Worse, I still have a Facebook account. And lately, it seems everyone has been adjusting their profile pics to old pictures, and so I figured I’d play along. And then I decided I enjoyed the picture so much I’d put it up here.

I’m a year or two older than Torsten in this (badly scanned, and not by me – it’s not my original) picture, but for the first time, I can totally see he’s my kid.

This’ll have to tide you Torsten fans over until I get time to put up birthday, Christmas, and all sorts of other pictures. Just think of it as Torsten with dark hair. And a dress. And mouse ears.

Christmas, 197*. (Hint: whatever year it is, it means I'm old...)

The problem is that because a lot of businesses only ship with them, they’re often the only game in town (because they’re cheap), so it’s not as if anyone has a choice in terms of using them most of the time.

I certainly never chose to ship with UPS when I had other alternatives. Your mileage may vary of course, but in recent years, my experiences with UPS were not good. Don’t get me wrong – some individual delivery drivers have been kind and helpful and diligent, and it is a shame that what I generally presume to be a bad customer service model (rather than individual drivers) means that there’s more focus on the substantial negatives people experience than the people who do a good job. That’s unfortunately the way of the world.

Buuuuuuuuut…

A gentleman referring to himself as “Mr. Big” (overcompensate much, dear?) from Florida (specifically, 76.108.125.137 , which resolves to a dynamic Comcast IP (c-76-108-125-137.hsd1.fl.comcast.net) - West Palm Beach, perhaps?) chose to demonstrate how classy some of UPS’s employees really are by leaving me the following message this morning:

you people are idiots,, please dont use ups,bunch of retards,,first off unless you live in complete filth in the ghetto , or THE SHIPPER PAID TO MAKE SURE WE DONT LEAVE THE PACKAGE WITHOUT A SIGNATURE then you are outta luck,we cant leaveit,, the last thing we want to do is go back to the same stop the next day, as for the sea cow that said ‘ oh,, thats terrible the driver would not bring the package up for the pregnant woman” boo hoo,, we have on average about 190 stops a day and everyone we deal with has a bad back, is crippled,, old,, pregnant, retarded, some reason why they want us to do more than we are paid for…jerks,,, ups has been around 100 yrs and is still payin its employees well and makin a ton of money….HA HA HA

Hmmmm. So UPS, is this the public face you want to display?

Complain about UPS on the Internet, get told you’re a a retard, and a jerk, a sea cow for sympathizing with a pregnant woman,  and get (really, so eloquently) informed that UPS has been around forever, is making loads of money, and you, the customer, can suck it?

My personal suspicion, given the number of hits I get for UPS sucking in various forms, is that businesses that use their model of making customer service effectively unavailable (and having a standard set of falsehoods used as a delay tactic for angry customers) which don’t also provide reasonable service to their customers will eventually collapse under their own weight, though it may take a while. If you’re the only game in town by virtue of being the cheap choice of online retailers, it takes a while for customers to decide to pay for more expensive options or to simply stop using particular services until they start offering multiple shipping options. When we still lived in the US, I often opted for 2-day FedEx, USPS or DHL when it was offered, even if it was more expensive, to avoid having anything important go via UPS. I wanted to ensure I actually got what I asked for when it was supposed to come and didn’t waste multiple days waiting for it or find it stolen (by the way, “Mr. Big”, I didn’t live in the ghetto – I lived in a city. Cities are densely populated and not all people are scrupulous, as you surely know from *ahem* personal experience). If companies like UPS continue to go for increased profit margins at the expense of actually providing the service they’re paid to provide (delivering when they say they will deliver, not lying about having tried to deliver it afterwards, etc.), they will eventually run into problems, though I do suppose the lesson of the U.S. economy in the new millenium is that you can lie for a damned long time – at least long enough to run off with the profits, leaving employees like our friend here screwed.

Anyway, I should state, for the record, that I didn’t post this because I’m somehow upset by it – I’m actually amused.

Especially since Mr. Big — whose charming (and certainly fake) email address was, incidentally, entered as “slapyousideways@yahoo.com” — got here by searching for the following phrase: “why working for UPS sucks”.

UPS, you may want to have a chat with some of your Floridian employees about 1) how not to represent your company, and 2) how to be less stupid on the Internet.

Just sayin’…

(1.14.2010 – and it appears we have another winner on the employee list. Of course, it could be the same dude coming through a Tor server (don’t think I didn’t see that), but if not, welcome, “bossman” from somewhere near Valencia, CA… you’re the next contestant on the Circle of Jerks ™! – pun intended.)

Will this be an open casket concert?

Um… yeah. That would be all kinds of awesome, but…

I’ve said several times before that the search terms that provide me with hits cause me near-endless amusement, and it occurred to me that I might as well provide these poor lost souls with what they’re looking for (or, more likely, smartassed responses to it) since they bothered to come visit my humble little blog. I forewarn you, though – very little of this will be useful.

And so I bring you the first installment of:

Ask GoogledKrista – for when The Google ™ just doesn’t cut it

(More fun than Dear Abby on a stick!)

Query #1: “what does it mean when a guy is ‘almost caught up’”

Response: Probably that he’ll be fired or dead by morning.

Query #2: “sarah palin foot fetish”

Response: Um, ok, wow. You have no idea how many hits I get from this one. Seriously. I suspect there’s some Internet site somewhere that… ewww. Never mind.

I realize it’s my fault for the title I used in a post about Sarah Palin putting her foot in her mouth all the time, but, um, really?

Sarah Palin?

And do you have a foot fetish and just have a thing for her feet, or are you hoping she has a foot fetish? In any event, could you guys please go look somewhere else? (Yes, I realize I’ve just ensured more hits by responding to this, but it’s just so darned funny to me…)

I should add that this is a bipartisan issue – I get just as many hits for “Hillary Clinton foot fetish”, and I know I’ve never mentioned that one… If I start getting hits for “John McCain foot fetish” or “Barack Obama foot fetish”, you can refer to me as officially creeped out.

Query #3: “why won’t my baby let me sleep?”

Response: I’ll give you the answer my buddy LaQuisha gave me when I asked a similar question: because he is a baby and he can do anything he wants.

Query #4: “geek girls Finland”

Response: Apparently, some Italian person is looking for the Geek Girls of Finland. (Apparently, they do not have their own calendar yet.) While I have no help for you, I applaud you in your efforts to appreciate Geek Girls as they most certainly deserve to be appreciated. And if any of my Finnish friends give me any latebreaking info on this topic, I’ll be sure to follow up.

Query #5: “barry manilow looks like papa smurf”

Response: Hmmm.

Nope.

Not seeing it.

Query #6: “my husband is evil”

Response: So is mine. Professionally so.

Actually, to be serious, he isn’t. I get this query a lot, and it makes me sad.

All joking aside, if your husband is actually evil – as in hits you or emotionally abuses you, you need to get out. Seriously. Right now.

My husband is a nice man who I call “evil” because he’s got a particularly wicked sense of humor. He’s not the other sort of evil at all. I’m sorry, but you won’t find any tales of bad men (as relate to my husband, anyway) here.

But if yours is actually evil, seriously… get out while you can.

Query #7: “week 5 pregnancy period hacks”

Response: I hope this did not come from one of the Geek Girls of Finland.

Here’s the thing… being a geek girl is a good thing, but you need to understand that getting pregnant doesn’t exactly count as an anti-menstruation “hack”, and if you really see it that way, you need to put the K & R down and go outside.

(As hacks go, this one has some fairly irreversible side effects… )

Query #8: “baby smiles at not moving ceiling fan”

Response: Totally normal. Torsten only recently became less obsessed with the ceiling fan, but he’s been staring at it since he came home, which totally freaked me out because I’d read some stupid article on autism where a mother said she knew there was something wrong with her baby when he came home from the hospital and was obsessed with staring at the ceiling fan. Took me a good while to find out that no, lots of kids from very little like ceiling fans. When they’re still, it’s the pattern of the blades. Moving, it’s, well, the movement.

So enjoy the smiles.

Query #9: “celta lesson planning cheat”

Response: Oooo, now this one makes me mad. Almost as mad as undergrads who try to send me computer security homework as “interested questions” after reading my web page.

Ok… for those who don’t know, the CELTA is the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults issued by Cambridge, and getting one is intense and quite tough. Working on getting one is about the only thing you’ll do for a month if you do it full time. I got one last year, and it just about did me in. It’s a lot of work, and lesson planning is a huge part of how you’re evaluated.

So, um, to Mr./Ms. Future Cheater… You have barked up the wrong tree.

You have some nerve. You should be ashamed. Also, you do know I have your IP address, don’t you?

Query #10: “when you see it you get no sleep”

Response: Try querying Rush Limbaugh spandex.

I’ll try to collect some better ones next time I try this – I just sort of poked at some of the random queries in my logs for fun this afternoon.

Tune in next time, when hopefully I won’t have another instance of “krista fetish” to respond to.

And now… to do real work!

(Manilow photo by Matt Becker – used under CC Attribution 3.0 license. The Papa Smurf image is from Wikipedia and is used under U.S. copyright fair use provisions.)

So when Spaf posted this the other day, I just knew I had to steal it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf1y9s73Nos

I always did have a bit of a crush on Michael Palin, but he really would make a much better VP

Attention Dr. Rod, whose last name I will not use for privacy’s sake:

Do you remember what the Internet is for?

I never got to find out in L.A. or Vegas, but by pure accident, tonight, here in London, I will finally know the answer.

Sorry not to be able to share the good times with old friends (So instead I try to make you wildly jealous – I know, I know… Don’t worry, I’ll be punished by having that song in my head for another year, which is actually a blessing, since after touring Westminster yesterday I had Monty Python’s “Oliver Cromwell” (Ollllliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (and his warts) etc etc…) stuck in my head all night, but anyway…)

Sooooo psyched!

And now, off for my poor feet’s last day of turbo-touring/research!

Reading RSS feeds this morning, this one came up with a lot of my friends, so I just had to try it. Hey, you try waking up at 3:30 am on your first baby-free night (as in the baby is nowhere near me, not as in I don’t have responsibility for the baby) in more than eight months. You’d do weird things too…

I’m not looking for a new husband, especially not a fictional one, but if I were…

Your result for The Harry Potter Husband Test…

Mrs. Bill Weasley

Your perfect HP man is Bill Weasley.

Take The Harry Potter Husband Test at HelloQuizzy

Christian this morning, not tongue-in-cheek, after a week of WiFi access every day, almost all day: Hah, yeah right, satellite WiFi on the ship…

Posted from the Silja Tallink Line M/S Galaxy (which is very smelly), somewhere in an archipelago between Turku, Finland, and Stockholm, Sweden, and most definitely on the water.

I

WIN

!!!!!!!

ETA: Google thinks I’m Estonian. Hilarious.