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Feedback sent to Staples

Apr 26th, 2017
by Craig.
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Staples makes my head square and my face red! Art by SumiTomohiko: https://openclipart.org/user-detail/SumiTomohiko

Staples makes my head square and my face red!

I’ve been using Staples more than usual for about the last year for various reasons, and one of the things I’ve been doing is making signs for a noticeboard. For this I generally want something printed in black ink on coloured paper; nothing fancy, but not plain, white paper. However, unsurprisingly (I suppose) Staples doesn’t offer coloured paper on their self-service machines, so of course I go to the desk … for which I do expect to pay a bit more, considering I’m dealing with a paid employee.

However, what I don’t expect is a bureaucratic nightmare! Below is what I’ve just submitted to their survey system, although (to rub salt into the wound) I don’t qualify for their freebie draw because my order total was less than $20. (However, I had to scan the fine print to catch that.)

In order to get three copies on coloured paper your employee had to do four pages of paperwork that took more time than it would have taken to do the job. I realise you can’t have as many employees as you have customers, but the bureaucracy involved in your typical “quick” job would make a government bureaucrat blush with envy.

On top of that my “express” job couldn’t be done right away, and I was told it would take an hour and a half! However, within five minutes of my arriving back home a few minutes later I got a call saying my job was ready. If I had known it would only take that long I’d have returned after doing my other errand in the area.

And further, your employee told me that the express charge was an additional 30%, but when I showed up to collect my order it turned out the express charge was 2825% — yes, two thousand eight hundred and twenty-five per cent — of the base charge!

This is not my first experience like this. It’s always like this with simple orders, but I’ve had enough and decided it’s about time I said something.

SIMPLY PUT, you need a better way of dealing with orders that take less time than it takes to do the paperwork. This is just bloody stupid.

Bloody ridiculous indeed! I did time the process on a previous occasion and I think it literally took two minutes — 120 seconds — from the time the employee started talking to me to the time I walked away with my paid-for copies. But if they screw around with four pages(!) of paperwork it of course takes much longer, and so it’s no wonder they can’t do small jobs right away and have to charge an “express” fee. I went into Staples late one evening a few months ago, interrupted the kid checking her social media, and still had to pay an “express” fee! (I believe that was the occasion on which I timed the whole process.)

Staples, train your employees to differentiate between small jobs that can be done in a matter of seconds and stuff that will actually take longer to do than it takes to do the paperwork. It’s not that hard. People with small, quick jobs like me will be happy to be out of your hair in minutes, and the guy over there waiting for his thousand copies won’t have any reason to complain if the employee is off at another machine doing my three copies while his are still printing.

“Shedule” versus “Skedule”

Aug 23rd, 2016
by Craig.
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Having been challenged about this yet again recently and still not having much more to offer than the stunning revelation than that the English language is full of exceptions to rules — because, really, it’s not a surprise or a big deal to me that different people in or from different parts of the world pronounce things differently — I decided to do some research.

The tired old comparison is to the word “school”. “Why don’t you pronounce it ‘shool’?” goes the typical witty refrain. Really? That’s your best argument for why I’m supposedly pronouncing the word “schedule” incorrectly? Why are there two pronunciations and three meanings of the word “desert”? Why ask me? Who died and left me in charge of making the rules of the English language and ensuring that every word conforms without exception?!

Sometimes it amuses me the number of Canadians who simply don’t realise the extent to which they are influenced by American English, even when the closest thing we have to an official guide north of the border — the Gage Canadian Dictionary — goes against American wisdom and sides with British norms. It’s a sad result of our proximity to the States, Hollywood, and American dominance in certain other areas — such as the default settings for spellcheckers in software created by American companies, not the least of which is Microsoft. (Although, maddeningly, my copy of Mozilla Firefox keeps reverting to United States English unbidden!) But distance does not save even the British themselves — and others like South African, Indian and south Pacific speakers of English — from the grubby hands of “Pax Americana”.

You may or may not be aware that the English language contains a vast number of loanwords. According to a couple of impeccable sources (one an answer on the collaborative English Language & Usage “Stack Exchange” addressing a bizarre question about class in the UK, and the other a British blogger living in the US), the British “shed” pronunciation is influenced by either French or German, while the American “sked” pronunciation is influenced by the Greek origin of the word. A slightly more impeccable source is the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which lists both pronunciations with a preference for “shedule”, and indicates that the word comes to us from Greek via Latin and French. (No mention of German.) There you have it; foreign influences in our pristine, flawless, rule-bound English language! Who would have thunk it?! (Don’t tell the morons responsible for this nonsense!)

OK, now that you’ve taken in the enormity of the difficulties involved in adopting foreign words into “our” language, learn to accept that there are understandable regional differences in spelling and pronunciation. My background means that I often pronounce and spell words the British way and pepper my speech with Afrikaans loanwords, but put me in the company of people who are from the places where I grew up and they’ll tell me that I have an “American” accent and use “weird” terminology. I can’t win. And actually, I like that. I’m not one who wants to be like the rest of the crowd. I’m almost tempted to use “skedule” in their company!

Speaking of which, in my dim and distant past when I briefly worked towards a career in the aviation industry, I did actually occasionally refer to a “sked”, aviation argot (another loanword pronounced as the original French) for a “scheduled flight”. Referring to one as a “shed” would have just been weird.

Anyway, getting back to the aforementioned Gage Canadian Dictionary, it offers both “skedule” and “shedule” as correct pronunciations of the word, in that order. And in case you’re so unimaginative that “school” is the only comparable word that you can come up with, my Concise Oxford Dictionary lists 86 words that start with “sch”. Some of those are compound words and phrases, but here are a few that are unquestionably pronounced using “sh”: schist, schlep, schlock, schlub, schlump, schmaltz, schmear, schmo, schmooze, schmuck, schnapps (yum!), schnauzer (woof!), schorl and schuss.

Now, how did you learn to pronounce those in shool?

Fucking Microsoft

Nov 12th, 2011
by Craig.
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I hate it when software interrupts my day to tell me that I should download the latest and greatest version. I hate it even more when I must reboot to finish the installation or — when I have 37 million tabs open — Firefox tells me it must be restarted.

So whenever Windows tells me that updates are ready to be installed (I don’t allow anything to be installed without my reviewing the details first), I ignore that until I am ready to reboot. Why? (The full reasoning will become crystal clear in a moment.) Because despite the laughable assertion in the description of every Microsoft security update that the machine “may” need to be rebooted, the fact is that Microsoft is entirely incapable of updating any part of its operating system without requiring that the machine be rebooted.

But today there was one out-of-band security update that, based on its description, I figured shouldn’t require a reboot. So I let the update go ahead. Sure enough, a reboot was required. However, as is usually the case, I was busy and had a lot of stuff open and on the go, so I selected the option to reboot later.

And this is why I never do that: Because every few minutes you get this annoying, in-your-face pop-up that “helpfully” reminds you that you need to reboot. Combine that with the fact that I have my mouse pointer configured to “snap to” the default button in a dialogue box, and the fact that Microsoft “helpfully” makes the “reboot now” button the default button, and you have a recipe for disaster. Somehow I managed to avoid clicking the “reboot now” button for several hours, but eventually it popped up just at the instant I was clicking somewhere else on the screen.

Result: Machine reboots, and all of my work disappears in a puff of smoke.

Now, fortunately I didn’t lose much — I’m an obsessive ctrl-esser — but I did lose some text I was entering into a textarea on a web page. It could have been worse.

One thing I have noticed about the OpenOffice.org office suite is that, when a dialogue box pops up, the mouse pointer snaps to the middle of the dialogue, not the default button, and this is even for ones that you’re expecting. So I have to move the pointer a few pixels rather than just clicking on the default button; not a big deal, it’s close enough. On the other hand, it’s a big deal when your machine suddenly reboots as you helplessly watch all of your work swirl around the drain.

Bill? Are you listening?