The only time I ever kind of enjoyed a fundraiser was when I was in Little League back in the 80’s. We sold chocolate bars. They were good - definitely made by either Nestle or Hershey, I think the latter - and had four varieties: plain, caramel, peanut, and almond. The first two were by far the most popular.
I would walk around the neighborhood with my box of candy bars and had an easy time selling them, as they were only 50 cents and were regular candy bar size. Even with multiple kids in the neighborhood in Little League, most people were happy to buy good, inexpensive candy bars.
I don’t remember if we got the first box or two for free or if we had to buy our supply, but either way, my parents were totally cool with buying a whole bunch more boxes because a) they were easy to sell, and b) if we had a lot left over, we still had yummy chocolate for not much money.
I eventually started selling at school. I would just walk the halls with my candy bar box and kids would stop me to buy some. Even teachers would buy them.
We did the magazine sales as well. One year my grandparents ordered a subscription or two - they were big readers, but I think they mainly did it to help out their grandkid. 6+ months pass and at some point they mention that they didn’t ever receive the subscription they ordered. (I’m guessing the only way they even remembered this was because they balanced their checkbook by hand and realized the check was never cashed).
I realized I had completely forgotten to hand in the packet/order forms; it still sat in a drawer at home. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of telling them this, so I think I said I turned it in and there most have been a screw-up on the part of the company administering the order. It still bugs me to this day that I told them that lol, and that was like 30 years ago.
In junior high we had to sell floating candles door to door around the neighborhood for some reason, maybe fundraising for the wrestling team or something like that. I was embarrassed to be a part of it. They were red and green and had little sparkles in them.
My dad said they “smelled like a French whore-house” which raised a lot of questions for me
The internet is such dogshit. This thing called Rufus popped up on the Amazon page for my book. It has a list of suggested questions. So I clicked a few,
Literally useless. Probably has a billion $ valuation, or $100s of millions behind it internally. It doesn’t have to work, it just has to sell investors! AI! .
My guess is it is only training on the meta-data available about the book and that it hasn’t trained on the book itself, because that is probably illegal.
Maybe I should cross-post this to the baseball thread, but holy shit the new “Voting is now open for Player of the Game!” pop-up that appears on the MLB app now every time you click into every Gamecast that’s in the 6th inning or later. And x’ing out of it once doesn’t get rid of it. If you ever leave that game and come back, it pops up again. And it basically covers up the most recent live updates in the game, which is the whole reason you clicked into Gamecast.
One of the most horrendous user-unfriendly updates I’ve ever seen in an app.
Speaking of terrible UI updates, the Twitch android app last month updated to be tiktok’d. You get autoplaying at full volume streams that you’re not following when you open it. To go to your followed streams you have to find a small button and click twice. Might be the worst UI change I’ve ever seen.
My wife and I started watching the show “From” on Amazon. It’s normally on MGM+, but I guess Amazon gets it eventually. Before each episode, there’s a trailer for the UPCOMING season. Yes, please spoil the show for me before I even watch it.
Fuck these assholes who scan every book at Goodwill and thrift stores and load up a cart to resell them at Amazon.
Had to pick my son up from school to get him to an appointment. Got in the carpool line 30 minutes early so I could be as close to the front as possible because the appointment was 15 minutes after school ends. Was next to visitors’ parking spots, so I left about a half car length gap between me and the person in front of me in case someone needed to get out of those spots. About 15 minutes later, entitled mom in a gigantic Lexus SUV cuts the line and wedges into the gap I left, leaving the ass of her vehicle hanging out into the middle lane (technically we’re only supposed to use the right lane to pick up, but everyone lines up in the left lane, too, leaving the middle for people driving through). Fuuuuuuuck you.
Companies that make software worse with a later version.
Like it takes a special kind of stubbornness and stupidity to do this. All you have to do is just roll back.
I’ve got stung twice recently.
Sonos updated and made a completely new app. Everyone hates it and it’s full of bugs and I now can’t connect my speakers. Sonos has lost millions and might go bankrupt because the new app is worse than the old one and they won’t admit it.
I use Mendeley for managing all my citations and stuff for uni.
Worked great, for literally 4 years. Never had a single problem. I had to reinstall it recently due to some password stuff, and they locked me out and made me install the new web friendly version.
Half a day unsuccessfully getting it to work, to sync to the web version, to update. Nope. Nothing.
In the end I had to scrap it completely and start from scratch with Zotero, which worked perfectly straight out of the box. And is open source as well. So fuck em, never going back
Message boards for Mendeley are full of people making similar complaints and switching away.
Like. Someone is getting paid big bucks to fuck these products, why?
I heard Sonos had already started pushing firmware to speakers for the new version which meant they couldn’t go back and were stuck with the new awful version.
It happens because they don’t have anyone looking at the product who can say no.
I think old Mendeley might have been slightly better. It was super fast.
I had an online exam to do during covid and had an hour to write an essay. With Mendeley I managed to pump out a 3000 word fully sourced full bibliography essay in that time that looked great.
This is partly ranting, but it also turned out partly hilarious.
My garage doors are connected to an app on my wireless network that lets me control them from my phone. It also has an automated setting that ensures they’re closed every night at a certain time in case we accidentally leave them open. Great system. It’s already closed the doors a couple of times when we’ve forgotten to. Easy to install. A+
Anyway, something got dorked up and I had to reset the app. Well, the app now has some type of relationship with Amazon (or is maybe even owned by Amazon?) and the app would NOT let me finish the setup without connecting to my Amazon account. So now the evil overlords at Amazon can control my garage doors if they want. Whatever. BUT this has also created a “helpful” new delivery option in my Amazon account: having the item delivered inside my closed garage rather than on my front porch. And it made this garage delivery the default delivery option.
So ever since I reset the app and created this new delivery option, I’ve had to make sure that I switched the delivery option back to “front porch” for each order. (This is very irritating, hence the ranting part.) Which I thought I had remembered to do every time…
Tonight I was sitting on the couch, and my wife and son were in the kitchen. We hear the garage door open, which is unexpected. My wife walks over and peers through the door into the garage and starts freaking out, because what she sees is an Amazon delivery person casually walk into our garage up to the door to the house, smile cheerfully at my wife, and place a package on the step. Then this person walks out, with the garage door closing immediately after.
My wife freaked the fuck out, because she had absolutely no idea about this new “deliver in the garage” option, and she thought we were being robbed by the boldest and most cheerful thief in the world. She was also super confused about how/why the cheerful thief closed the garage door behind her. That was the funny part, at least to me.