Amazon Same-Day Delivery is a Modern Day Miracle

Last week, I decided to order a new phone online. I went with Amazon, because I just signed up for Amazon Prime and that gives me free two day shipping. Yeah, that totally works. Anyway, I get to the shipping and I was about to select two day shipping when I see this:

FREE Same Day Shipping

Now this made me pause for three reasons.

First of all, it said "free." When I had resigned myself to two day shipping free, the idea of getting it sooner for the same price seemed too good to be true.

But second, it said "same day." I'd never heard of such a thing. How could I get something the same day I ordered it? Even overnight seemed like a stretch.

But the third reason I was in disbelief is that it was a Sunday.

That's right. Sunday.

Could Amazon really deliver my phone for free on the same day I ordered it? On a Sunday, no less?

I figured there had to be a mistake, that the system probably made an error. What the heck? I selected same day shipping and hit "next," expecting Amazon to say the equivalent of, "Oops, my bad. We meant delivery on Monday." That's why I was shocked when it said, "Congratulations! Your delivery date is Today." There was even a tracking number.

I Googled it and discovered that Amazon had achieved what I thought to be impossible.

The short version is that Amazon has warehouses set up in a handful of major cities and can process and ship orders for delivery to those cities on the same day. They even had arranged with the US postal service to deliver on Sunday, something the post office had convinced me was impossible.

I spent the rest of the day clicking "update order," and waiting for a moment when the website would say the package was going to be delayed. When it said it was shipped, I figured it would be a mistake, something would go wrong, and it wouldn't show up.

At five o'clock, there was a knock on my door. I opened it to find my package.

I got the phone. Six hours after I ordered it online. On a Sunday. I would have gladly paid $10 for that privilege, but I got it for free. This sort of thing feels so amazing, it should be illegal. Ordering online is now officially better than shopping in a store, because I didn't have to get dressed, drive to the store, wait in line, drive back home, etc.

Amazon, you are amazing.

No, Google, *You're* Too Slow!

I'm on a dial-up ISP (yeah, yeah), and I get this message every time I go onto Google Images:

You are seeing the basic version because we think your Internet connection is slow - Switch to standard version

To me, it seems a little confrontational. It sounds like, "You are seeing the basic version because your Internet connection sucks. Get a new ISP, loser. Or switch to standard version, and prove us wrong, and we'll apologize." Okay, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but still...Google, mind your own business.

Top 10 Monkey Migraine Posts for May 2009

I have a counter for this blog, and I thought it was interesting to see what the top ten posts are and what they mean. Let’s break it down.

1. Yellow Fever: Guys Who Like Asian Women: This is the most popular post on the blog, and has been for a few months now. I guess a lot of guys and gals are interested in the “Yellow Fever” phenomenon. I still think guys with yellow fever get a bad rap. Asian women are beautiful. What’s wrong with that? Although I thought the Onion’s article, “Asian Teen Has Sweaty, Middle-Aged Man Fetish” puts a nice spin on it.
2. Fat Old Man: Darth Vader Unleashed - Although I pride myself on my writing, there’s no denying from the statistics that the vast majority of my blog’s traffic comes from Google Images. For example, this one image of Darth Vader gets me tons of traffic. I think that is a pretty good post. And a good action figure.
3. Pussycat Dolls Are Strippers - From the keyword descriptions, it seems a lot of people stumble onto this post looking for information on whether the Pussycat Dolls were really strippers. I think that’s a sad sign of how far the fraud of the Pussycat Dolls has come. Let me spell it out. The Pussycat Dolls were literally a bunch of strippers (oh, sorry, “burlesque dancers”) that somebody decided to turn into a musical group. Only one (later two) of them could actually sing, but that was enough to get things started. They “remade” (I call it borderline theft) a song that was already a hit from another musician, stole their Girl Power attitude from the Spice Girls, shook their booties in cameras’ faces, and made it big. Anything else is just window dressing. To me, the Pussycat Dolls are the essence of everything that’s wrong with today’s image-obsessed MTV pop music culture. And right now, somewhere in the United States, a truly gifted group of singers and musicians who are only mildly attractive can’t even get a record executive to look twice at them.
4. Destroy Humanity: Pandemic Game - Honestly, I want to delete this post, because it’s the kind of post I hate – a post that just points somewhere else. People looking for the “Pandemic” game go here. And then they go to the link. Maybe I should see if I can embed the game on that post.
5. Heart Attack: Jarvik's Lipitor Ads - I still feel pretty strongly that that Lipitor ad is wrong. Using Jarvik to promote a medication when he’s not a doctor is like false advertising. I need to research and find out whatever happened to the investigation on the ethics of those ads.
6. Muscle Top: New Carrot Top - I’m glad this gets a lot of traffic, because this post is one of my favorites. It still freaks me out to see Carrot Top with muscles. The link has one of my favorite lines ever…but the website is gone! And so is the line. So I’ll re-create it.
7. The Problem With McDonald's - This post is not one of my favorites, to be honest. It ends my long-running feud with McDonald’s, but the sad part is that it’s as true four years later as it was then. And McDonald’s has become more health-conscious, but without following my advice. A lot of people stumble across the post with the keywords “Mcdonald’s problem.” Makes me wonder what problem they’re looking for.
8. Top Ten Alien Myths - Again, I don’t like my posts that just link somewhere else. But this is a good link that takes a lot of information and packs into a small space – why all the UFO enthusiasts are wrong.
9. Sexy Women vs. WNBA - Would it kill the WNBA to put their players in spandex? Seriously? Maybe loosen up the sports bras to add some jiggle? I know women are crying “sexist pig” to this post, but come on. If you’re marketing solely to women who like sports, you’ve got an inherently narrow market. If you market to guys who will watch women play sports, it gets even narrower. You got the lesbian market all sewn up already. If you get some eye candy on the court, you wouldn’t be able to sell tickets fast enough. Maybe some of those guys will actually get hooked. They come for the wiggle, but they stay for the sports. Besides, men’s football has gay and female followers who watch it for the tight pants. You don’t see the NFL putting their players in potato sacks to maintain their integrity. Or beach volleyball - very popular and very sexy.
10. Bear Riding a Unicycle: Circus vs. Wild - Still believe this. Circuses are fun, but they are not humane. Don’t say otherwise.
    

Runners-up: The following don’t fall into the top ten this month, but have in the past and deserve an honorable mention.

• A Beautiful Lie: The Truth Behind a Beautiful Mind - This is one of the blog posts that I worked hardest on, and I wish I could promote it more widely. I liked “A Beautiful Mind” and still do, but the more I saw what they changed, the more annoyed I got. Why can’t Hollywood just leave well-enough alone? Still a good movie, though.
• Flashback Friday: Herb - I like this one because it’s more informative. There’ s not a lot on the web about Herb. This is my homage.
• Every Episode of House in a Nutshell - Most of my more popular posts were written years ago. I’m glad this one is getting some traffic. I like it.
  

Yee-Ha: Country Music While You're on Hold

Companies who use country music as their hold music should be forced into bankruptcy. I hate country music, and I have to listen to country music if I want to talk to you. That's like holding me hostage in some sort of torture chamber where they played heavy metal and the theme song for Barney the Dinosaur (allegedly). I would go insane. People really need to consider the full range of people who might be calling their business. Just because you like country or hip-hop or accordion music, doesn't mean everyone else does. It could even offend potential customers. That's why I like classical music on hold. Even if the caller doesn't like classical music, it's not going to offend them. Unless listening to Beethoven is against their religion or something.

I H8 Wiggles

I always felt sympathy for people who had kids and had to endure the nightmare of Barney the Dinosaur and Teletubbies. At the same time, I did think "Cut them some slack." Of course, we don't like kids' stuff. It's for kids. You have to look at it through their eyes. That said, I hate the Wiggles.

It's not that they're annoying and simplistic and silly and repetitive. All kids' shows are like that, really. It's that the Wiggles are all those things, and nothing more. At least Barney had the dinosaur thing going. You could understand how kids could like that. And the Teletubbies are so surreal that even I find it hard to take my eyes off them. The Wiggles, on the other hand, are a bunch of ugly, middle-aged, Australian men who dress like crew members from the original Star Trek. That's it. I've seen two episodes and don't see anything more than that. They do have other characters like Captain Feathersword (weird), Dorothy the Dinosaur (a blatant Barney the Dinosaur rip-off), but that's it. And my kids love them. In doing research for this post, I discovered that the Wiggles incorporate child development research into their performance, which is kind of a relief. At least I understand now why kids find them so irresistible - they're designed to be. But I'm not going to the concerts. No way.

5 Phrases That Don't Make Me Feel Better About Gas Prices

1. They pay more for gas in Europe...
Europe built their cities for foot traffic and horses, so everything's close together and you can take public transportation or walk. I can't do that in Phoenix. It takes me two hours to get to work on the bus, and it would take me three or four hours to walk (I'm assuming, I'm not even going to try walking in this heat...)

2. Gas is still cheaper than milk...
But I don't need to buy ten gallons of milk every week.

3. High gas prices will drive us towards alternative energy sources...
If I could buy a car that ran on carrot juice right now, I would. But I can't. I'm still stuck with my gas-guzzling car that runs on plain old unleaded, and will be for the foreseeable future.

4. Gas prices are higher in other parts of the country...
Then I feel sorry for those poor saps, but I still feel sorrier for myself.

5. If you factor for inflation, prices are lower today than they were fifty years ago...
Well, for that to be comforting, I'd have to have my income factored for inflation to match.

Fun in a Call Center: A Girl Named William

I got a call from a woman named William. I cannot imagine what would possess someone to name their girl William. Maybe the parents wanted a boy or the father really wanted to name the child after himself. I also cannot imagine the nightmare William goes through on a daily basis. Is there anyone out there who would look at the name William and not assume it's a man? Everything she does would be affected. She goes to the drugstore and they ask her if she's picking up medication for her husband. She gets married, and people protest, thinking it's a gay marriage. People filling out forms for her accidentally set her gender to "male." People call her on the phone, and they start out calling her "sir." That would wear you down so fast.

Diaper Duck

The Diaper Duck has a warning, "This product is not a toy. Do not allow children to play with it." I don't have a problem with that. But if you don't want kids to treat the Diaper Duck as a toy, why did you make it toy-shaped?!

UPDATE: I should probably clarify this...the reason I ask the question is that my son has rubber ducks, and I constantly have to take away the Diaper Duck from him, because he doesn't understand the difference and wants to play with it. They just made my life a little bit harder. Might as well have made a samurai sword with a rubber duck on the handle. Or a bottle of rat poison with the Flintstones on the label.

Patriotic Colors: Coloring to Support the Troops

It does get boring in a call center sometimes, so people come up with ways to amuse themselves. For a while, some people were using coloring books and crayons. What I found absolutely bizarre is that they would collect up the pages they colored and send them to the troops in Iraq. Why would the troops in Iraq want these? I imagine them opening the envelope and finding all these colored pictures and saying, "Isn't that cute? All these kids drawing us pictures." Not realizing they were colored by forty and fifty-year old men and women.

Not-So-Deep Thoughts: Cactus

You ever notice that if you type a word often enough, it starts to look weird? Like "cactus." It's got that "cac" in the beginning like someone gagging. "Cack! Cack!" And then there's "tus." Which is just weird all by itself. Put them together and it makes you wonder why someone saw those spiny things and decided to call them "cactus."

Memo to the Wallpaper Guy

This is for the guy (or guys) who keeps putting wallpaper images on the public computers in the employee lounge: Every now and then, you change the wallpaper background on the computer to pictures of sports cars, airplanes, and pictures of your pets. You may be wondering why you come back and the wallpaper is gone, replaced by the generic Windows background. That would be me. The reason is that these are not your computers. Maybe you like to have pictures of Porches and DC-10s on your computer, and that's fine. Put it on your own computer. When you go to the public restrooms here at work, you don't change the wallpaper on the walls. And when you use the computers in the lounge, don't go messing around with them. I'll continue to change anything you do back until you get the message.

Microsoft of Baby Stuff: Winnie the Pooh

In the past few months, I've become quite familiar with baby apparel and I'll say this - Winnie the Pooh owns baby stuff. It's hard to find a baby bottle or a baby sheet or baby clothes that doesn't have Winnie the Pooh characters on it. Oh, sure, there are some Sesame Street characters or Peanuts characters or even baby Tiny Toons (where did that come from?), but Winnie the Pooh is the default. He's like Microsoft. Winnie the Pooh has a monopoly. The government should step in and break them up into smaller divisions. Maybe Tigger gets baby blankets or Piglet get baby bottles.

Poor Get Poorer: Auto Title Loans

There's a common misconception that poor people are poor because they're bad with money, that they can't save properly or don't invest or spend it all on drugs and alcohol. That may be true in some cases, but a lot of poor people are poor because once your credit rating gets too bad or your income drops below a certain level, you don't have as many options as rich people do, and are more vulnerable. Case in point, an auto title loan.

I happened to go with a friend to an auto title loan place and was stunned.To get an auto title loan, you give them your car's title as collateral. This place had a chart on the wall that showed the interest on various loans, and they ranged from 15 to 30 percent interest. That's not per year. That's per month. The interest on an auto title loan can increase by three hundred percent in a single year.

As outrageous as that is, it gets worse. The place I went to doesn't letyou pay back the loan in installments. It can only be paid back in full. In cash. Within thirty days. If you don't pay it back, you have only one other option - extend the loan for another thirty days by paying them a percentage, which can be as much as three hundred dollars. And that three hundred dollars doesn't count towards repayment of the loan in any way.

Let's look at this in the real world. I'm in danger of losing my apartment because I lost my job and don't have any money to pay the rent. No bank will lend me any money, because I ruined my credit rating defaulting on all my bills. All I have left is my car. So I bite the bullet and take out an auto title loan. Great, I've got a thousand dollars. But what are the odds that I'm gonna have a thousand dollars in cash a month from now? Almost nil. So the thirty days come up, they say "Pay us another three hundred dollars or we take your car." I need my car, so I pay them another three hundred, and sigh with relief. Until next month. When I owe three hundred and twenty. Within a few months, I'm trapped in a vicious cycle. The longer the loan is extended, the more I owe. The more I owe, the less capable I am of paying it back. Even if I do get a low-paying job that keeps the roof over my head, it's still not enough to get me the money I need. So I just keep paying and paying for months, watching the loan spiral out of control, until finally I just can't afford it anymore and they take my car away.

My friend was one of the lucky ones. She actually had the money to pay back her auto title loan. When my friend showed up to pay it,the clerk seemed surprised, as if she'd never seen anyone pay it back before. And I'm betting she hasn't. To get an auto title loan is probably the dumbest thinganyone can do, but there are really people out there who have no choice. The people who created it set out to target the most vulnerable of people,and set it up in a way that makes it almost impossible to pay it back.

Lunch Hunter

Someone stole my wife's lunch last week. That is so irritating. I can't believe somebody would just take someone else's lunch. I wish I could understand the psychology of that. You walk into the lunchroom, sift through all the lunches, find one that looks good, and just walk away with it. And you sit down and eat it, knowing someone else could be going hungry because of you, and don't care. Unbelievable that there are people like that. That's something that a homeless person would do wandering in off the street, not an employed adult working in an office. I can't understand how you can live with yourself doing something that low.
Categories: opinion

Bear Riding A Unicycle: Circus versus Wild

There was a guy on the radio calling his friend a bad father because he wouldn't take his kid to the circus. That friend argued that circuses are cruel to animals. The talk show host argued that animals are great in circuses - they get fed, medical care, no predators. That irritated me. If you don't care about animals, fine. If you don't care if animals are mistreated in circuses, fine. But don't try to argue circuses aren't cruel, because they are. I was just reading an article about how the whole concept of zoos is being questioned because it's almost impossible to replicate the environment of animals like elephants in a caged setting. And that's a zoo. Now look at an elephant living in a cage, forced to ride around on a tricycle. There's no way that animal is happy.
Categories: opinion

Quit Whining: R&B Singers

What's up with R&B songs where the guy's whining about how a girl left him? I swear, ninety percent of R&B songs I hear these days are about some guy begging his girl to come back to him or whaling about how he shouldn't have let her go. Have some pride, people. What happened to the good old days? I know where this comes from -- women wanting to listen to some hot guy grovel at their feet or imagining the song is from their ex-boyfriend so they can feel a visceral revenge.
Categories: opinion

IH8 BLNDZ

I hate blondes. Probably not a big surprise, given my love of blonde jokes and hatred of blonde celebrities like Paris and Britney, but I felt it needed to be said. Now let me say that I have less of a problem with women who are born blonde than those who dye their hair blonde.

Next time you're in a room full of people like the DMV or the movies, count the number of women with blonde hair. Chances are, most of those women are dying their hair blonde. The reason I hate bottle blondes is it shows a complete lack of imagination. "I wanna dye my hair. What color should I choose? Well, blondes have more fun." There are so many colors in the world. If all you can think of is blonde, then you are not even trying. Which means you're stupid. They might as well wear blue contacts, too, like Paris Hilton.

I know why women do it. Blonde gets you noticed, not because it's that beautiful, but because it's bright. It's like wearing a spotlight on your head. Not to say that blonde can't be hot, but I greatly prefer brunettes or redheads.

Writer's Block

I've seen some blogs (thanks to BlogExplosion) where people's blog entries are actually about how they have nothing to write about. I guess that's what they call writer's block. My opinion? If you can't think of anything to blog about, then maybe you shouldn't have a blog. I have the opposite problem. I have too much to blog about. I literally have hundreds of blog entry ideas. I have text files full of blog entries. There are two reasons why this blog doesn't have a hundred posts a day. One is that I don't have the time, because I have to do things like eat, sleep, and work for a living. The other is that I'd like readers to pay attention to each individual entry and not drown readers with stuff. I'm pacing myself. But one of these days I'll do a flood and you'll see what my mind is really like. Prepare yourself. Not a pleasant sight.
Categories: misc

Pee Phone: The Ultimate Abuse of Cell Phones

We've already seen enough abuse of cell phones while at the bank, while driving, even in church. But we all need to be proactive to stop what is, to me, the ultimate abuse of the cellphone. Last week, when I was sitting in a bathroom stall, I heard someone talking on the phone. I figured he's gonna have to shut it off. But he didn't. He stepped into the stall next to me, still talking. I thought to myself "Surely at this point, he'll shut off the phone." But he didn't. It was like that scene in Naked Gun where Drebin forgets to turn off his microphone while he goes in the john. I swear, if that was me listening to that, I would've hung up and never spoken to that person again. Are we really willing to become a world that would tolerate that? I hope not.
Categories: opinion

Men Are Such Sad, Pathetic Creatures

I was snooping around on YouTube to give my new DSL connection a test drive and stumbled across a homemade music video called "Hey." It has to be good, considering the hundreds of people watching it, right? I watched it and quickly realized it was just two girls doing some vague dance moves in their bedroom to a song by the Pixies. Good? No. But the girls are cute and scantily-clad. Imagining the hundreds of guys drooling over this video gave me a pang of sadness for my gender. We're so easily-manipulated. Most guys will flock to watch scantily-clad women doing anything, including washing cars, fixing computers, and even just standing there. Shouldn't we be better than this, considering we rule the world? No point to this rant, really...all the men who should be reading this are too busy drooling over pictures of cute girls on some other blog.
Categories: opinion