helene_t, on Jun 10 2008, 09:33 AM, said:
Reminds me of a system administrator at the first place I worked for. He had made a database called "complaints". You could enter customer complaint forms into it. Out of curiosity I tried to run a query on the database to see what kind of complaints had been filed. That made the system crash.
Me: "How am I supposed to get data out of the complaint database?"
SA: "You aren't. The DB is a black hole, and intensionally so".
Absolutely correct. We moved a couple of years back and called to have cable for the computer installed. Some days later, I was looking out the window and saw some guys digging up the front lawn. I investigated and found out that they were from the cable company. So I called the company and said that if someone is going to dig up my lawn I expect them to ring the doorbell and identify themselves before beginning. The woman on the other end was very well trained. She apologized profusely and assured me that she completely agreed with me. I said I wanted a callback from someone other than herself to assure me that this had made it past the first stage and she assured me that someone would be calling me very shortly. OK, two years and counting. Best I didn't hold my breath until the phone rang.
I don't complain that often but some years back, during my single years, I felt that the son of a woman I was dating had been treated badly by the police. I had given them a cat, cats look alike, a neighbor guy claimed the cat was his (it wasn't) and called the police who took the cat from the kid with no checking with anyone. A police rep came out, I explained (I thought completely) and the rep explained that the officer had behaved exactly correctly. But the rep had misunderstood what I had said and when he finally got it, he again explained that the officer had behaved exactly correctly even though this newly understood exactly correct behavior was now in direct opposition to the original presumed exactly correct behavior.
This so-called self-regulating, self-policing, self-correcting stuff is a crock of *****, pure and simple. The home loan industry is self-regulating, is it not? Those guys have managed to eff the entire country and get rich doing it.
Very fortunately I have had little need for lawyers in my life. The limited experience that I have had has been mixed. Very mixed. Some are definitely very good and have been helpful getting things done correctly. Mostly I think that the entire legal system in this country is embarrassing. When my older daughter was in high school I took her to watch a court in action (circuit court or district court or something, I don't remember) as part of a school assignment. It was not uplifting. At one point a young black male defendant (well, sort of a defendant) was brought from the jail and appeared in front of the judge. No charges were read. The judge asked him why he was there. He said he didn't know. No one could find anyone who could explain why the man had been in jail or why he was in front of the judge. Maybe he had been drunk. Maybe he killed someone. Who knows? The judge told him he could go. Every so often I read that a serious criminal has been inadvertently released from custody. I don't doubt it.
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