapons-grade sarcasm ahead!

It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.

Incorrectly spelled idioms

Man, I just stopped reading in the middle of what was probably a very decent blog post on the recent anti-immigration law in Alabama when the author used the phrase “by in large.”

I’m sure it’s a mark of irrational bigotry on my part that I react so badly to spelling/grammar errors, but, fuck it, I’m letting my freak flag fly. Especially since the blog post in question was posted on a social network for writers. We should know better.

The phrase is “by and large.”

“By in large” makes no sense.

And don’t even get me started on using “of” in place of have. Perpetrators of would of/could of/should of, I am glaring unpleasantly in your direction.