Author / Winter Wallaby

by Winter Wallaby

Your call is very important to us [OT]

When I’m on hold, if they play some bland, inoffensive music, I can put my headset on, and ignore it for hours, as I work, read e-mails, etc… A long wait can be a little annoying, but it’s not really a big deal.

If they interrupt the music to tell me “your call is very important to us” I can’t ignore the interruption. Having a person “talking” to me jolts me to attention, and disrupts me from whatever else I’m trying to do. It doesn’t make me feel like my call is important to them; it just makes me more aware of how long I’ve been on hold, and increases my annoyance. And if I’m on hold for 45 minutes, and the music is interrupted every 35 seconds to tell me that my call is very important to them, that shifts from annoying to maddening. (You may begin to guess that these numbers are not arbitrary, but based on a recent experience.)

Anyway, this is not (just) a rant, but a genuine question: What’s the point of interrupting the call like that? Is my reaction atypical? It seems “obvious” that this is annoying, and will not endear the company to me. But almost every company in the world does it (albeit not with 35 second intervals), and it would be easy enough not to, so my guess is that there’s some logic behind it that I’m not seeing.

by Winter Wallaby

Covid consistency

Some comics completely ignore the new post-coronavirus world, continuing on as if nothing had changed. Some comics consistently reflect the new post-coronavirus world.

But some comics are inconsistent, sometimes acting as if they’re in a world with a pandemic, and sometimes acting as if they’re in a world without. And sometimes they’re even inconsistent within a single strip. For example:

Dagwood goes to work every day without a mask, as if there’s no coronavirus. That’s fine. But in what conceivable world, with or without COVID, does his boss plan an in-person Halloween party, but change it to a Zoom party at the last minute?

Send in your single worst offender for a comic that’s inconsistent in it’s treatment of coronavirus. Here, we mean a single daily strip that’s inconsistent within its panels on a single day, not one that’s just inconsistent between different days. Include “coronovirus inconsistency” in the e-mail title.

Comments are turned off in this post to save the discussion until we get the actual comics.

by Winter Wallaby

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, November 8th, 2020

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Both from Andréa.

A Halloween left-behind LOL.

If only!

In case you didn’t know, the “Nick and Zuzu” comic panels run as accompaniment to an advice column by Carolyn Hax. Sometimes they really depend on the writing and are totally CIDU without it. Other times, the comic is quite independent of the column which sparked it; and that is the case here. And the cartoons appear elsewhere, where the column is not available or even mentioned, such as GoComics.

But in case you are interested:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/advice/carolyn-hax-how-to-tell-dad-that-you-want-to-dispense-with-the-unpleasantries/2020/11/05/f85f3d90-1578-11eb-bc10-40b25382f1be_story.html