Granted absurdity isn’t new. Stupidity has been around since the dawn of time. There just seems to be a whole lot more of it now.
NOTE TO VERIZON PHONE USERS…. Please read.
If you didn’t know, I am NOT very techie. In fact, I shun a lot of it. I don’t care about gaming, or chasing the latest greatest gadget. But this past week or so has shown me how bizarre things are getting in their push to “make you spend money.”
I had no idea that the newer phones have batteries you can’t change. My kid has a Motorola phone, that’s maybe two years old. The battery stopped holding a charge, so he figures he’ll buy a new battery and change it. NOPE. It’s a complicated process where you need special tools to do it. The phone shop in town here charges 69 bucks to do it for you, and they tell you up front there’s a chance something inside could get damaged because you have to remove circuits, etc.
Isn’t that interesting? No longer can you just pop the back off, and plop in a new battery. Nope, they’d much rather you come into the store and buy a new phone. That’s the ultimate in planned obsolescence. But wait, it gets better…
Again, I’m no techie. I want a phone to , uhm, make phone calls and send texts. So I use a six year old Galaxy 3. It’s perfect. It makes calls, texts, and if you need to, you can get online with it. Oh, and you can change the battery in literally 30 seconds if necessary. I’ve done it.
So, I tell my kid that I have another Galaxy 3 that he could use until he figures out what new phone he’s going to get. It was a phone that the wife had provided to an employee several years ago as the company “on call” phone. He figures that’s a great idea for the meantime.
We go to the Verizon web page, and there’s an area for swapping an existing line onto another device. We start plugging in the information and a box pops up saying “Verizon doesn’t support that device any longer.” Then it goes on to say that their equipment upgrades don’t play well with that phone.
Well, I know that’s not true, as I have the exact same phone. And, it works just fine. So we call Verizon tech support and after a 31minute hold, we get a tech on the line. We explain what we’re trying to do, and he tells us that the reason we got that message, is because on January 1 of 2020, that phone AND MY PHONE will stop working. It’s not going to be supported on the “new” equipment.
WHAT???? I have a perfectly functioning phone and come January it won’t work anymore? I’m hoping that basic phone and text will still work and only the internet stuff is what won’t play nice, but talk about forcing people to go buy more crap. I was/am, genuinely pissed about that.
IF YOU HAVE AN OLDER VERIZON PHONE, CALL THEM AND SEE IF YOUR MODEL IS GOING TO BE DROPPED.
Anyway the tech overrode the system and allowed the phone number to swap onto the Galaxy and it works. But maybe just for a few more months. Batteries you can’t change and killing “older” phones is the new business model. It stinks.
But then again, a lot of things stink now. I was cruising around just taking notes of some of the ridiculousness out there, and I had to stop. In under 5 minutes my brain was about to implode. Catch a few of these:
A professor at the University of Washington - Professor declares 'SpongeBob SquarePants' is racist and perpetuates 'violent' acts against indigenous people
Uhm, really?? This is what we teach at college now? And we wonder where idiots like Antifa come from. Wow.
Warren: Inmates Are ‘Entitled’ To Taxpayer-Funded Transgender Surgery
Excuse me? Someone that’s done a crime and is thus in jail, who is confused about his gender, should rely on me and the taxpayers in my town to pay for is surgery? That’s lunacy at a level rarely seen
Elizabeth Warren Wants to Give $1 Trillion in Climate Reparations to Black Families
What the hell are climate reparations?
Trans Town Hall Attendee Says It’s “Violence” For CNN Host to Get Her Name Wrong
In certain areas now, calling someone an illegal alien will get you fined and or jail time. ( NY) Now it’s “violence” because someone can’t pronounce your exotic name? My Lord.
Instagram to Remove Photos of ‘OK’ Hand Sign as Hate Speech
Ghee, I’m so old that I remember when the OK hand signal, meant OK. Silly me.
University Bans White Students From Attending Anti-Racism Meeting
Stupidity on this level could only be found at a University.
Washington: Illegal Immigrant Gang Member Murders Teen After Sanctuary City Set Him Free
The mayors of sanctuary cities should be forced to open their homes to the illegals. I’m sure they’d love the company.
3 Years After Los Angeles Taxpayers Handed Over 1.2 BILLION for Homeless Housing, Not a Single Unit Has Been Built
1.2 billion goes where? That’s not chicken feed. I bet they can’t find the money now.
Incarcerated Felons Could Be Allowed To Vote In DC
If you’re a felon, why should you have the right to vote? Haven’t you displayed via being a Felon that you make bad choices?
California Just Became the First State to Require Public Colleges to Provide Abortions
Colleges to provide abortions. Why don’t they try something really novel, like providing an education in subjects that could actually help you get a career?
AOC: MY ‘DREAMS OF MOTHERHOOD NOW BITTERSWEET’ BECAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING
This lunatic and that little Swedish girl and scaring the heck out of children all around the world.
Beto O’Rourke says he’d revoke tax-exempt status of religious groups that oppose same-sex marriage
What a turd.
Twitter allows ‘Die Trump’ to trend, sparking outrage
Twitter is just another leftist, socialist control mechanism.
Facebook Deletes “Donald Trump is Our President” Facebook Fan Page with 3,276,000 Fans
What do you expect from an operation that wants socialists to run the country?
Fed Paper Says Negative Rate Policy Can Provide Real Stimulus
There it is…paving the road for negative rates, coming to a bank near you.
While I was gathering this nonsense, I really had to stop. There’s only so much lunacy one can handle at one time. But if you really contemplate each and every one of these headlines, you truly do come away with a strange feeling that something is terribly wrong with our Nation.
It’s almost like there’s a competition to see just how utterly bizarre they can get. Colleges to provide abortions? Paying for inmate trans surgery? What planet did I get transported to?
Granted absurdity isn’t new. Stupidity has been around since the dawn of time. There just seems to be a whole lot more of it now.
Growing up on the Jersey shore, I spent a lot of time in and on the bay. With family in the seafood business, it was common for me to go clamming on weekends for spending money. On a decent tide, on a decent day, you could catch 800 or more, and that’s worth about 120 bucks at the clam dealer.
I’d take the clams into the clam house, and run them through a sorting machine to sort them by size. The sizes were “little necks, mid necks, top necks, cherrystones and “chowders” (from smallest to largest) They’d drop down chutes into large mesh onion bags, and when the proper amount of each size was in the bag, the machine would stop, and you’d take off the full bag and put up another one.
One day I came in, and when replacing the onion bag on the machine the clam dealer said “hey before you put that bag on the machine, turn it inside out.” This was a new development and I asked, “What’s up with that?” He told me the health inspector was in the previous day and demanded we turn the sacks inside out so “people don’t mistake them for onions.”
Wow. Who would have known that someone might mistake a 50 pound sack of chowder clams for onions? As I said, absurdity didn’t start recently.
Sorry for the rant, but between Verizon going to shut down my phone, and that little collection of headlines; while at the same time trying to get my wife through a tough time, I just had to go off.