There, cleaned house a bit.

Straightened up the blog a little bit, should get less spam now also. Don't really have anything important to say(shocker...) but I figure I should at least push the last old post out of the way so it's all recent stuff on the main page.

I guess while I am typing this, I'll comment on one of the silliest, yet oddly captivating, gameshows that I've ever seen. NBC has a new gameshow called Deal or No Deal, pretty simple title and that fits the "thinking" that is involved in the show. You pick a briefcase out of 26, each having a dollar value between 1 penny and 1 million dollars, they are set amounts(though randomized each contestant) so they have a list to cross out dollar values as they are revealed. They keep revealing the amounts in the remaining cases and as the odds go up or down that the player's case will have a high dollar amount in it, they offer him or her money to "Sell" them the case, they do this "deal or no deal" thing every few cases. Requires no thought or skill, 100% luck basically. Silly show, yet for some asinine reason I watched a whole episode tonight. I'm ashamed to admit that and I feel as though the process has cost me some braincells(not that I have any to spare) but I just couldn't change the channel! I can't imagine watching more than a couple episodes of it before you get tired of Howie Mandel saying the same things each time or the people relying on their family(which makes no sense since it's all random)for support, calling out numbers to reveal...at least they didn't give people a lifeline to call..."Uh...go for 22 I guess?"

This one goes out to a special gal out there, she knows who she is...

So at the beginning of this past summer, the series Big Brother 6 started on CBS, a definite guilty pleasure for myself and a lot of bored people during the summer months. The show follows 10-15 people in a house, doing various chores and contests, voting each other out until they determine a "winner" who gets $500k. It's not exactly interesting for the contests but moreso for the contestants and how they react to each other and their surroundings(plus the t&a factor, some nice hot ladies this season) and it's more of a study on the human condition(and their boobs...)

This season of big brother was a little slow the first week or so, but started taking off bigtime and for the first season so far, it *really* felt like a battle of 2 set sides, both vying for attention. In previous seasons, there were hidden alliances and such, and that's to be expected. In this season, the alliance lines were known openly and they would openly trade barbs in the house, calling each other whores, sluts, and so-on. This made it very entertaining, but eventually the more interesting(both personality-wise and body-wise) got voted out and the less popular of the 2 sides(as shown through internet voting) won out, two of their own made it to the final 2. So it was basically boring, then good, then sucky(kind of like a good massage...)

I subscribe to the internet live feeds during each season of big brother, it's usually 20 or 30 bucks for 3 months of entertainment, I get plenty of use out of it so it's like an extra mmo during the summer months, yay. This season the feeds didn't add a whole lot, not much sex or nudity and the show put on most of the best parts during the tri-weekly episodes, so I could probably have saved the money this year. The live feeds are done through Real Networks Realplayer, an annoying program that tries to do much too much and take over your system, plus it has several annoying features like auto-updating that are a pain to disable. You can sign up for the live feeds online with them, easy as pie, but to cancel them you *must* call them, herein lies the "best" part of this story.

I can almost see why they'd want you to call them, I'm sure that there are people out there who forget or just aren't able to call and Real manages to make some extra money off of them, and they can try to wow you with "special offers" and such also. I just find it a pain in the ass though, I know aol does it also and I didn't like it then, and when I first was telling the story to people, they mentioned a couple other companies doing the same thing. The two things I learned from calling customer support at Real were that they outsource their help to India or Pakistan and that the people there are sometimes as bad at their job as a lot of the customer support I get in this country.

First call to customer support at Real got me a guy who apparently couldn't hear me very well, I could hear him crystal clear and hadn't had problems with other people hearing me, but maybe it was their phone lines. Took me about 5 attempts to spell my account info before he said he got it. At that point I told him I wanted him to cancel my account, he said(in his very thick accent) "ok, want anything else?" and upon saying no, the conversation ended without him trying to get me to stay or at least asking me why I was canceling. I've gotten these live feeds in the past a couple times, I know how Real support is supposed to act when you cancel your , I knew he was either a horrible employee or he just gave up trying to spell my account and just faked it all. Either way, it ate at me for about a half hour or so, I didn't want to be billed again(it was due to bill soon) and the online account status didn't show any update.

Calling customer support a second time for something so simple shouldn't ever have to happen, it's not like pressing the "cancel" button takes a phd or an mba. So after an hour or so of thinking about it, I just decided to call again. This time I got a girl who actually sounded like she belonged at a customer support call center(as opposed to the guy in the first call who was probably the janitor or something) She sounded friendly, she sounded professional, and she was able to get the job done for me. She got my account info put in, she tried to give me an offer to stay with them, she asked me why I wanted to cancel, she even asked me to consider Real again in the future. When I got off of the phone with her, I felt confident that my account would be canceled and indeed it was. Two examples of customer support, both outsourced to India or Pakistan, but one a very poor example and one a very good example.

I really embellished this story, when I originally told people the story it was when I was still pissed and rambling about it because of the poor job the first guy gave, so I was ranting about it basically. The people in voice chat right after that I told the story to just didn't appreciate me being angry about it, and for that they are all foofuses.

Hmm, damn that Toki and her new blog...

Now people are going to start looking at this suck-fest of a blog, so I need a post to knock the old crap to the archive, let's see if this works.