Ornery. That’s the only way to describe how I am feeling today. Ornery is a good word. If it’s not an SAT word I’d be disappointed.  Edit: I almost missed out an a glorious opportunity: I’d be ornery if ornery wasn’t an SAT word.  I don’t know if that actually works.  I think it does.  English is weird.  Whatever.  I’ve said it, I can’t un-say it.

Today’s (the weekly post for this week) is brought to you by Mike, the Ornery bugger. It’s going to be a bunch of things that have me REALLY annoyed at the moment. Not RAGE AGAINST THE WORLD annoyed, more: come on man, use your damn brain.  I tweeted out a few of these, but I realized I should just blog it out and fill my self-imposed (currently on-schedule) blog quota for the week (for those not keeping track: the plan was to do one blog post a week for the entire year).

So, starting from the top:

1. Sirius XM Satellite Radio is pretty cool.  Totally -not- worth the $11 to $20 a month for it, but that’s OK because once you unsubscribe to the service you’ll probably get a letter in the mail saying “Come back for 5 months for $25.”  Sirius XM is totally worth $5 a month, so I do it all the time (especially when I have a long drive in the works, like I did in February and in May).  It’s super easy to sign up for online, but you CAN’T CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION ONLINE.  BAD Sirius XM, BAD.  NAUGHTY! No cookies for you.  Seriously, you look on their website and it plainly says it: “If you wish to cancel for any other reason, please call us at <removed> as we would like to understand and resolve any issue you may have had. Please note your subscription cannot be cancelled online. Our Listener Care agents are available Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. ET and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET.”  While I give you credit for not having standard 9am-5pm hours, and even Sunday availability, seriously.  Get with the goddamn times.  Even XBox Live and PSPlus let you cancel online now.  Don’t give me some bogus technical reason.  We all know the reason: you don’t want people to be easily able to cancel their service.  You want people who do the 5 month promo to forget and HAVE to call or get dinged the next month rate (making it 6 months for $40, just above what I’d pay per month for the service).  Or you want people to sit through a fifteen minute spiel about how they want your business and what can they do to keep you.  Save the effort: you won’t meet my price point so stop wasting your time and mine.

   The part that has me ornery: when you call in, it says: “Did you know you can do <a laundry list of things except for canceling your service> faster by going to our website?”  Yes, I know that I can do that.  The only thing I can’t do via the website is CANCEL MY GODDAMN SERVICE.  Jesus H Christ.  Seriously.  Just let me cancel my service already.  I don’t care what special offers your have.  Just let me cancel the service.  God.  Damn.

2. Credit Card Rewards programs are pretty cool too.  1% to 5% cash back on purchases?  Sign me up.  Read all the fine print though.  Phew, points never expire, good, so when I use that card solely for vacation purchasing it won’t disappear.  Oh wait, they will?  I can only imagine the level of cognitive dissonance the writer must have had when writing this:
   
   Yep.  Basically: Points do not expire.  Points expire after 12 months of no purchases.  I get it.  You could make the distinction: points DON’T expire, but you forfeit your right to them after 12 months not making a purchase.  Whatever, the points go poof one way or another.  Forfeiture is just a fancy way of saying the already fancy expire.  Furthermore: KEEP READING THE FINE PRINT.
   
   More shenanigans.

   The part that has me ornery: I get it, you don’t want people to be able to redeem the rewards.  I went on vacation and racked up ~ $10.00 in rewards points.  Yay for me!  Yay for me, I can’t use them because $10 < $25.  So I basically need to keep spending money on the card in order to get access to my rewards.  And if I don’t make a purchase within 12 months, the rewards go away.  Scummy scummy scummy.  No cookies for you either, credit card company.  That being said: thanks for the interest free loan on my vacation.  Those purchases will be paid off by next paycheck, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

3. Seriously people.  Learn to read.  If you look at what Alice wrote on one of my previous posts here you’ll see my point.  I wrote out a nice, long explanation of how to do a task.  I did all the legwork.  All you need to do is follow the guide.  I did this because all the guides I found previously involved watching a YouTube video.  I get it, YouTube is a great instructional format, but sometimes people like to have a checklist or steps to follow.  So I wrote it out.  Step by step.  Alice’s comment? A question: “Can this be done without a computer?” … … … Seriously?  Did you EVEN READ THE GUIDE?! Did you watch the video that I linked?  No?  Well that’s why you have a question.  The whole process is about running a script on a computer that allows ADB commands to be run.  Sure, you could probably run ADB commands locally on the Android device, if you had root. The guide is about getting root though.

   The part that has me ornery:  Seriously, people, please: just take a few minutes and read the instructions before you start asking questions.  The guide talks about setting up ADB drivers on your computer.  It talks about running a batch file on your computer.  Therefore: No, this cannot be done without a computer.  And because you’re too lazy to read you’re now going to be publicly shamed on the very blog you came to ask for help on.  Because I’m ornery today.  And you’re an idiot.
   
   I’ve included a screenshot, for posterity.

4. Credit Card fees.  We all know them, and let’s face it: we’ve just come to accept it at this point.  $2.029/gallon for Credit.  $1.979/gallon for Cash.  $46.50 for your annual car registration. Oh wait, you’re paying online (avoiding the line and wasting someone’s time at the already crazy busy DMV [never will I ever call it the MVC])?  $48.00.  $1.50 to not stand in line at the DMV and deal with the people there is a small price to pay, I suppose.  But it isn’t $1.50 to do it online.  It’s $1.50 to use your credit card.

   The part that has me ornery: Cash should be dead by now.  It isn’t, and that’s OK.  That being said: funds transfers are bits on a wire.  It doesn’t cost you $1.50 to process that credit card purchase.  It doesn’t.  Don’t even try to tell me that it does.  Because it doesn’t.  You just want more money.  BAD.  Naughty.  Downright asshole-ish.  Credit card usage fees should be bullshit.  Money is money.  I’m saving you the hassle of dealing with cash.  You swipe my card, money is gone from my account and appears in your account.  The system works.  Why should I be penalized for not carrying cash?  I don’t like carrying cash.  Cash offers no protection.  If I get mugged, my cash is gone with the wind.  My bank won’t offer me a refund on that cash.  If I get mugged, my credit cards are gone.  My bank / credit card company will (with police report) refund all those purchases.  Ugh.  Seriously.  Places have gotten accustomed to credit card fees now.  They ‘eat it’ which is basically a way of saying they deal with it.  You all should too.

5. Credit Card purchasing and delays and the like.  I swipe my card at the terminal.  My purchase is approved (it says so on my receipt!).  2 days later: the funds are still in my account.  There is no record of the purchase.  lolwut.jpg  It sometimes takes a full week for those transactions to appear.  I get it though, some places do batch transmission of purchases.  That is to say: you swipe your card, the machine verifies that your card is valid and that their are funds available, but does not make the purchase immediately (to save on processing fees I imagine).  Then at the end of the week or twice a week or whatever, you send out a batch of purchases in bulk.

   The part that has me ornery: I pay very close attention to my finances. I know I made the purchases *waves receipts about*.  My bank account doesn’t recognize them as being paid.  That means my accounting doesn’t match my bank’s accounting.  This… makes me twitchy.  I like when things match up. Grumble grumble.

That’s all I can think of right now.

I’m ornery today.  And that’s OK.  I am on my last day of vacation.  I am allowed to be ornery.

-M, out.

Edit 1: Spacing of ornery to make things tl;dr-able.  Also added some text.

Edit 2: Almost.

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