Last friday I left work and was off to pick the girls up, and I stopped at a 4-way intersection.

I got waved through, and as I shifted to 2nd gear, felt something “give”. I lost the ability to shift gears entirely. I made some calls and got M to re-route herself in case I couldn’t get the car home.

As it turns out, a bracket that holds the shifter cables had come apart. Luckily, there was no extesive damage, and the part was pretty cheap. Still, getting the car to the shop, borrowing another car, and putting gas in all these cars (at the rates charged lately) has made for a highly expensive week.

Slax 5.0.8 was released yesterday. I pulled it down with bittorrent through LinuxTracker . They’ve updated the kernel and some stuff with the hard drive installer, but as a live CD, most people probably won’t notice any difference.

The automation of mundane tasks has revolutionized our workplaces and home life, and has made an indelable mark on our day-to-day lives. Reliable solutions abound for taking that task that the employer had to pay 15 or 20 workers hours of wages for, and reducing it to a script or a series of scripts and one or two humans to staff. It’s a beautiful thing.

The areas of Sales and collections, however, have twisted their options, and are widely misusing them. The average home “consumer” (if you can even call us that anymore, really) is fiddling with telephony on their own. They are moving in droves away from POTS and toward VOIP, toward cheaper, more complete services with more options, requiring less of an investment. Many of these options have to do with call blocking and call routing. Even my current POTS setup has a routing option that was on by default, which I removed for a while, then turned back on just for kicks. This privacy feature screens calls based on caller-ID information. if the CID info is blocked, it rejects the call. In some cases, it asks the caller to record their name, then rings through with that recorded name and gives options to “sales-reject”, to “perma-block”, or to accept the call.

Those of you who use autodialers to contact us are wasting your dollars. You have become the “consumer” and are earning nothing for your money and overhead. A couple of examples:

Auto-dialer “A” is designed to call the numbers in its list, and when it hears an answer, will play a pre-recorded message. This pre-recorded message is usually either a very spam-like sales plea. Some collections agencies use the same solution, recording a threatening-sunding message that basically reads, “call us at number-number-number RIGHT NOW! Or you will regret it!”

Auto dialer “B” is an automated predictive dialer that dials the numbers in a pick list, and when it hears a voice, connects the call to a live operator, who is “standing by”. Upon creating this connection, it invariably plays a message like, “please hold, connecting you with the next available representative.” This system was designed for handling large numbers of incoming calls, and is now being used in reverse. The result is that the phone rings at your house, and you answer it, to hear that you’re on hold. Insta-hold. Nice.

So if you have any kind of routing in place, you will likely not get any of these calls, or if you do, you will likely never speak with a person to hear whose money was wasted making the call or who wants to extract money from you. in the case of the Auto Dialer “B”, I bet 98% or more of red-blooded americans would hang up, muttering a few choice words found only in slang dictionaries for the waste of time.

So for all those people out there mis-using the dialers: Have your machine call my machine. We’ll continue ignoring each other right away.

The cherry trees are blossoming in my backyard. Somehow it always starts on a workday. I always imageine walking out on the back porch in the morning with coffee to find a group of people practicing Tai Chi under them.

The papers are filed today. There is a mandatory “parenting” class, and in 45 days, it’s all final. The girls are still not aware of any major changes. It’s very sad, but I carry on. I’m trying to get a handle on the logistics of getting them to school and handled after school until I can get home without loosing the job I have. I honestly don’t know how people do it.

I’ll try to get a picture of the cherry trees in bloom. maybe I can get home before dark….

Today is my birthday. The HR people are very aware of this and have arranged for a bunch of co-workers to meet after work at the mexican place to celebrate.

The weather has been up and down here lately. You need a jacket one day, and shorts the next, with lots of rain mixed in.

It’s supposed to be nice tomorrow, so I’m thinking of doing some yard work.