I hate how everybody wants you to join.
You go to a store, they want you to become a member. No thank you, Target, I don't need you failing to secure my personal data. I'm just buying some overpriced freezerburned flavorless ice cream you're selling because you're the only store nearby - we do not need to bring ink and paper into this, much less have you keep track of all my damn purchases.
You go to a website, they want you to sign up for an account. Takes time, whatever. Then, IMDB wants me to hand them my fucking telephone number or credit card number? WTF? It feels like a Nigerian Prince scam. I was just trying to make a post in response to a guy afraid that a brief titty scene in a movie will be too much for his teenagers, helpfully alerting him to the fact that his teenagers view hardcore porn on the Internet twice a day (and if they vigorously deny it, they're doing it 3+ times a day). And this isn't uncommon: Hotmail kept trying to tell me I needed to give it a cell number ... for my own protection, of course.
You go to a company's website to apply for a job. They want you to upload your resume, but then the software they use to read your resume and translate it into their database fields is a shabby POS and most of the fields are empty. Then they expect you to fill in every little box, spending 30+ minutes on this turkey. My most recent fiasco with Macy's (I'm a highly educated and experienced yet desperate man at this point) resulted in them asking me what my fucking favorite color was, and my favorite season. Figuring this is some bullshit voodoo interview technique they use because actual questions are hard to ask, I search on it to figure out how they will interpret my answer - and when I switch back to the application tab it's timed out and lost all my progress. An hour lost. I will resort to a hell of a lot of vile things to pay my bills before I ever try to use Macy's website again. Is it too much to ask that the employer either (A) hire people to read resumes, (B) get good resume-scrounging software, (C) ask only the minimum questions necessary, or (D) import from a centralized resume service that everyone else uses - such as if LinkedIn had a resume export feature that resulted in a text file that the employer's system knows how to import?
Is it too much to ask that the transaction between me and you just be money for goods or services? Can't I just not provide that extra little bit of market research data, that extra little bit of revenue from selling my personal information? This is completely beside the point that I fucking hate marketing and everything it stands for - do not try to guess the best way to sell to me, just make the features and price of the item available and I will make a fucking decision.
Check this out: when I applied for my first college loans, the data entry slave who processed my paperwork mistook my middle initial. Now when I get junk mail I know when it's the college or the bank who sold my info to that company.
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When you go to a concert you expect to participate in exactly the way you desire. If you want into the mosh pit, you get in, but if you don't, nobody will force you. And if you go into the mosh pit, you realistically expect to not get raped. I want to participate in our economy and communications, but I want to do the (quite basic and legal) things I want to do without being tracked, probed, and assaulted. But it feels like right now it's either opt-in or opt-out, and the world is slowly becoming a place where you can't opt-out without disconnecting from society in a way I'm not comfortable doing.
Basically: stop trying to decode the wrinkles on my balls, FFS. I just want to keep warm in the cold shadow of my inevitable death.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3780043 times)