Facebook, I Hate You!

Okay guys. I am not that old, but I am out of college, which exempts me from facebook (for those of you who don't know, facebook is an online community for college folk, to insure you are in college you have to supply a college email adress to sign up). What a bunch of a-holes. "Sorry, you can't be part of our club because you graduated college in a reasonable number of years." I mean, does facebook really offer a whole lot that myspace doesn't? No. Bastards. But they do have a bunch of "going on my eighth year of college to get my associates degree" pedifiles. Sorry I dont have a college email address. Why you may ask. Well, I'm not in college. But even when I was in college I didnt use my college email address because it was for getting homework from teachers only. Not socializing. That and no one wanted to write down gregmathewsykes@students.armstrongatlanticstateuniversity.ga.edu .

So I hate you facebook. And I would like to encourage my facebook using friends to leave it behind as well because I love you guys and I want to keep up with you guys. And with facebook I cannot do that. If facebook were a person I would smack him right in the face. . . with a book, and then laugh at the irony.

What Happened to you BLOCKBUSTER

My wife and I have been subscribers to BLOCKBUSTER online for quite some time now. It started off like any other relationship. I am a boy so i will use a boy meets girl, movie scenario.

So you're minding your own business one day. You've got like, candy on your mind or something and your just day-dreaming about candy. All of a sudden you see this really cute girl across the park. Did i mention the boy here is walking in a park? Well he is. So thi ssute girl from across the park see's you too and eventually you cross paths. Well, you pretend to trip in fron of her to get her attention and you know every girl is a sucker for a dorky boy. You start talking to this girl. You flirt a little. She flirts back! Yeah boy. Now your onto something. You get this girl's phone number and your on your way. Well, you give her the 3 day waiting period that's outlined in the "Secret Code of Man-ual" You start dating. You have good times. She starts to get clingy and looses her mind. Now your not hanging out with the guys anymore, you have pink doilies hanging from your toilet and your eating vegitables. Well, you just can't take it anymore. So you have to find away to break up with her. But she's got all her crap over at your place and breaking up would just be a huge hastle. Do you just bend over and take it liek a man or do you man up and get the heck out of there.

You see, we met BLOCKBUSTER online a while ago and we fell in love. It was so good to us. We asked for movies, it gave them to us. We don't have cable so the BBO (BLOCKBUSTER online) was a great alternative. We're watching so many movies that BBO probably isn't making a ton of money off of us. It's as close to perfect as we could get. Streaming Blockbuster directly into our brains for free would be perfect. But it's an amazing service. We're telling all our friends about it. We couldn't wait to see that yellow and blue envelope in our mailbox. Well, we were waiting for 50 First Dates and ELF and we got 50 First Dates in 5o Sharp Pieces and ELF wasn't ELF at all. It was Charmed, Season 1, Disk2. Well, Everyone makes mistakes and when you get into that relationship, the honeymoon period wares off and you start to see the flaws. So we call BBO and the immediatly sent the correct DVD's out which was good, we only had one night really ruined. And to say sorry they sent us 2 free in store rentals. Kind of like buying us flowers after they said somethign mean about our mother-in-law or accidently hinted to the fact that we look a little "husky" in a certain pair of jeans. So it was all good. . . THEN SHE WENT CRAZY. BBO sent us this email explaining ways to keep this stuff from happening and dared to say that "The option is yours. Please understand that if an unusual number of issues are reported, your account may be placed on hold while we investigate." OMFG. Thats right. It was so absurd i had to use AIM lingo (OMFG). So like any other person i responded:

__________________________________

I am writing to respond to a very disappointing email i have recently received from my "friends at BLOCKBUSTER online." In the past, my service from BLOCKBUSTER online has been good, with quick response times and whatnot, with a few (three to be exact) exceptions. When we first signed up we never got the first DVD's sent to us. any number of things could have happened and we don't blame anyone. so we changed or mailing address with BLOCKBUSTER online and have seen more movies than i care to admit since then. We have enjoyed BLOCKBUSTER online's services. Recently (last week to be exact) we had problems again with the BLOCKBUSTER online services. Inside the envelope for "ELF" was the second disk of the first season of "Charmed" not exactly a useful DVD. Even if i had any sort of interest in the television series "Charmed",
disk 2 would be of no use for me because i would be wondering how this whole show started. i would never really know what was going on now would i? if you were going to make such a mistake, could you at least send season one, disk one, so we can start of on the right foot. In addition to the "Charmed" mishap, the movie "50 First Dates" showed up broken in half.

Now then, according to your email recently sent to me. I could have wiped the back of both DVD's with a lint free cloth and run a DVD cleansing disk through my DVD player but that wouldn't help a disk that had been shattered into pieces work and it certainly would not have helped the series "Charmed" to not suck. I have done everything i was supposed to do in the event that BLOCKBUSTER not hold to it's side of this deal. The morning after incidents have happened i have responded
to this customer service and help center. A place that i have seen way too much of.

This last email is worthless to me. none of these tips are anything that i can use. Not to mention that it is quite accusational and that is wildly inappropriate. I cannot for the life of me see any sense in you sending out an email like this to someone who has recently had such poor service from the BLOCKBUSTER service provider. "The option is yours. Please understand that if an unusual number of issues are reported, your account may be placed on hold while we investigate." Lets do this. If BLOCKBUSTER online screws up again, and BLOCKBUSTER online decides that their way of fixing the problem is to place my
account on hold while it is investigated, then just go ahead and cancel our account ASAP so that we can start our account with netflix. It is incredible to me that after our sub-par service recently you would send me this letter. Please understand how I feel when a service i pay for does not fulfill their half of the deal and then sends me an email like this. I can't describe how angry i am in email. I at one point told people how much i like this service and how much i recommend it. i have sent emails out to people suggesting it. now they all have to hear how angry i am because of this email. keep it to yourself next
time.

Your Friends at the SYKES household™
_______________________

Well, if that wasn't enough, We get an email today telling us that the are raising the price some $3 a month. thats 20% of the original price. You can't just up the price 20%. Dangit BBO. What the hell is the matter with you. You have lost your mind. Am I not giving you enough attention. GET YOUR FREAKIN' DOILY OFF MY TOILET!!!

I'm not an angry man but how much should I take. BBO. . I think it's time we broke up. I think i see some girl with a netflix t-shirt across the park. Either that or you better loose some weight and lay off for a little while. Be the best damn BBO girlfriend you can be. Instead of waiting 3 days for a movie. How about overnight. Maybe from 3 to 4 movies out at a time. You better think of something cause you walking away from an engagement ring really fast.

The Water Calls Me

So this past weekend my beautiful wife and i finally found / made the time to go kayaking. We have two necky touring kayaks. Some people might even call them sea kayaks. Not us, we hardly ever have them out on the sea so we call them touring kayaks. The touring kayak is designed for one thing, distance. One can travel farther, faster, and use less energy than a standard recreational kayak. A Rec kayak is about 6-10 feet long. Our touring kayaks are both about 17 feet long.

Well, I think this last weekend we might have pushed it a little bit. We kayaked for about 10 miles saturday. Not a big paddle. We've done it a dozen times and will do it a hundred more times before our kayaking days are over. Sunday however we decided to do a stretch of the Etowah River between My parents house and our apartment. Well, because the river snakes back and forth a dozen or so times on the map it is hard to measure distance. As the crow flies the trip should have only been about 10 miles. We did the trip and went home exhausted. When we got home and looked at the map we realized that it had to have been a bit longer than 1oish miles. I took a piece of thread and traced it along the Etowah River on the map and then straightened the thread out over the distance key in the corner. To my surprise, it seems we paddled some 22 miles. So over the entire weekend we probably paddled 32 miles. Well, Jess wasn't feeling well the next day do to an ear problem and i was just beat so we took monday off recuperated instead.

We learned our lesson though. Before any outdoor adventure make sure that you have done all of the appropriate research. especially if it is a trail or river or excursion that you have never done before. We will not make that mistake again any time soon.

Well, I haven't mentioned it yet be we didn't plan on pulling the kayaks out Behind our apartments. We planned on going all the way to Lake Allatoona. We only went half way. So we pulled our boats out in the middle of the woods. There was no boat ramp nearby. We ended up dragging both of out boats up, one at a time, about a 10 feet bank. I stood on the bank with a rope in my hand and my vest and spray skirt still on my body to be used as armor for the thick brush we were hiking through. My wife stayed by the waters edge. Every three seconds I would pull as hard as i could while Jess pushed the boats up the ledge. We then drug our boats one at a time through about a hundred yards of brush and trees. We couldn't pick the boats up and walk them out, it wa just too thickly wooded. Then we carried the boats another hundred yards through some trails that we knew were back there. We hid our Kayaks in some high grass and got my truck to get them out.

We hurt. . . Bad. . . We will do the other half soon.