Rogers, You're Such a Jackass

Today Eric called Rogers to try to deal with a problem I had:

Rogers: Rogers Customer Service, how may I help you?

Eric: Hi, my son threw my wife's iPhone 3GS on the floor and the screen cracked. Is there anything you can do for me?

Rogers: Let me check...I'm sorry sir, but your wife isn't eligible for a hardware upgrade. I can't help you, but you can purchase a new iPhone 4 for $749.

Eric: No thank you, goodbye.

He then hung up and immediately called back.

Rogers: Rogers Customer Service, how may I help you?

Eric: Can you please put me through to the Cancellation Department?

Rogers: Yes, please hold.

(music music)

Rogers: Rogers Cancellation Department, how may I help you?

Eric: Hi, I would like to cancel my wife's wireless phone plan.

Rogers: What is the reason?

Eric: My son threw my wife's iPhone 3GS on the floor and the screen cracked.

Rogers: All right sir...well, we would like to keep your wife as a customer. You can purchase a new iPhone 4 for a discounted price of $269 to replace the one that's broken.

Eric: Okay.

Spontaneous Haiku:

You hold the power

It doesn't need to make sense

Ha ha ha Rogers

Thanksgiving Parenting Fail: Dylan Doesn't Share

For the last five years, we've been building a tradition of having a Thanksgiving dinner with our friends at our place. It used to be a ridiculously cramped gathering in our little condo. There was always more food than conceivably necessary, and nowhere to sit. People would be forced to sit cross-legged on the floor balancing plates piled dangerously high with food and gravy. We would make the organic turkey, and our friends would bring everything else. One year, there were so many people that we ran out of Thanksgiving-type foods for people to bring so one guy brought butter chicken and naan. But I digress.

This year was a smaller group due to people being on honeymoons and vacations, but Dylan's friend Cameron came with her parents Jordan and Lindsey, and her baby brother Preston. Cameron was born two months before Dylan, so she's one of the closest in age friends he has.

The trouble started early. We were trying to psyche Dylan up for the party early in the day so we told him about how all his favourite grown-ups were going to be coming, and also his friend Cameron! We enthused about how Cameron is so nice and fun, and that he and Cameron were going to have a great time together. He looked at us suspiciously. He knew there was going to be a catch. We told him that when Cameron came, they could play and Dylan would share his toys. Dylan is not good at sharing.

Dylan: "No. No! NO! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Then he ran around like he was having a seizure and had a meltdown screaming fit.

Our friends arrived, people sat around chatting and waiting for dinner. Finally, Cameron got bored and asked if there were any fun toys. Cameron's mom said reasonably and innocuously, "Why don't you ask Dylan where his toys are?"

Dylan: "No. No! NO! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Then he ran around like he was having a seizure and had a meltdown screaming fit. It lasted a really long time. It was highly embarrassing.

I'm a pretty firm believer that there's no such thing as bad children, just bad parents. So it would appear that we suck.

Sorry, friends.

iHate You

I sign up for those group savings sites. So far, I get emails daily from Groupon, WagJag, FabFind, and LivingSocial. I've purchased two deals, one was a voucher for a burger meal at some gourmet burger place downtown that uses non-conventional beef, and one was a $50 voucher for Gap but you paid $25 for it.

Maybe you're already aware of this, but today FabFind posted a HUGE deal: they were offering a limited number of Apple iPads for $10. That's a 98% savings! I got pretty excited when I saw it in my mailbox this morning, and I called Eric at work to tell him to keep an eye on it. I wasn't the only one who got excited because predictably, their server crashed all to hell with all the people scrambling to get on it. Eric and I certainly did our best to maintain the chaos by keeping open four tabs each and refreshing them constantly.

We didn't get an iPad, and I'm not too surprised or disappointed about it. I was running after two kids all day, and Eric was leaving work to come home just as the FabFind site was fixed and ready to go live. This isn't a rant about my sense of self-righteous entitlement to a $10 iPad.

FabFind sold all but one iPad, and that last one they gave away for free in a Facebook contest. You had to go on their Facebook page and write why you felt you deserved the free iPad and the person who got the most votes would win. Here's what I would have written, if I had been able to sit down at the computer for long enough:

"Because I was so excited about this, iPeed."

I thought it was quite clever, and it still makes me giggle. I also voted for Eric's Aunt Sandra who wrote:

"Because an iPad is way more fun than a maxipad."

The leader for a long time was this guy:

"Because I'm having a very hard time uploading apps to my invisible iPad."

I like these responses. They're fun and light and appropriate. Besides, it really comes down to who has the most loser friends sitting around doing nothing but checking Facebook and responding favourably to your begging them to vote for you in this contest.

Some responses were stupid. These were the ones where people complained that they deserved the iPad because they had spent all day refreshing their screens when they should have been working. Which hello, that's what everyone was doing. That's not original or deserving. That's annoying. Some people were boring and talked about how it would help them in school or work, or how they wanted it to give to someone for a gift. Some were really sanctimoniously irritating, and talked about selling it and donating the money to charity. Bleh.

But the worst, THE WORST were the people with sob stories.

"I deserve the iPad because my son was recently diagnosed with juvenile diabetes."

What?! I'm going to guess you're fat. The last thing you or your son needs is an iPad. What you both probably need is some good nutritional counselling and a gym membership.

"I think I deserve an iPad because of the epic run of bad luck that I've had lately. Illness, unemployment, potential homelessness. Yeah. :/"

Are you sure you're having bad luck, or maybe you just suck at life? Either way, it doesn't entitle you to an iPad. And if you're potentially going to be homeless, what are you going to do with the damn thing anyway? Are you going to write "Spare some change, God Bless" on it and be the hippest panhandler in town? By the way, this is the person who's currently in the lead, and it looks like she might win. So keep an eye out for a homeless girl with an iPad. She's probably too ill to fight you if you try to take it from her.

"I'm having major surgery next month and won't see my 3 kids for a few days : ( I want an easy way to stay in touch with them. Please vote."

Why...aren't your kids coming to visit you?

"I deserve an iPad because my 38 year old husband died during a nap about a year ago. I fell asleep with his breath on my neck and his arm around me, and when I woke up he was gone."

This was by far the worst one. It actually wasn't even on the vote list, because this woman couldn't get it to post. I think that was because the instructions said to limit your answer to 140 characters, and hers was so long she posted it in a two-part wall post on FabFind's Facebook Wall page. It went on and on about how her family scammed her out of $300,000 and she couldn't collect her husband's something something because she was collecting unemployment and the government was screwing her and she was suffering from PTSD and now she's living with said family who don't love her...it was really uncomfortable and awkward. And here's my rant: this is inappropriate and gross. Why are people using their horrible life tragedies to try to win an iPad? If all of this is true, then this woman probably deserves my sympathy, but she just gets my appalled disgust. I wonder how her late husband would feel about this? He dies a sad early death, and she tries to leverage his passing to get a free iPad. On Facebook.

All in all, I quite enjoyed today's FabFind diversion. And people are stupid.

For Roslyn

Wow, my last post was last December!

My friend Roslyn very nicely hounded me on Facebook today to blog something. My typing fingers were itching, so I thought why not? I'm going to blog something.

Quick update: We had another baby boy in June. We named him Lee, it's easy for Chinese people to pronounce. I expelled him from my person naturally at home, and it was an amazing transcendent experience. And my vagina suffered no tearing! Which is excellent seeing as I tore about an inch and a half while expelling Dylan. Lee looks nearly identical to Dylan except he's fatter and rounder and more smiley.

We've mostly gotten used to living way way far from the city in our slice of suburban hell, and we've managed not to rip down the house yet.

Dylan started preschool in September and I'm not sure he likes it. At the very least, he's very dramatic about being dropped off and picked up, though the teachers assure me that he has a fine time in between. He better start liking it soon, it's not okay to not like school in this house. We're Asian like that.

Eric and I are the same, we celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary this summer. Time flies when you're having babies! The difference is we're totally skinny again, Eric especially. I still have wobbly thighs, and my stomach is a sad sagging wrinkly mass of despair. But I'm about 4lbs away from my wedding weight. It rocks, yo. I thought I was going to be a fat tubbelard forever.

And that's the update! I'm going to write an actual post about an actual thing immediately following this. Stay tuned.