ravenology

Okay, first, sorry for disappearing for a few days. Second, I know I’m a few days late with this, but there was an awesome wedding to attend on Saturday and that took the whole day. Then yesterday YouTube decided to hate me so all the videos couldn’t get uploaded properly.

Anyways, was at Chermside on the day of the iPad 2 launch. For the purpose of looking at what kind of madness there could be, since yours truly was one of the fortunate non-crazies who got the iPhone 4 without much of a queue… and I do not really understand the concept of queuing for something that everyone will have soon for hours.

I got there around 12.30, and thought that there wasn’t a queue when I was within sight of the Apple store, coz it looked pretty much normal. But when I got to the front of the store, I realised I spoke too soon. Everyone was sitting on the floor, therefore I couldn’t spot them from the distance. This was the queue infront of the store at 12.30 PM:

I went and got myself a bit of lunch, and started to trail the queue at 1 PM. This is what it looked like then:

Then I went for a loiter - went to JB HiFi and got some tapes for the wedding, bought some awesome shoes (at KMart - I got 2 pairs for 15 and they were more comfy then the stuff I was going to buy from Rubi or some other shops that I can’t remember the names that would have cost at least 40 bucks each). Around 2.30 PM when I again passed JB, this had suddenly sprung up:

At 3 PM, I got back round to the Apple Store - They had by now closed the doors and put up the “veil” - a buncha black cloth - so that no one can see them replacing the old iPads with the new ones I guess. For some reason, everyone stood up at that point.

I then followed the queue to its end and this is what it looked like at 3 PM:

Caught up with a friend who was working at Borders earlier in the day and had a bit of a chat. Went round to Starbucks for a coffee and followed the queue at 4.30 PM. By this time, it had extended into the carpark.

You’ll notice that near the end of the line, there’s a little old lady sitting on her walker.

The lady in whit walking along (she’s at the zebra crossing in the above pic) went and asked her what she was queuing for. Her reply: ” Oh, I think I’m queuing for the Apple iPod”. *Face Palm*. You, whoever you are out there, who has convinced your granny to join the queue for you - SHAME ON YOU.

Anyways, so, on my way back into the mall, there was suddenly an uproar. By the time I got back to the store, I realised what that uproar was about - they had unveiled the store, showing everyone and tonne of staff in primary color blue clapping. So. I missed the unveiling. Got the opening though.

For all of you that can’t be bothered looking at the rest of the videos, this is the one that has all the crazy moments in it, sped up, and put to some awesome Creative Commons Music by Sound Art. Track is called DrumWithRum. You can find it at http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/86590. Enjoy.

Spent the last half hour getting bulldozed by school kids, stomped on by Neanderthals and steamrolled by barbarians.

To add to the excitement, the sun has decided today is a good day to cast it’s wonderfulness on everyone.

For fuck’s sake, we are all supposedly civilised beings. Is it so hard to behave? Even animals are more polite.

I’ve realised a pattern here: There are 3 Starbucks branches I frequent in Brisbane, namely: 

1. Chermside

2. Myer

4. David Jones

Every single time, when asked for my name, I always tell them my name’s Vi. Of course, I don’t spell it out for them. And, the resulting pattern (regardless of the staff that is scribbling it on my cup) :  

1. Chermside ALWAYS hears it as “Fi” instead of Vi. So, now I’m wondering, since I happened to have submitted my resume to them after I ordered a coffee, did who ever it was realise that my name’s Vi and not Fi?

2. Myer hears it right. But, the result is always “Vee”. Interesting. 

3. David Jones - classic. Reminds me of the Starbucks in Sg everytime. Just 1 alphabet - V. I’d like to add “for Vendetta” after that, but hell, I haven’t had the chance to watch the damn movie (I know it’s old. Gimme a break will ya? I haven’t watch ALOT of movies). 

Oh, can I just add that, everytime I go to the Starbucks at Myer, there’s always incidents? Not all bad, but basically, something will happen without fail. Either my cup went missing so everyone who ordered after me got their drink but 15 mins later I’m still waiting, or some lame shit would have ran off with my drink but had actually ordered the same drink in larger size, so I got a larger drink for less. Or, there’ll be a missing ingredient in my drink (ok, my bad for ordering crazy stuff). Or - this last one is always an incident caused by my own stupidity, but it has never happened at the other branches - I’ll stupidly ask for an extra shot in my Iced Tall Vanilla Latte coz I forgot that the Au recipe calls for 2 shots, not like the Sg recipe which calls for 1 shot. This effectively gives me a crazy kick that messes with my head for the rest of the day. 

What can I say? I love Starbucks. 

In the last month I’ve had reason to complain about a couple of the services that I subscribe to, and I’ve done so via twitter - more as a way of blowing off steam then a method of getting any form of resolution to the problems faced.

But I’ve come to realize one thing - there is now a lot of emphasis on the use of social media for businesses.

The first incident was when my web hosts failed to deliver - basically I had a possible dimwit as a technical help desk personal - who had no clue what I was talking about at all (I wanted to install google apps on an account which did not have an advanced DNS editor available to me, and when I asked the TS to help with adding some entries and stuff, he told me that it is not recommended to change the DNS settings because it could void my entire site. -.-“”) Compound that with the fact that, over the last few months, I have had to deal with many occasions of their customer service personnel being dimwits, (they sent me an invoice, and when I tried to log in to the client area to make payment, I realized they had reset my password. Another time, the entire email server went down - this was before I migrated to Google Apps - and I asked the TS for help. He basically reset my entire c-panel account. So of course I wanted to kill him). I tweeted my displeasure at their service, and within half an hour, had 3 replies to my tweet offering better web-hosting that “does not suck balls” (I said that in my ranting tweet).

The second incident was when I tried to terminate the (useless) mobile insurance that the telco had bundled with my plan (which I then have to pay for every month). I called up the customer service hotline, asked if there were termination fees, was told that there wouldn’t be any, and my next bill will be pro-rated regards to the insurance charges. Therefore, I figured I might as well terminate it. Turns out there WAS termination charges. So, I called CS again. Was told that the only solution was that they could split the penalty fee into a few payments and I can pay it off over the next few months. Well, I was pissed off, so again, in the interest of venting my anger, tweeted it. Wound up getting a reply with a link for me to fill in a (complains) form, sent it through, issue resolved. No penalty fee because I was told there was none in the first place.

And, third incident this morning (resulting in the decision to post this). I was trying to do some stuff in uni using a tool called BBEdit, and it’d failed. Not just on my computer, on most of the computers in my class. And, as most of you would have seen it, I took a screenshot of it, and posted it. My tumblr’s linked to my twitter account, so when there are new posts, it turns up on my tweets as well. So, that post went up sometime mid-aft yesterday (Brisbane time). This morning, I woke up to a tweet from BBEdit telling me that if I encountered any further problems, I should drop them a message. And, frankly speaking, I wasn’t even actually bothered about it, coz I can write code in pretty much any text-editing program.

So, yeah, made me realize, seems like pretty much everyone is on twitter. Makes you think maybe you should watch what you say.