So, I was reading my e-mail today, thinking about giving JW a shout out, when out of the corner of my eye, I spied an ad that caught my interest. It was advertising a three generation mother, daughter, granddaughter necklace. Now, since my mother's birthday is coming up and since I have no gift yet, I clicked away. Maybe, I thought, this would be just the thing.
I am a particularly good catch for advertisers. I'm a sucker. I buy things I don't need or have money for. So does my husband. Among his 12 Stepping, he counts Debtors Anonymous meetings, where he is currently busy admitting his powerlessness over money. Creditors hate us, but advertisers? They really, really love us.
So, good for you lifesendlesscircle.com. That ad worked! You got me, a perfect target customer, to click through and look at your product. Yay! Ad budget well spent for you. And I even liked the necklace; it was pretty. But what was that I saw at the bottom of the page? A link? You also sell earrings in the same design? Why that would be even better! I clicked it. Oh, no you didn't, people! The link didn't work: 404 not found. That's ok, I clicked "Products" instead. There were the earrings. I clicked on them for more information; after all, maybe it was just the one link that was broken. Nope: 404 not found. Well, whatever. At least I saw some kind of picture. Now how do I buy those suckers, and can you ship them in time for Mom's birthday?
That was when I saw the "Locate a Store" link. Oh, if there is anything that pisses me off more than the dreaded "404 not found" error, it is companies who advertise online but only sell through brick and mortar stores. Come on. That is so 20th century! But, desperate to give this lame ass company my own hard earned blogging ad revenues, I gave it one last valiant effort. Maybe if I clicked through to one of their distributors, the distributor would have a fucking online store where I could get a pair of earrings Fed Exed to me in time for Mom's birthday. So, I took a deep breath and selected my state from the drop down menu to find a retailer near me. And nothing happened. Nothing! No message letting me know there are no retailers in my state. Just nothing. That same stupid web page just sat there, mocking me with it's lack of movement; laughing at my inability to give it money.
So, retailer dudes, let me give you a clue, as someone who has been putting together web sites and shopping online since the dawn of the fucking Internet: before you go throwing money at Google to get them to post your ads enticingly (and effectively!) within my Gmail inbox, check your fucking links and test your site on different browsers! And since you're too stupid to know you should do this, I'm assuming you're too stupid to check your own fucking code, so let me give you another clue: there are software programs that will even do this for you! Damn. Until then, have fun watching your money slip away and your business fail.
Showing posts with label are you stupid?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label are you stupid?. Show all posts
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Monday, October 1, 2007
Shalom from Crazyland
So my cousin and her husband are crazy-ass super-Republicans. A while back, they announce to the family that they are taking a vacation to
She would say things like "It's very exciting to be fighting for the good guys." You are not fighting. You are a war tourist. You do not know enough about this to know who the good guys and bad guys are. I don’t know enough either, but I’m not taking my ignorant American self over to the desert and inserting myself into other people’s wars.
She would also talk about how she couldn’t tell us where they were, then talk about how they were taking lots of pictures to show us when they got home. Way to maintain security there!
Then there was the food. She constantly complained about the food, like how there was no milk and how there were olives served as a side dish at every meal. She would follow these complaints with comments like “I’m going to be so mad if I don't lose weight on this trip." Good to see you have your priorities in order there.
She would describe the people she met on this trip as things like "nice, but very Jewish". No shit? I mean, who did you think you were going to meet on this trip to
Why Don't I Just Take Over the Class?
If there's really not enough venom and cursing here to qualify for a true Cunt Face post, it's because it is cross-posted from my own blog, so I'm cheating. It is full of sarcasm and bitterness though!
Few things in life irritate me more than dealing with my son's school. My son is autistic and spends most of each day in a special ed classroom, where he (theoretically) receives instruction that is tailored to his individual needs. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will recall that I was seriously pissed off at the end of the last school year. I was fed up and livid and cursing in all caps (oh, and there will be just a little more of that today), because I spent all of last year fighting with the school district to get them to bring in additional (legally mandated) resources to address a problem that was interfering with my son's learning. They did nothing but stall, accuse me of being difficult and tell me that, in spite of my son's declining performance, the best people to address the problem were the classroom teachers under whom his performance was declining. Oh, no wait. How silly of me! I forgot. They actually did propose adding one additional resource to the classroom: me, as a free aide.
After a summer filled with down time, and work with one of the world's great amateur behaviorists and OTs (yes, me), my son and I worked out a solution to his problem. He started the school year and has made rapid progress in his former problem area, to the point where he no longer requires assistance. Thanks for nothing, school district.
Of course, a new problem has cropped up in a different subject. I received a note last week from his teacher stating that she was sending his classroom work home for me to finish with him, as he had not been doing his work but had been "fooling around" and "wasting time." I (very calmly) wrote back and said I'd be happy to help him at home, but shouldn't we, oh, I don't know, find out why he wasn't doing his work in class and figure out how to address it? She wrote back and very tersely said that any suggestions would be appreciated.
What?! Um, unless I'm mistaken, she's the teacher. She's the one with the degree. She's the one with the actual training in working with kids with special needs. She's the one whose job it is to figure out how to engage kids in learning and how to ensure that they behave themselves in class. Oh, and lest you say she's overworked and underpaid (which she is). She's also the one who was such a big expert, so perfectly capable of handling my son's needs herself, that she adamantly and repeatedly stated that she didn't need or want to bring in an outside specialist to help her with my son last year. But my unpaid, inexpert labor, under her direction, is, of course, always welcome.
So, I sat down with my son for 10 minutes, quickly determined what particular obsessions were preventing him from doing the work, thought up several ways in which we could break the task down into more manageable components for him and got him to finish the work. I wrote the teacher a note with my suggestions on getting him to complete the work in the classroom, put the completed work in his backpack and haven't heard back from her since. And to top it all off, that important classroom work we did hasn't been removed from his backpack all week; each day, it comes back home to me a little more crumpled and worse for wear, because nobody has bothered to take it out and look at it.
This year, I am going to try something new. I am done with threatening to sue. I am done with going into debt to pay for representation to force the school district to bring in someone with even more "expertise" to help in the classroom. From now on, I'm going to be a bitch in a new way. I'm going to tell the teachers how to do their jobs. I'm going to teach them all the amateur OT and behavioral techniques I've painstakingly learned through the last six years. I'm going to share the knowledge and share the wealth and maybe, just maybe, one day they'll be able to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS! If not, I'll at least have saved some money, stayed out of blood pressure raising IEP meetings and ended up no worse off in terms of the education my son is receiving.
Few things in life irritate me more than dealing with my son's school. My son is autistic and spends most of each day in a special ed classroom, where he (theoretically) receives instruction that is tailored to his individual needs. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will recall that I was seriously pissed off at the end of the last school year. I was fed up and livid and cursing in all caps (oh, and there will be just a little more of that today), because I spent all of last year fighting with the school district to get them to bring in additional (legally mandated) resources to address a problem that was interfering with my son's learning. They did nothing but stall, accuse me of being difficult and tell me that, in spite of my son's declining performance, the best people to address the problem were the classroom teachers under whom his performance was declining. Oh, no wait. How silly of me! I forgot. They actually did propose adding one additional resource to the classroom: me, as a free aide.
After a summer filled with down time, and work with one of the world's great amateur behaviorists and OTs (yes, me), my son and I worked out a solution to his problem. He started the school year and has made rapid progress in his former problem area, to the point where he no longer requires assistance. Thanks for nothing, school district.
Of course, a new problem has cropped up in a different subject. I received a note last week from his teacher stating that she was sending his classroom work home for me to finish with him, as he had not been doing his work but had been "fooling around" and "wasting time." I (very calmly) wrote back and said I'd be happy to help him at home, but shouldn't we, oh, I don't know, find out why he wasn't doing his work in class and figure out how to address it? She wrote back and very tersely said that any suggestions would be appreciated.
What?! Um, unless I'm mistaken, she's the teacher. She's the one with the degree. She's the one with the actual training in working with kids with special needs. She's the one whose job it is to figure out how to engage kids in learning and how to ensure that they behave themselves in class. Oh, and lest you say she's overworked and underpaid (which she is). She's also the one who was such a big expert, so perfectly capable of handling my son's needs herself, that she adamantly and repeatedly stated that she didn't need or want to bring in an outside specialist to help her with my son last year. But my unpaid, inexpert labor, under her direction, is, of course, always welcome.
So, I sat down with my son for 10 minutes, quickly determined what particular obsessions were preventing him from doing the work, thought up several ways in which we could break the task down into more manageable components for him and got him to finish the work. I wrote the teacher a note with my suggestions on getting him to complete the work in the classroom, put the completed work in his backpack and haven't heard back from her since. And to top it all off, that important classroom work we did hasn't been removed from his backpack all week; each day, it comes back home to me a little more crumpled and worse for wear, because nobody has bothered to take it out and look at it.
This year, I am going to try something new. I am done with threatening to sue. I am done with going into debt to pay for representation to force the school district to bring in someone with even more "expertise" to help in the classroom. From now on, I'm going to be a bitch in a new way. I'm going to tell the teachers how to do their jobs. I'm going to teach them all the amateur OT and behavioral techniques I've painstakingly learned through the last six years. I'm going to share the knowledge and share the wealth and maybe, just maybe, one day they'll be able to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS! If not, I'll at least have saved some money, stayed out of blood pressure raising IEP meetings and ended up no worse off in terms of the education my son is receiving.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
For the record, I am not a therapist
That will become abundantly clear in a minute.
But I do know some things about psychology, and I am aggravated when the media gets it terribly wrong. Sometimes it is clearly just laziness. For example, once on an episode of CSI, Gil refers to "Piaget's attachment theory". Attachment theory is Bowlby. Piaget's theory is about cognitive development. A cursory Google search would have taken care of this. (I realize this is nothing compared to the complaints lawyers and actual crime scene experts have about CSI, but still.) But sometimes there are larger problems, what I will refer to here as "fake psychology".
So first off, fake psychology often ignores how psychological disorders are diagnosed. Typically, there is a big list of characteristics, and you must meet a certain number of them to qualify as having the disorder. Fake psychology will assume that having a mild version of just a few qualities from the list is sufficient for a diagnosis. So for example, here are some items the list to be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder: failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest; deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure; impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
Now really, what man (or person, really) do you know who hasn't at times been characterized by unlawful behavior, deceitfulness, and impulsivity?
So, your idiot man is probably just an idiot. But, if you must have a label, here is my quick and easy guide to diagnosing your fucktard's personality disorder:
1) For the good of others, should he/she be in jail?
Yes --> antisocial personality disorder
No --> go to step 2
2) Does he/she remind you of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?
Yes --> borderline personality disorder
No --> go to step 3
3) Is he/she manipulative mostly to get attention, rather than resources?
Yes --> histrionic personality disorder
No --> go to step 4
4) Is he/she completely self-centered and never wrong?
Yes --> narcissistic personality disorder
Now, codependency is also a part of fake psychology, but I am inclined to cut it a bit more slack, because I think it's a useful way of thinking. It's not a real disorder, but it is a label for a certain pattern of behavior, and it is good to recognize and understand our behavior patterns. Most people, even people with problems, don't have a major psychological disorder, but that doesn't mean they don't have problems or that their lives couldn't be better.
I think part of the reason that codependency is not really recognized as a disorder has to do with a good impulse, which is to avoid blaming the victim. We should not be blaming people for being in abusive relationships, for example, even though some people get into abusive relationships over and over. Also there is the idea that being in a certain type of relationship is a situational thing, rather than an enduring personal characteristic. Though we all know that you can have a tendency to pick the same kind of partner over and over again, and that that does make it more of a personal quality. Also I think the name is stupid, but that's just me.
Ok, I'm getting off my ivory tower/high horse now.
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