The Complaining and Bitching Thread

I'll be glad when the midterm elections have passed- I keep getting spam texts for donations. I block & report every single one, but they keep coming at the rate of about 5 per day.

Alienating me is not going to make me generous.

 

I have gotten hundreds of these. I guess I just tolerate them flowing in. With the disappearance or irrelevance of traditional channels of communication, political campaigns improvise, and those improvisations are usually inconvenient for the recipient.

 

The texts bother me, the blood red ones more so than the blue ones . But I just see them as another form of media. One of our local right-wing media assmouths commented that the texts slowed considerably after he early voted. "Those people" knowing when I've voted concerns me.

I should've saved all of the campaign fliers I received via USPS in a separate recycling bag. It would've been interesting to all them piled together.

 

Here in Michigan, we have the Qualified Voter File (QVF), which tracks who has voted. That information is public and hence available to political campaigns.

In the old days, traditionally, party workers would spend the day at the polling place, note and check off supporters as they showed up to vote. Around 6:30 pm, they'd send runners to roust out the laggards.

Nowadays, absentee ballots and early voting make up about half the voter turnout. The QVF is updated in real time until Election Day. The voting precincts are mandated to be completely offline, so the updates of who voted then don't get posted until about a week later.

 

I can say my
political text messages have
not
slowed in the past four days
since I early voted on Monday.

 

There's one candidate whose team keeps texting me, despite the fact that I'm not one of his constituents. (I suppose because I've sent money to ActBlue, my number's in the system.) While I'll never give money to a red candidate, I have only so much to give.

 

Politicians carved out an exemption for themselves from the Do Not Call list. I was talking with my dad one time about how infuriating that was. My dad ran for political office back in 2000 or so, and he replied "well, when I ran for office robocalls were one of the most cost effective ways to message people". Talk about completely missing the point!

 

Was considering getting another shirt from a vendor I recently discovered (was pleased with the 1st shirt) and wanted another one in a different color. Went to the website to find out that they are out of stock.

So, I sent an email querying if they were going to do another run. I get an instant reply from a worthless clanker (AI bot) who tells me that it's over and done with, but feel free to look at any of their other products instead.

Now I'm getting swamped by ads on other sites advertising the very shirt that isn't available anymore.

Why does this even come up? Why is it still listed if it's discontinued? Also, why not do another run? If you sold out, doesn't that indicate a strong demand for said product?

(I can get another shirt like it from another vendor that I've used before. but the price is slightly higher and there's a long delay, since it's made to order and comes from New Zealand.)

 

About four days after I early voted I started getting texts mentioning that I had voted. I'm not sure what they wanted because I deleted them unread.


Amazon really POs me. I do a lot of research on products, namely used binoculars, that have been discontinued for a few years to maybe five plus decades. I frequently see Amazon near the top of the results showing the brand being available. Sometimes I see the BS because I know the brand folded, or was purchased then shut down, decades ago. Other times I'm not sure, so I click on the site to check...only to find out Amazon doesn't have a single thing under the brand name I'm searching for. Oh great, marketing where blatant lying is allowed.

 

Somewhere in my head there's a Photoshop of a superhero named Captain Obvious who tells you things you already know ("You voted!") and should be telling others (like Amazon) things they should know. ("This item is unavailable; remove it from your site!") but I can't quite see how I can get it into meme format.