It's things like this Ask Metafilter thread that make me pessimistic about humanity as a whole.

I have to ask myself how I would react in this woman's place, if somebody was giving me grief for closing a frigging bus window as they're exiting the bus.

The first time it happened, I would just sit back down with my ears burning. My brain shuts down when confronted with overwhelming pettiness/small-minded behavior/incompetence; I know this from past customer service experience. I don't have the gene that gives me the ability to verbally smack customer service reps around when they don't listen to the problem I'm trying to explain, or start stonewalling me. I'm the type who sputters and fumes, and gives up.

My two personal, notable exceptions are the time I yelled at a past pointy-haired boss in front of my entire department over a promised-but-undelivered raise, and the time I started shouting at the DMV clerk after some last-straw in the protracted battle to get my permanent California license. So I guess at the far side of that angry mental white-out is a point where things come back into focus, and I am able to get my point across. But I have to be really pissed off to get to that point, and the clarity seems to come at the expense of the ability to modulate my voice.

I think the bus situation would reach that point eventually. Rather than try to engage them in a battle of insults, I would ask the two ladies what is really on my mind:

"What is your fscking problem?"

I would really want to know, and in the pursuit of a straight answer I would probably be able to deflect the verbal jabs such a question would provoke.

Even now, though, just thinking about this complete stranger's little urban drama has me in mental shut-down mode. How much mental energy is humanity as a whole wasting on petty nonsense like this every minute of every day? The mind boggles.

Cottage
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Flickr hit 100,000,000 photos today.

The first photo I uploaded in early August of 2004 was number 273,481. A (relatively) low number like that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, kind of like having Blogger cred. (Even if I didn't actually start using Flickr in earnest until March of last year, when I won my Gold Star GF-85.)

Old Orchard Beach
Originally uploaded by stagewhisper.

We escaped today's blizzard with only a few inches of snow, but this photo does have me a bit wistful for summer in Maine.
Tagged:

• maine
• summer
• photo
• oldorchard
• beach

Ray Bradbury has written an opinion piece in the L.A. Times, saying that the solution to L.A.'s traffic problem is to put up a Monorail system.

Incredibly, a company offered to do so for free in the 1960's; they would have recouped the construction cost by operating the system and collecting tolls. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors turned them down. Granted, the L.A. freeway system probably still worked pretty well in the 1960's, but wouldn't you like to climb into a time machine, grab each of those board members by the collar, and shake vigorously while shouting WHAT... WERE YOU... THINKING!?

People are often surprised to hear that L.A. does have a subway. I rode it a few times from the valley to Hollywood, and to downtown Los Angeles. It was fast and efficient, and there was nobody on it. I'm sure there are a lot more passengers during the morning and evening commutes, but the larger problem is that the L.A. Metro just doesn't go anywhere; there are two stops in the valley, but unless you live within a couple of miles of those it's going to take you at least half an hour just to drive to the subway station. I'm less familiar with the other lines, but generally they all follow major street routes across the city; there are no branches that would make it a useful way to commute for anybody who doesn't live right near those main arteries.

There's also the fact that there's a certain segment of the population, the one that gives L.A. its well-deserved flaky reputation, who would never lower themselves to get out of their luxury SUVs and ride public transportation with the unwashed masses; if you ride the subway nobody can see what an expensive car you have, and having an expensive car (and having people see you in it) is well worth spending two hours in traffic on your way to and from work.

Plus, I'm sure the road construction companies would spread all sorts of stories about how the monorail projects in Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook went.

The signal to noise ratio has gotten lower every year since I started visiting Slashdot almost 7 years ago, but every once in a while there will be an interesting topic that garners some great comments, like "Does Company-wide Language 'Standardization' work?"

Which garnered this comment and follow-up:

Standardize on Hindi~

(Score:5, Funny)

by colin_n (50370) on Thursday February 09, @12:42AM (#14675334)
(http://www.pintmaster.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 24, @01:35PM)

Your company should standardize around Hindi - the new programming language in India - It is an extremely natural language - you write down your requirements in English (even on paper), send it via e-mail / snail mail to a supercomputer called "India", the "India" machine turns it into Hindi and feeds the information to a cluster of other India machines, known as "Indians" and then these "Indians" break it down into functions, write the code, put it back together, compile and send you the binary - you wont have to worry about what language they code it in!

[ Reply to This ]

Re:Standardize on Hindi~

(Score:5, Funny)

by strider44 (650833) on Thursday February 09, @01:51AM (#14675520)

Is the binary Big Indian or Little Indian?

Tagged:

• slashdot
• nerdhumour