things I care about so little that writing a blog entry about them is head-spinningly contradictory

The world awaits at long last the actual physical release of Guns 'n' Roses*' new CD Chinese Democracy, whose first "single" actually exists, at least in digital form.

Can I hire the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing "so what?" for about five hours?

GNR sucked back when CDs were new, shiny, wonderful objects that would transform the music industry, and they suck even more irrelevantly now that CDs are bizarre artifacts purchased only by the elderly (why yes I did buy a handful of CDs just last week, thank you very much). Axl and his gang of idiot poseurs were always just a bunch of dunderheaded clowns laughably enacting the lamest possible rock-star clichés on and off stage, and it's been utterly mystifying to me why anyone ever gave them the slightest scintilla of cred.

And to take longer to produce a single album than it took Beethoven to write a handful of symphonies, well, it's just ridiculous. Me, I'm more hotly anticipating the release of a new left-handed flange-grip attachment to the 1947 Grimsby slide rule than I am any new GNR product.

* No, I don't know which of the apostrophes on the already-annoying "'n'" thing GNR decided, for no good reason, to omit. Multiply my not-caring about this album by god factorial, and you'll be within a few light years of my not-caring about that issue.

petty annoyances, oversensitive ears division

We're watching Season 4 of The Office (US version, obviously: the Brit version didn't have four seasons), and the thing that's bugging me? The production company's little trumpet tag at the end ("Deedle-Dee Productions") is ever so slightly out of tune with the musical tag that goes with the NBC thingy that follows, and it's like being forcefed very sour lemonade every time I hear it.

Dammit, folks: tune to the same pitch!

It was the failed Glenn Miller follow-up

In a misguided attempt to give its mapping function a bit more precision, Flickr has dragged out placenames last heard when operators plugging patch cords into a bank of bays used full names for exchanges ("Morgandale 7-8220? One moment, ma'am..."). I mean, yes: people do refer to "Bay View"...but Fernwood? Morgandale? Town of Lake? (Also: if it's anything, it's "Yankee Hill" not "Vankee Hill"...damned scanners!)

Also amusing to find out that about a mile offshore (a photo I shot on the Lake Express ferry) is "St. Francis." Always thought that burb was all wet...

advanced point-missing, pt. 3,761

Some years ago I read an article somewhere on a company whose specialization it was to clean up after grisly, violent crime scenes. I hadn't really thought of it before - but I suppose not only is there unfortunately a market for such services, it would seem to require certain kinds of specialization other than just watching Pulp Fiction too many times.

So I wasn't that surprised when, a few blocks from our house, I saw a van parked with signage painted on it indicating it belonged to such a company. The irony lies in the text of the signage, which claimed that the company's task was to help "overcome the trauma of violent death" or similar phrasing by recuperating the physical crime scene.

Okay...but did anyone stop to think that survivors of a violent crime, or suicide, etc., might not want to have such a vehicle parked outside their house thereby advertising (to passing bloggers, say) that such an event had affected their household? I don't think most such people want to put up a billboard advertising their pain; it seems ironically insensitive of this company not to recognize that.

in which the author descends to cattily dissing unnamed local minor celebrities

For all I know, he could be a really wonderful great guy in person - but a certain local art personality (whom I'm not naming, since local readers will know whom I'm talking about, and no one else will care) seems determined in his public gestures to come across as rather a dickhead.

Let's see...first, there's the grandstanding temper tantrum of closing his art gallery and resigning his leadership of a local arts organization over the approval of a bronze statue of The Fonz slated for downtown Milwaukee. Now the idea of this statue is as painfully tacky to me as it is to anyone else...but people who are confident that they do in fact live in a real city would recognize that, hey, idiots live everywhere (even in Paris or New York), and sometimes those idiots will impose their dull and inane tastes on everyone else. (Like honoring a character fictitiously from a Milwaukee whose residents speak in suspiciously Brooklyn-esque cadences.) Much smarter just to ignore it.

And now here's this guy in an interview in the local edition of The Onion's A.V. Club (which doesn't appear to exist online) proclaiming that among his latest "art" projects is that he's started smoking. Uh, okay: do something stupid, obnoxious, and harmful that no one in the world will be impressed by; call it "art," and hope there are a few suckers who'll fall for it. His other art project? "Taking pictures of [him]self in tighty-whities." Well...surely no one's ever done that before either. I really shouldn't mention the pink-dyed Dairy Queen faux-hawk, but what the hell: pink-dyed Dairy Queen faux-hawk.

I'm sorta hoping this whole thing is part of a huge performance piece: you know, "I've been acting like a big pretentious idiot and you all fell for my 'art' ha-ha."

myBandZnameIz43

Once upon a time, someone (either Don Marquis or E.E. Cummings) figured out that if you futz around with the typography of your name, it will appear more distinctive in relation to other names. This was true then - but since every teenage poet and corporate brander has come to the same conclusion, we're now faced with a situation in which non-standard typography is nearly standard.

How standard?

One of the bands whose mailing list I'm on (The Hidden Messages) entered an "unsigned band" contest sponsored by Intel. Of the 265 bands listed, nearly one-third (78) displayed their names either in ALL CAPS, all lower-case, featuring InterCapitaliZation, runtogetherasifit'soneword, or with superfluous numerals tacked8 on4. I didn't count lower-cased or all-capped entries if they appeared to be only e-mail addresses, nor did I count intercapitalization when it's standard (surnames like "McDonald") or numbers that were relevant to the makeup of the act (such as the Bob Smith 3 if it had three members).

The breakdown:

All caps: 12
Non-standard lower-casing: 25
Non-standard intercapitalization: 9
Words run together: 23
Superfluous numerals: 9

There are some double-dippers. I think the champion is an act called (take several aspirin now; wait until they take effect to read on) ill-a-noiZe. They should have been "ill-a-noiZ3" if they'd wanted the crown for real, though.

two annoying consequences of computer graphics

Both of these have more to do with lazy humans than with computers - so please, take me off any Luddite mailing lists you might just have added me to, thank you.

Onward:

1. The same damned cheesy fonts everywhichwhere. Once upon a time, your small-business owner who didn't have a whole bunch of money to hire an expensive graphic artist, but who needed a sign, could probably still afford to hire a sign painter - or take the DIY approach. While the quality of the resulting work would obviously vary, at least the results (even if the business owner was a lame-ass letterer) would be distinctive, not the same cookie-cutter set of fonts now available to any business owner who can afford a computer.

2. Pixelation. This results when dull humans blow up a low-res image to a scale it was never intended to be viewed at. Quite often, there's probably a higher-res version available - but you know, you can just blow it up, and hey who'll notice that it looks like crap? Other than anyone with eyes, that is.

The upside of this is it's easy to tell the level of damn-giving a business (or individual) has. Papyrus font, pixelated graphics (especially if they're clip-art of the lamest sort), and a handful of missing or misplaced apostrophes: either the folks who put this together just don't care, or they're so insensitive to the effect that whatever they're selling, you can be sure they're not paying attention to quality there, either.

things that are good enough

I suppose that under the cancer-like rules of capitalism, things that stay the same and don't constantly grow and change are doomed to obliteration...but you know, sometimes things work perfectly fine and don't need changing. Not a major issue here yet, but...I've noticed that Flickr apparently is getting itchy about being associated with photos. Kinda odd, given its name, but...two examples: I have RSS feeds for the photostreams of several of my "contacts." At one point, the default label for these was "X's photos"...which has the advantage, if things align automatically in alphabetical order, of letting you know whose pictures you're about to look at even if the right margin of the reader window (I'm using Sage, a Firefox extension, and that's how it's laid out) cuts off the end of the phrase. Then Flickr changed it to "Photos from X," which has the disadvantage of cutting off the key part of the info: whose photos the link leads to. And now, Flickr's gotten even more vague: the ones I've updated or added most recently say merely "Uploads from X." "Uploads"? Am I interested in "uploads"? No: I want to see what photos people have taken lately. That's why I'm going to Flickr, dummies. Another indicator that Flickr's preparing to broaden its scope: its map feature used to say something like "Y photos taken here" for any given area of the map visible in the screen. Now it says "Y things here." "Things"? I'm not looking for "things," I'm curious where your photos were taken. Yeesh.

bonus points for ubergeeky opening clause

In the Buffyverse, demons and vampires generally shun Halloween as being a pathetic excuse for humans to lamely pretend to be all evil-like and to rehearse the most clichéd stereotypes about demons, monsters, etc.

So, uh, Happy St. Patrick's Day. I hope no one thinks I'm too much of a monster if I stay home tonight, kick back, and enjoy a few rounds of online kitten poker. (I won't argue with a beer or two, though.)

driving suggestion

We have left-turn only lanes, HOV-only lanes...I think a truly useful innovation would be lanes reservedly exclusively for assholes. Think of it: how often have you been driving along, obeying the rules of the road and paying attention to your kind fellow traveler, when some moron in the sort of vehicle that causes penis-enhancement-pill salespeople to salivate does something...well, utterly assholey? All the time, right?

Today, for example: I'm on my way home, when I remember that I need to buy medicine for my poor sick mama at the local general store, and so I thoughtfully signal to move into the right lane, which is for right turns, and then on the green arrow I make the right turn into the rightmost lane.

Which is when some large ballcap-wearing guy in a huge pickup truck that's never seen a lick of hauling comes nearly straight up my ass like he's reenacting some nature documentary, with his horn blaring honking and his middle finger all a-flip. And it came to me, in a flash: this should be the ASSHOLE ONLY LANE. The right lane for people who just turned left? That's the ASSHOLE ONLY LANE. The two-inches-to-spare between you and the parked car zip into the abandoned parking lane to jet past you at the just-turned-green light so as to gain ten extra feet to immediately turn right into the strip mall with the hubcap store, Wal-Mart, and Viagra wholesaler? That's the ASSHOLE ONLY LANE.

I'm sure we can designate more lanes for those benighted with Advanced Asshole Syndrome (or "AAS" - which, I'm pretty sure, is by sheerest coincidence Swedish for "flatulent anus").

UPDATE: Plagiaristic Onion bastards!

petty pet

As I have a significant menagerie of pet peeves, I will follow Flasshe's example and occasionally vent examine their sociological significance.

I have nothing against paying whatever a restaurant wants to charge for its menu items. The prices are listed; if I think they're too outrageous, I can choose to go elsewhere. But in addition to what's listed, certain assumptions come along with the dining experience...and if a restaurant is going to do things differently from those prevailing assumptions, it ought to both have a good reason for doing so and be sure its customers know about it.

For whatever reasons, in the last five to ten years, nearly every restaurant has gone over to the endless-refill model where soft drinks are concerned. One exception is fast-food places that have the fountains behind the counter...but even there, many of them offer refills free or at a nominal charge. Your typical fast-food or fast-casual restaurant nowadays has the soda fountain out on the floor, where customers can fill and refill beverages themselves. Even most sit-down places will refill your soda for free, many times without asking, many times taking away a quarter-full glass just for their own convenience. How can they afford to do this? Having worked one summer for Pepsi delivering their product, I know that the answer is: because soda is dirt-cheap, particularly the fountain variety. Restaurants are still making good profits on beverages, and it's to their benefit to keep customers happy by offering free refills.

So what's the problem with the few holdouts? The other day I was at a place, and as usual, when my diet Coke or whatever was empty, the server returned, asked me whether I wanted another one, and went off and returned with a second soda. So it was slightly irksome when I look at the bill and find that this is one of these places that still charges for every individual soda. It's not as if I can't afford the addition two bucks - but I can't escape the impression that, knowing as the place must that most restaurants nowadays do not charge for additional sodas, the quick service on the second soda is a way of driving up the bill - and along with it, profits. It'd be one thing if this place were charging some superlow price for soda - but as I said, it was a fairly typical two dollars. I didn't say anything about it - I'm not that cheap - but hey, it's just a little bit annoying, and a small little addition to my collection of peeves.

gaah!

I still refuse to accept the annoying set of words formed along the lines of "thirtysomething" (i.e., "twentysomething" etc.), after the now-decades-old TV show and for some reason utterly beloved of hack journalists everywhere. The world got along just fine for centuries without a word ending in "-something" to describe the general age of people: "in their twenties," "in their late thirties," and so on. (Side question: is age always even relevant? We're addicted to generation-mania...see the related and annoying trend of vague generational names...)

And now the producers of the old Thirtysomething TV show (I'm just a puddle of peeves today: yep, I'm refusing to lower-case the name of the show...) are back with a new series, to be called Quarterlife (no points if you guessed that it, too, is supposed to be lower-cased) and dealing with the oh-so-traumatic maunderings of a bunch of folks in their early to mid-twenties.

Oh joy - now pop-sociology -loving journalists will have a new term, and a new phenomenon, to bluntly hit us over the head with: not enough for there to be a "midlife crisis," no; now we need a "quarterlife" crisis as well.

Grr.

I am going to go search YouTube for videos of cute kitties to calm myself down for a while.

let's visit the peeve zoo!

Today's entry: "security questions" at websites (such as for credit cards) that ask you personal questions which do not have a unique answer, or whose actual, real, correct answer cannot be used because of a dumbass requirement that the answer have a certain number of characters.

Sorry, but questions like "who is your favorite singer?" and "what's your favorite restaurant?" are terrible "security questions"...because their answers will change over time, and it's very difficult to recall, several years later, what you might have answered years ago. (At least that's true if you know lots of singers or eat out frequently.)

Worse yet, then you choose an option whose answer you're reasonable certain to remember ("what was the first name of your childhood best friend?"; "what was the first name of the boss at your first job?"), and then you can't use them due to the character-number requirement. Sorry - but if someone's name is "Don" or "Li" and no one in the entire universe ever called them "Donald," or there is no longer version of the name, the question is ruled out.

So, in recently filling out one of these in order to pay a card online, it's iffy odds whether I'll remember how I answered whatever their idiot questions were.

Are there people who think the answer to "favorite restaurant" is actually a constant?

Where's the hipster vat?

It defies genetic probability that not just a "look" - clothing, hairstyles - but an entire body type would somehow become more prominent and popular in the wake of a trend...yet walk around any town's hipster ghetto, and I swear there's a secret underground laboratory in which largish heads with larger hairstyles are propped atop stringbean bodies with no ass whatsoever, issued plastic glasses, and set loose to bitch about Kevin Barnes selling out.

shark gotta swim!

Anyone who parks at the UWM Union parking garage is aware that at many times of the day, the line extends beyond the garage's entryway onto the street - but anyone who parks there also realizes that typically, cars flow fairly quickly into the garage as other cars exit the nominally full garage, thereby letting new cars into the structure.

For some reason, last year or so, the city (I presume, since this is a city street) posted this signage:

The intent is, presumably, to discourage those waiting for parking from queueing on the street.

It is an utterly asinine, pointless, and possibly dangerous policy - so far also, completely unenforced.

Any time you prohibit a behavior, you need to analyze what people are likely to do instead - and if your reason for prohibiting the behavior because it's potentially harmful, you should not prohibit it if the likely alternative behavior is more harmful. (Attention: anti-drug zealots...) In this case, I can't see what possible harm is caused by vehicles queueing on the street: there's no parking there, no bus stop there, and no pedestrian crosswalks in the area (other than, of course, the sidewalk vehicles have to cross to get to the entryway proper). The only offense I can imagine is against the Teutonic rage for order that also motivates Milwaukee's annoying night parking ordinances (certainly, those ordinances are not used to allow the city to remove snow from street parking areas overnight...), but that hardly seems like a very compelling reason.

Okay, so if the "no waiting" rule were strictly enforced, what would people do instead? Well, they still need to find a place to park (the sign suggesting the use of the new Pavilion lot is well-intentioned...but that lot is at the very northeasterly edge of campus and quite a cold, wet, wintry walk all the way to the sciences buildings on the southwestern part of campus: not useful for all people, in other words). Aside from the Union garage (and the Pavilion), there are only a couple small surface lots and one small underground lot that allow non-permit parking for more than a couple of hours. Those are typically full, so often the Union garage is the best, central parking alternative. So, these drivers are going to either circulate around this block of campus, increasing an already serious traffic glut on those streets, or they'll hang around, sharklike, on the other side of the street. In either case they'll essentially be racing one another to get back to the lot entryway sooner than others - and of course, they'll always lose out to folks who happened to have arrived at the entryway when an opening appears. It will lead, in other words, to lots of angry, frustrated drivers circulating on overcrowded campus streets already overflowing with pedestrians. Bad idea.

Of course, one could always finesse the question of what behavior actually is prohibited by the sign. (Note: I blatantly violated it to take this photo. I stopped my car, put on the flashers, and framed and focused the shot through my windshield. No other cars were around - but I definitely plead guilty to that violation.) For example: if indeed you are in a line of cars waiting to get into the garage, at what point does the slowness and occasional stopping characteristic of busy traffic turn into "waiting"? I could argue that in fact, even if I'm sitting in the same place for five minutes, I'm simply driving, stuck in a momentary traffic jam, in this lane designated for those turning into the parking garage. I certainly can't go forward - I'd crash into the car in front of me. And if I'm set to make the turn into the entryway, and there's a crush of pedestrians I have to wait for, surely they have the right of way, and I'm not "waiting" in that instance either?

Presumably, Officer Friendly, after being annoyed at my smartassery, would suggest I simply move on and drive away. Ah, but this lane is clearly marked as being only for right turns, not for through traffic: are you suggesting that I violate a law and use it for temporary driving (since I'm already in it) even though my destination would not be the right turn into the entryway? In real life, at this point I'd almost certainly get written up for whatever possible violations our long-suffering officer could come up with.

Then again, if the sign were actively enforced, that would entail officers stopping vehicles in the "no stopping, standing, waiting zone" - thereby creating exactly the clot of stopped vehicles the sign is intended to prevent. Or would someone just stand on the sidewalk, waving cars on - to meet another officer parked somewhere else who'd issue a ticket?

I seriously doubt anyone will ever be ticketed for waiting in line to get into the parking structure. If anyone gets a ticket here, it will probably be for doing what I did to take the photo: that is, actually stopping and waiting when it's possible to do otherwise. It's the conjunction of the "no waiting" signage with the obvious fact that this area is used by cars queueing to get into the parking garage that creates the problem here.

I half suspect the real intention of the signs is simply to encourage people to use the Pavilion structure...but simply putting up a sign saying that, without the warning- and rule-based signage, would violate the legalistic mindset around parking and traffic ordinances. Simply making a helpful suggestion? We can't do that. We can make up bizarre, unenforced ordinances instead, and hope people will simply interpret them right.

Seems like a waste of effort.

I don't want to know where graphic artist Jack Horner stuck his thumb to pull out this pie

I think the time has come for the formation of a new organization: Citizens Against Pie Charts. I have no idea why the media seem so addicted to them - because quite often they're eminently unsuited to their apparent task, to show the relation among various quantities of related items. And that is because people really are not good at determining relative scale between two "pieces of pie" at odd radial angles within a pie chart. A pie chart does one thing well: it shows that the various components of whatever it's measuring add up to a whole. How often is that really what needs to be known? A lot less often than pie charts are used. Probably nine times out of ten when you see a pie chart, a column graph would convey the desired information far more clearly and cleanly. But America's infographics editors have a smutty passion for the pie chart - and so its pointless reign in newspapers, business reports, and websites continues.

Here, for example, is a pie chart showing the relation among six different items. I chose the quantities somewhat arbitrarily, only making sure that some of them were rather close.

Which is larger: quantity 4, or quantity 5? Is the sum of quantities 2 and 3 larger than quantity 1? Pretty damned hard to tell, isn't it.

Now try answering the same questions, this time looking at a column graph built from the same data:



Much easier, isn't it? And if I'd wanted to, I could have color-coded those columns (I blame Excel) to make the graph a bit more interesting and the distinction among the various items more clear.

If for some reason it was also necessary to see how those items parsed out as a proportion of the whole, why not put small pie charts, each one oriented with its particular quantity's left margin straight up and down, at the bottom of each column, to show the way each item fits into the overall numbers? The graphic would be more complicated, but still much clearer than the pie chart.

Go Figure Dept.

People get bent utterly out of shape by a tenth-second, 25-pixel glimpse of bare nipple on TV, flapping their arms wildly, crying "what about the children?"...yet in Wisconsin (and probably plenty of other states as well), it's perfectly okay to strap a gutted, bloody deer corpse to your car or truck and drive or park it anywhere, including where young kids get to see it.

Good luck explaining when some kid asks "what happened to Bambi?"

my favorite stamp

I really haven't seen many of the new stamps since the Postal Service needlessly complicated its pricing structure - but this one's a beauty:
Of course, the cat factor helps - but I really like that blue color anyway.

I have no idea what the point of a 26-cent stamp is, however. I suspect the Postmaster General merely set up a dartboard to determine denominations.

left foot blue, right hand green

One of the subtler, but more important, aspects of architecture has to do with creating legible, navigable space. (The second quality follows from the first.) If you walk into a space, you should be able to discern immediately how to get to wherever you want to go. And those paths should correspond to the most likely needs most users of that space are likely to have.

So, for example, when you walk into a restaurant of the counter-ordering variety, it should be immediately obvious where you go to place your order, where the menus are, where you go to get your food, drinks, napkins, etc. Those elements should be arranged in a logical order.

Here's an example of how not to do that. This image of a local restaurant is done from memory, so it's probably not 100% accurate - but it's accurate in its essentials (click to enlarge):



The dotted lines with arrows indicate one possible path through the restaurant. The heavy black dotted line indicates a portable barrier, one side of which is for people ordering salads, the other side of which is for people ordering other menu items. (And what if you or your party want both?) First problem: if you enter in the door indicated (which I did last time I was there), because of the table layout, a column in the center of the space, and that barrier, you have to circumnavigate the entirety of the restaurant (in fact, it would be quicker to go out the door and back in the other door). Then, once you've gone through the line and placed your order, you're faced with another minor quandary: there's no obvious space for people who've already ordered but are still waiting for their food. In practice, this means that when you're waiting, every other person passing you by asks whether you've ordered yet. Once your food arrives, you have to walk past the self-serve soda machine to the cash registers to pay. Once you pay and get your soda cup, you have to double back to the soda machine (which also doubles up the crush of waiting people). Finally, if you'd prefer to drink your soda with a straw, the straws are clear over on the other side of the room - once more, past the cash registers.

This place seems to have been designed in an utterly piecemeal, arbitrary fashion. Yet if the space for the soda machine (and dessert display, not shown) were simply switched with the cash register space, almost everything would make sense and flow smoothly: order food, get food, pay for food, get beverage, get straws and napkins, go to table.

Another thing about that barrier: the logic is that it takes the staff longer to make sandwiches than to give customers the (pre-made) salads. Okay, fine. But the signage indicating where people should line up leaves something to be desired. At the end of the barrier there's a sign, about three feet tall by two feet wide, telling people which side of the barrier is for salads and which is for other stuff. But perhaps in an effort to avoid the clumsy look of a big sign standing upright directly past an entrance, the sign was tilted downward about 60 degrees. This made it pretty legible if you were right in front of it - but approaching from any side (and given its position relative to one entrance, and with the other entrance requiring that roundabout approach), it wasn't very visible. This explained why several customers ended up in the wrong line - and in fact, part of that was that only one or two of them wanted salad, while the majority wanted sandwiches etc. - and so, new people coming in and not seeing the sign naturally went into the shorter line. And of course, if they passed that sign without seeing it, they'd have no way of knowing they were in the wrong line. This led to confusion among the folks working the counter, since they were expecting salad orders and getting sandwich orders instead.

I think the salads should be somewhere near where the soda machine is now, between the sandwich-ordering area and where the cash registers should be - so while sandwich people are waiting for their orders, salad people could merely go up, order their salads (which, being pre-made, could just be handed to them), and go pay for them directly. Other places allow this sort of thing to be handled intuitively by customers: one person at the bagel shop is ordering a dozen mixed bagels and a sandwich that has to be made up, the other person who just wants to grab a chocolate chip cookie just goes ahead of the ordering area and grabs a cookie, placed next to the cash register, then pays for it and is gone before the complicated order is done being made.

Jumpin' Jack Flash

It strikes me as bizarrely ironic that at the same time everyone's all a-tizzy over "identity theft," credit card companies and businesses that use credit cards are making it disturbingly easy to use credit cards - whether it happens to be your credit card or someone else's. A lot of so-called "fast casual" restaurants will swipe your card without a signature or PIN, as will most gas stations. And of course there are those ads on TV implying that the dullardly deadweights who use grubby, disgusting cash are a positive drain on efficiency, a blasphemous assault against our national religion of wham-bam-charge-it-ma'am.

Or, we can just try to entrap you into driving away from the gas station without paying. That happened to me this afternoon. I need to fill up the gas tank, so I hook up the gas pump to the car's tank, slide my debit card in the reader, select which gas I want, wait for the tank to process the card (i.e., to read "0.00"), and fill up my tank with gas. Once I'm done, I notice that the receipt printer is apparently out of paper, since I don't get a receipt. No big deal: I know there's enough money in my account to cover it, and I can look up the amount later at my bank's website. Fortunately for my criminal record, however, I had to use the restroom, so I went into the store to do so. On the way out, I realized I was kind of thirsty, so I picked up a bottle of Diet Pepsi.

"Is that all?" says the cashier. "Yeah," I say - and then remember I didn't get a receipt. "Oh - and I need a receipt for pump 5." At which point the cashier informs me that actually, the pump hadn't accepted my card. "Uh, so how did the pump work then?" Oh, because I put the pump in my car before I slid my card into the reader, the reader was disconnected.

WTF? So if I hadn't happened to have used the restroom and bought a soda, I would have driven away, assuming I'd put about thirty bucks on my debit card. And some random cop would chase me down, and I'd have to explain the whole damned thing...that would have been big fun.

I've never heard of such a ridiculous system. I'm guessing this place is going to get a massive number of accidental drive-offs...and people who eventually discover, hey, that transaction never showed up on my debit card. Free gas!