Maybe we're not supposed to "love" our jobs

Scott Adams:

There's a natural limit to how happy a person can be at work. If work becomes fun, your boss will stop paying you to do it and start charging other people to have that fun in your place. So let's agree that work has to be a little bit unpleasant, at least for most people. Still, despite this unpleasantness, many people have a feeling called job satisfaction.

Car keys stopped working?

Just a tip, my truck key has been sticking a little for years now, but today it got so bad I couldn't open either door. I borrowed Kyla's key, and it didn't work either.

My first thought was that the key was just old and worn down, but then I thought -- "Hmm, why would both keys be worn down, since mostly only my key gets used? Maybe it's the tumblers in the door part? But then why wouldn't the keys work on either side?"

Then I realized, "Ah! Maybe one of the pins is just stuck in there!" So I put some 3-in-one oil on the tip of my key and pushed it in and out a few times, and voila! Now both keys work perfectly in both doors.

Hope that helps somebody.

Changing hairstyles, part 3

Oh. Snap.

Looks like battery acid may not be the end of this story.

Any chance this lady had a headlamp with leaky batteries like mine?

Still running out of fossil fuels...

You mean we only have a few years left of fossil fuels? Again?

In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said that U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said that the world had 13 years' worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought, and the postwar boom was fueled. In 1951 Interior reported that the world had . . . 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped, and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, scold in chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves.

- George F. Will, Awash in fossil fuels, Washington Post, November 22, 2009

On the plus side, if they keep saying we're about to run out, eventually they'll be right.

Unemployment grows

Check out this animation (via Daring Fireball) of how the unemployment situation has deteriorated over the last couple years.

It looks like the plague spreading, pretty scary.

The coloring is skewing your perceptions a little, though. My brain tends to watch how the brightness changes instead of the hue differences, but watch it and look at the scale. From 0% to 5.9% the brightness is roughly the same, but above that it tanks, implying a drop off a cliff.

In real life, going from 5.9% to 10% unemployment means another 4 people out of 100 are out of work. This is obviously not a good thing, but not the catastrophic death implied by the blackness of the picture.

Can somebody explain to me what makes Nebraska so special?

Bird book

See something beautiful today.

On cancelling Verizon service

Wow, switching cell carriers is apparently a big deal to the carriers. They go to a *lot* of trouble to keep people, which says to me they're making a lot of money on us.

Anyway, all I wanted to do was cancel my Verizon service.

Try #1

This afternoon I called their customer service line. I kindly asked them to cancel my service, saying that we'd already switched to AT&T. (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess why.)

That operator proceeded to literally spend an entire hour with me on the phone, taking me down different paths obviously designed to keep me with Verizon: "With all cell carriers you have 30 days to change your mind, just go back and cancel." "You owe it to yourself to try this new Verizon phone, no cost or obligation, I'll even ship it to you free and give you both lines next month for $15. If you don't like it, ship it back free and you pay nothing." "AT&T's coverage is bad, their support is bad, and they're more expensive, you should definitely select your network carefully." "You know you can give your lines to someone else? Or convert one to a landline?"

Literally a whole hour of this!

Wow. That was emotionally draining. I had great reasons for switching, but this lady had several strong avenues, totally dodging my reasons and trying to remove any excuses I had for not staying on.

Finally, I just said, "You know, you're right, I need to think about this before I make any decisions. Thanks..."

"Oh, you're quite welcome. We're so glad to have you as a Verizon customer."

(As an aside, I am sad to go -- in any group of people I always had better cell coverage than everybody else. Verizon's been good to us. It's only 2 years, though, and a lot will change by 2011.)

Try #2

Two hours later, I was a little smarter.

me: "Hello, I'm calling to cancel my service."

Verizon: "Oh sure we can help with that. Were you concerned about the cost, or the phone? or the network?"

me: "No, just personal reasons."

Verizon: "Uh... Okay, I understand. You know you have several options for these lines .... Have you considered any of those?"

me: "Yeah, we understand all those things but we just need to do this."

Verizon: "Okay. It's asking me to put a reason in here and they won't let me put 'personal reasons' in there..."

me: "I guess 'expense' would be the best thing to put, but it's complicated."

Verizon: "Okay."

Done and done.