PhobosAnomaly

I’m unlucky enough to be in junior management… and that sounds to me like the manager or supervisor has the breaking strength of a melted fucking KitKat.

Sure, they’ve made a problem go away, but they’ve emboldened the arsehole to pull this stunt in the future, and it has done untold damage to the self esteem and mental health of the poor airport spud who was doing their job just fine.

From a personal perspective: if I was a passenger on that plane and we were delayed because some arsepiece threw a hissy fit at the gate, I’d be fuming that the airline caved too.

It’s gash. Fuck that guy, but fuck that supervisor too. They literally had the grounds to fuck that guy right off and enjoy every second of it, but they buckled and became part of the problem.

I went to Tesco (a large (perhaps too large ((brackets)) grocery retailer in the UK) a while back with some raspberries that hadn’t even lasted until I got home before going mouldy.

Literally, all I wanted to do was show the customer service desk lass the issue, show them my receipt, get a replacement, and fuck off to make the interaction as easy as possible for them.

An honest appraisal of what the problem was; some witty banter; and a general understanding of the “don’t be a dickhead” principle to frontline staff meant that she kept hold of me for ten minutes, noted down details and times and whatnot, and it ended up with a £10 apology gift card in the post - which in turn purchased a rather nice bottle of wine.

Where I’m going with this: I cannot fathom how people cannot be polite about issues like this. I’ve never understood how being a wanker to someone whose job it is to sort issues out somehow nets you a better end result. Perhaps the best advice I’m going to give my kids is to spend six months or a year of their teenage starts to their careers in an inbound call centre in a field they’re interested in - yes the job can grind you down and yes the pay sucks, but the basic life skills and soft people skills it teaches you is fucking invaluable.

tl;dr: solid advice, ask nicely, don’t be a twat, and you’ll probably end up with a net result better than you started.

I got into Poets of the Fall in a big way after Late Goodbye. Their work is fantastic and they’re brilliant live.

I’m glad Remedy have stuck with them over the years, the Herald of Darkness song from Alan Wake II was a banger.

The first major story where I thought “oh noes” was the Canary Wharf bombing in 1996ish. It was the first time I’d ever seen a “we interrupt this broadcast…” moment and it was so out of the ordinary that it sticks in my mind.

9/11 was a wild ride too. Getting home from school and my old man - who never watched the news - had Sky News on. At that point, the replays seemed… incredible, in the most literal sense of the word.

many

That line break is unfortunate.

I’ve had many an “ass apocalypse” in slow time after a dodgy kebab. They were anything but boring, however.

Outstanding. It’s like picking stuff like November Rain and Free Bird to make the most of your money.

In a similar vein, one of my old haunts had a jukey, but the button under the bar to skip tracks was fucked. So, we’d get towards the end of our drinks, put two quid in the jukey, pick two decent songs to give us six or seven minutes to finish our drinks, then queue up a load of Christmas songs… in June.

We’d drink up, fuck off, and sit smugly in the next pub knowing there was half hour of Mariah Carey & co. blaring out at the previous pub which couldn’t be skipped. Good times.

Oh that sucks. I bought a multi pack of bin bags (or trash liner or whatever they’re called across the pond). I’ve used the company for years because the bag material is fairly thick, and it doesn’t just perish away if any liquids sit at the bottom. Decent quality.

This batch though must have been produced when the machine that seals the bottom and perforates it 5mm below the seal, must have been needing a service. The perforations looked like faint dents in the plasticy material, which meant that when you tried to rip a bag off the roll, it just stretched the plastic rather than tear off cleanly along the dotted line of perforations. It meant that rather than just fucking one bag up, it often pulled across the seam of the next one, making two bags useless.

The whole multipack was fucked and it was infuriating. I can only imagine the machine’s perforating teeth were blunt as fuck.

Little things.

Funnily enough, I got an email from MS plugging their Copilot shit.

I don’t give a fuck about what I’m subscribed to, I give a fuck about the link to unsubscribe from it.

I don’t know, can you??

…and other great 90s teacher questions!

95 was an innovator if anything, ahead of pretty much anything else on desktop at the time, even if it DID fart and die whenever someone looked at it funny.

com/com 😂

nice

Specifically, process niceness - a very basic view is how “nice” a process is at handing over control to the CPU scheduler when asked to.

It’s a similar situation as when your mam (the scheduler) tells you to give up the SNES (the process) because you (the CPU) need to do the homework (another process), the dishwasher (another process) and the bins (another process) - but the SNES is saying “just thirty more seconds bro, and the boss will be done”.

edit: in context, these function keys manually force the niceness value up or down, determining whether the process allows you to finish the boss and give up the CPU at a more appropriate time, or whether the scheduler is like “nah absolutely not, homework, now”.

edit edit: my assumption is that this is a process manager app anyway, else the rest of the above is bollocks

Awesome. I miss the raised numerals on the front of the card.

I don’t think there is in terms of process, I think payment handlers just add a higher charge for processing credit card payments, which is why stingy retailers dislike them.

I’m happy to be corrected though.

Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear.

I’m assuming the 16 digit card number, start and expiry dates, and CVV are printed on the reverse - whereas it used to only have the CVV on the reverse and the rest of the details on the front.

What’s stopping someone with a picture of the rear of the card visiting an online retailer and going wild with a picture of just one side of the card these days - aside from multi-factor authentication at the point of authorising the payment?

Absolutely spot on, thank you - always handy to know.

I’m wondering what it does to mitigate the “card not present” fraud though, for online purchases or remote purchases?

As entertaining as that is, it does raise the question - why do they put all of the details on the back now?

I thought one of the main reasons that the CVV was on the signature strip was so if a card was photocopied, photographed, or carbon copied (literally on carbon paper), then it was still less possible to clone the card.

Is “physical” cloning so small of a problem now that it’s more beneficial to make fancy looking cards? Anyone in the industry able to shine a light?

Reminds me of the mid2000’s era of British journalist Gary Cutlack trying to post every instance of a spiral in the real world, linking it to the upcoming announcement of a Dreamcast 2.

I miss that sort of journalism.

Purely a subjective opinion (and I apologise if the artist shows up in this thread) but is it me or does it look like the person who made the background took a step back after it was done, marvelled at how pretty it was, and enjoyed the moment before thinking “…fuck I forgot about O’Brien”?

It’s a great bit of artwork but poor Miles looks like an afterthought!