xanithofdragons | Entries tagged with rant

Today's post is inspired by me remembering that I had made a "wtfuckery" tag and by my local post office continuing to be terrible.

Look, I think public, government-run services are great, even if they're slow or overworked or made cumbersome with bureaucracy, but my local post office is very unreliable. I've said in a previous post that I've only ever had a problem with a post office once before moving here, but the problems keep continuing with my local post office.

It's hard to even remember when it all started, but in September, I think, I ordered two of these phone cleaner plushies, one for me and one as a late birthday present to my sister-in-law. Well, to cut to the end, my sister-in-law never got her birthday present.

I picked air shipping, and it was taking longer than usual, but there was tracking. According to the tracking, it made it to my town's post office, but it never went out to be delivered. After a couple of weeks I decided I finally had to contact the post office to found out what happened to it. I hate talking on the phone and found out there was a way to make inquiries by email, so I sent one out. The Saturday after I sent the inquiry, someone from my post office called me (even though I entered into the form that I preferred email contact, of course), but I didn't answer because I didn't know the number.

She left a voice mail though. And ugh, she acted kinda put out that I had sent it by email using the national form instead of calling my local office first. When I told my family this story, they guessed it probably made them look bad to get an inquiry, but seriously it's their own fucking fault if they look bad. (# ﾟДﾟ) But she said they'd investigate and get back to me by Monday. She also told me to check with my apartment's office (as if I hadn't already multiple fucking times) and to call her if it was there. It wasn't there when I checked after work on Monday, obviously, so I didn't call her. Unfortunately she also didn't call me. Even though she said she would. I never heard from her or anyone else at my post office again.

After waiting a few more weeks, I checked the tracking online on a whim, and it was being returned to sender. So at some point they had to have found it. And they never bothered contacting me to tell me. Ever. Great fucking job post office. Great fucking job.

Like, I suppose I could have contacted them again, and I thought about it a couple times, but I shouldn't have to. I shouldn't have to chase after my mail just to make sure it doesn't get lost or mis-filed and actually makes its way to me. Ugh.

Well it's been returned to sender, and at least their policy is to refund the cost of items returned undelivered. I'm still out the eight dollars I paid for shipping though. :< I'm trying again, and hopefully this time my sister-in-law will get a Christmas present. I picked EMS shipping this time and I'm seriously hoping nothing else gets lost. I might have to move just to live somewhere the post office isn't so shitty.

I guess it's kind of a weird change in my lifestyle after quitting my old horrible grocery store job, but now I'm usually not around when deliveries are typically made. And I typically order enough Japanese CDs/DVDs/magazines/books that I'll have something shipped to me usually 1-2 times per month at least. So I live in an apartment complex and the management office can accept packages for me, fine right? I even signed a piece of paper and everything. Things should work out great!

Except in reality it's like 50/50 whether the packages will actually get delivered or get stuck in limbo. All of the stuff from Japan either comes through Fedex or the postal service. Domestic stuff often comes through UPS, but that's much fewer orders. I've had the least problems with UPS; they'll pretty reliably just leave it at the apartment management office (as long as they're open that day) and leave a notice saying so. I can just pick it up and everything works out. Fedex and the USPS are the ones giving me problems. It's not even a matter of whether a signature is required or not. Like sometimes they'll have someone at the office sign for it, and sometimes, just not deliver it? I guess maybe they have the bad timing of coming when the office is closed, but it also seems like sometimes they come back and try to deliver to the office and sometimes don't?

But still, Fedex always leaves a notice, although sometimes the notices are inaccurate for some reason? One time the COD box was checked even though it wasn't COD, and one time it said "check leasing office" but when I went to the office they said Fedex hadn't even come that day. So weird. But still, they always leave a notice, and if it isn't delivered I can wait and hope it's delivered the next day or use their website to have it sent to the nearest Fedex office and pick it up.

The worst, though, is my local post office. I have never had so many problems so frequently with the post office as I have had here. I can think of only one other time ever before here that the post office has failed me. Like Fedex, sometimes they'll leave it at the office and sometimes they won't, with no apparent rhyme or reason. And like Fedex, they're supposed to leave a notice. Supposed to. It wasn't like this right away, but shortly after I moved here, it sounds like they got a bunch of new trainees in or something and now, actually more often than not, they either don't leave any notice at all or leave it in the wrong box. I won't pick shipping methods without tracking any more, because I can't trust the post office to just never leave any notice and send my orders back to sender without ever contacting me. T_T So I watch the tracking and if I see that they tried to deliver, I'll take the note if I'm lucky, or write down the tracking number and my address if I'm not lucky and go pick it up at the post office the next day.

However, the USPS also has a reschedule delivery option through their tracking, and if it's close to say, a Saturday or day I'll have off from work and can just sit around in my apartment and wait for it, why not use it? Well, I have tried this method three times and three times my local post office has managed to fuck it up. The first time I requested it to be delivered on a Saturday, and I waited around with no ring on my buzzer. I checked my mailbox and saw the mail had already come, and then I checked with the office and they hadn't received it either. So I freak out and go to the post office while they're still open, and the person at the counter is like treating me like I'm being unreasonable at first, but it turns out they filed the package wrong and never sent it out for redelivery. >:< The second time, I scheduled the redelivery on Wednesday for the following Friday because my work was gonna be close that day. Yeah, they tried to deliver it on Thursday instead, and I ended up having to go into the post office to pick it up on Friday anyway. And finally, this past week they tried to deliver something on Friday, I scheduled the redelivery for Saturday, and of course, looking at the tracking, it probably never even went out for delivery. I'll see if there's any movement Monday and hopefully I'll be able to pick it up Monday or Tuesday, but yeah, I'm never using the USPS schedule redelivery option again, at least not while I live here.

I guess this is all to say that I still haven't gotten my copies of Johnny's WEST's new single that I ordered. orz

Current Mood: annoyed

Last weekend I bought a new computer. I'd known for a while that I would need to buy a new one sooner or later because I got the one I had been using back in summer of 2009, but I'd been putting it off for a while. In the past couple of weeks, however, my computer had gotten to overheating pretty often and at some point on Saturday, it started making an unpleasant sound that made me think it would likely fail at any moment. O_O

So I rushed out that evening to buy a new one and I managed to get a laptop on sale for only about $300 (when looking online, around $360 was the lowest I found for what I wanted). Probably the only problem with this computer is that it came with Windows 8.1 installed, and... Windows 8.1 is... weird. It's like they threw on these extra, unnecessary features to give it a menu more like a tablet which is just kind of, ew. If I had a wanted a tablet, I would have bought a tablet, and I do not want a tablet. But it does have a normal desktop, and it can be set to boot to desktop so I have to deal with that useless menu as little as possible. I'm slowly finding more settings to make things look and act more like I want them, and if nothing else, an unpleasant operating system isn't too bad because you can always install a different operating system.

I think I've transferred all the files I wanted from my old computer, so, thank you Ferdinand Yamato (yes, I gave my computer a human name), you have served me well for about 4 1/2 years.

My new computer's name is Michizane. May he serve me as well for about as long (or even longer. longer would be better).

I was reading a post the other day about non-sexual intimacies, and the first whole paragraph touched on some big parts of what bothers me about a lot of romance writing in fiction really perfectly. Too often, the writers focus overly much on romantic relationships while underdeveloping non-romantic relationships, or just seem to throw together the lead female character and the lead male character without considering compatibility or thinking about how their relationship would go after the story ends or even properly developing romantic feelings between them. It leaves me asking why they had them fall in love rather than leaving them as coworkers or partners or friends. It's bad writing and heteronormative too.

After reading that, I thought about listing some jdrama I've seen that had (what I think are) good non-romantic relationships between girls/women and boys/men.

( May contain spoilers )

Are there any jdramas (or other works of fiction) that had a non-romantic relationship between a man and a woman that you really liked?

I don't like American movie trailers.

I don't watch movies often. There seems to be something about the movie format that doesn't work as well for me. Other media like books or tv series or comics tend to hold my interest better. I can marathon a tv series. I can read a book I'm really into in under a day no matter the length. With most movies, on the other hand, I tend to get bored or tune out easily in the middle. But behind the format of movies themselves, I think there's another thing that makes me uninterested in movies most of the time, and it's the trailers, the commercials, how the movies are marketed.

Most of the time when I see a trailer or commercial for an American movie, at the end of it, I have no idea what the movie's about. The trailer looks like a bunch of disjointed scenes they thought were cool strung together with little to no context. When I'm picking media to watch or read, I select based on plot most of the time. I'm interested in the plot, the story, the characters. When I watch American movie trailers, they don't tell me what I want to know. The may show visual effects or action scenes, which are extras for me. They tell me the actors, but I don't pay attention to American actors. They tell me the director, but I don't pay attention to them either. They may give vague praise from critics, but I don't care.

There are a couple of things that made me think about this. In one of my Japanese classes at Kansai Gaidai, we watched Shall We Dance? (the original Japanese movie), and once we had watched the whole thing, the professor showed us a Japanese trailer for the movie, an American trailer for the Japanese version, and an American trailer for the American remake. Only the Japanese trailer seemed interesting to me. It made the movie look good, and I thought the movie was only so-so and a little awkward to watch at points overall. The Japanese trailer was good enough to improve my opinion of the movie.
Then, recently, I read a review for a movie after seeing commercials for it all summer and thinking it didn't look particularly interesting because the commercials were all disjointed scenes with no context or explanation style ads, and the review actually told the plot. The review made me think the movie was a little interesting, because it told me what I wanted to know about the movie, unlike the commercials which may as well have told me nothing.

Current Mood: pensive

So it probably happens at least every year or so at my college where a student-run organization will go around and collect trash from the dorms one Sunday evening and then pile it up in the quad with a sign that says "Face your Waste" or whatever. I never thought much of it, aside from people going around making a racket one evening. They pick the end of the weekend because trash isn't collected on Saturday or Sunday which makes what's sitting around greater than if they picked another day when trash is collected from the dorms. Actually, the trash can being full Sunday evening might mean more to me than their pile of trash bags...

Anyway, I heard that this time around they didn't bother replacing the bags lining the trash cans, and since people threw in trash without noticing there wasn't a bag, it caused trouble for the housekeeping staff who then had to clean the cans. I just think avoiding causing trouble for our housekeeping staff is way more important than some awareness campaign most people are probably going to ignore. -_-

Current Mood: bored

So today we have a radio rip of Perfume's new single song, and a ~~like split-second~~ teaser for the PV.

:/

:/:/:/:/:/

( thoughts )

Current Mood: disappointed

So, the Japanese classes, I've been through, tend not to cover onomatopoeia much. By which I mean hardly ever. So when I came across it when I'm reading something I tend to not know or only vaguely know what most of them mean, which means I have to look up onomatopoeia all the time. And since onomatopoeia is used so commonly in Japanese, it's something I get more and more aware of.

So of course, I look it up when I really need to know the meaning, but so many aren't really in dictionaries. If they're not in dictionaries, then I resort to googling it which is my solution to all words/phrases which I can't find in dictionaries or which dictionaries explain inadequately. (It's especially useful for words or phrases specific to certain dialects.) But then sometimes I can't even figure it out by googling it. That is where I am now.

The next method I'm trying is asking on a FB status and hoping Japanese friends know what it is, but the first person to comment says she doesn't know either. This is not looking good.

This evening, I got started looking at Perfume videos on youtube, and found this cool fanvideo. Sometimes when I'm watching Perfume videos on youtube, I end up watching a bunch of Perfume videos. Perfume's great~ ♥