The Mezzanine

So frustrated with Paypal right now.

( the saga )
The Moral Of Our Tale?

Paypal are the devil. And less willing to help than Cthulhu.

So, I've been enjoying the ridiculously cheap books one can buy through iBooks. And, two days ago, I got the first book in a series.

Today, I went back to get the second book.

...and, sometime during those two days, Apple decided to stop offering that book series to Australians. The whole series; the first book is listed on my laptop as having been purchased, but it informs me sternly that it's "not available in the Australian store". (Thankfully it's still on my iPad.)


This annoys me for a number of reasons:
1) My purchases are being restricted to Australia.
2) I'm not even in Australia.
3) I'm pretty sure this means they're price-fixing so that, once again, Aussies get far more expensive prices than the rest of the world.
4) Why remove a series you were already selling?
5) Why offer me a series in the first place if you're going to remove it?
6) What the hell???

GRRR.

How to move house (the easy way)

1) Buy a house.
2) Settle on a date for getting the new house.
3) Decide on a moving date.
4) Call up all your friends, and ask if they have cardboard boxes for your move.
5) While you're at it, ask how many of them are free to help you move.
6) Organise for a moving truck.
7) Organise for utilities to be turned on, the day you get the house.
8) Block out a date on the calendar with MOVING DAY written in big red letters, and plan your life around it.
9) Move.



How to move house (the annoying-as-all-get-out way)

1) Buy a house.
2) Settle on a date for getting the new house (say... the 13th).
3) Decide on a moving date (say... the 14th).
4) Call up all your friends, and ask if they have cardboard boxes for your move.
5) While you're at it, ask how many of them are free to help you move.
6) Organise for a moving truck.
7) Organise for utilities to be turned on, the day you get the house.
8) Block out a date on the calendar with MOVING DAY written in big red letters, and plan your life around it.
9) Get a phonecall telling you that, actually, the people currently in your new house aren't able to move until the 16th.
10) Redo steps 2, 3, and 5 through 8 ALL OVER AGAIN.

Pro-tip: If you don't want people to discuss your traumatic past when defending their favourite television character, don't write about your traumatic past in your episode review.

Also: If the characters in question are a super-strong woman who has recently been resurrected and a 200-year-old vampire with a thing for blonde women who want to kill him, then maybe, just maybe, their situation will not be directly analogous to "generic woman" and "generic man" in the same situation? Possibly?

Plus: Listening to what people say is a good thing! Especially before you ban them for saying something they never actually said!




*sighs*

And I'm out.

Dear Evil Corporate Guys Who Wish To Be Facebook,

Imagine, if you will, that you are hugely into balsa wood model camels. Because... camels! Made of balsa wood! Woo!

You are so into these balsa wood camels, that you decide to make a permanent display of camels for everyone to enjoy: your friends, your nodding acquaintances, random tourists, lonely orphan children with no shoes who will suddenly realise that they too can dream of balsa wood modelling... everyone. They will see your camel display and be INSPIRED. And have a fun day out for the whole family, filled with camel-themed delights.

So, you spend months, every single evening for MONTHS making those intricate little model camels, and stressing about them, and posing them, and accidentally breaking them and crying, and fixing them up again, and going to bed exhausted, and setting up the perfect display just like you've always dreamed... and you paint the display room, set it all up, put flowers and streamers all over it, and make fancy little brochures telling people all about it.

...and then I come in, look around, shrug, and calmly burn the whole place to the ground.


THAT IS WHAT YOU HAVE JUST DONE TO ME.


I spent months, MONTHS of my life, months I CANNOT GET BACK putting together the absolute best fic archive for still_grrr that I could possibly devise. I came up with thousands of tags, sorted entries by length, season, character, pairing, theme, style, and shoe size. I spent days organising tag bundles for each category. I made it completely possible to search the community for all the Cordelia/Giles mpreg season 5 genderswap PG-rated drabble darkfics you could want - and if that was what you wanted, that was exactly what you'd get, that specifically.

I poured SO MUCH time and effort into the bloody thing.

And now you, O Evil Delicious Owners, have revamped your site without a second thought, and destroyed the whole thing.


My tag bundles are gone.
The network is gone.
The pairing tags are gone.
The tag list is gone.
The multi-tag searches are gone.

The whole thing, in fact, is destroyed.


Somewhere in your evil clutches, Delicious Guys, are eight months of my life that I'd really like back. Could you please find them, dust them off, and return them so that I can devote them to windsurfing or learning Hindi, rather than spending them trying to finish a project that now turns out to have been pointless? Ta.

Mez: Hi, can I book my car in for a service?
Mechanic Guy: Sure. Can I get your name, details, etc?
Mez: *gives details*
MG: Okay. What service do you want?
Mez: Um... I'm not sure I understand.
MG: What service do you want?
Mez: What do you mean?
MG: I mean... what service do you want?
Mez: I'm sorry, but I really don't understand what you're asking me. Could you explain what you want to know?
MG: Well - what service do you want?
Mez: *headdesks*


Dear Mechanic Guy,
I'm sure you were asking a very simple question. And I must have been frustrating to deal with. But...
1) yes, I really am that clueless.
2) I am not deaf.

STOP REPEATING THE EXACT SAME WORDS WHEN I'M ASKING YOU TO EXPLAIN. I CAN HEAR THE WORDS. TELL ME WHAT THEY MEAN.


Sometimes it would be nice if I could just smite people.

Are you checking my tagged entries?

Everything's cross-posted from here to LJ, these days. But my earlier stuff wasn't.

If you're looking for a tagged entry from my LJ-only days, please look here.