Tired of Holiday Car Commercials

So tired of these "Buy your spouse or significant other a luxury vehicle this holiday season" commercials.  Every frigen year, how do these ridiculous gift wrapped cars manage to live on each Christmas, yet a classic like the Salad Shooter hasn't been seen in years? Its just not right, because I can guarantee more Salad Shooters get sold during the Thanksgiving-Christmas shopping marathon than cars as Christmas presents, that's just unrealistic.  Give us a break will ya? Guys have a hard enough time measuring up to the expectations of woman without advertising execs promising them a $60,000 car, damn.  

PS: What is funny though, is companies like Hyundai getting in on the Christmas spirit.  Could there be a worse gift?  Your wife walks out blindfolded to find a compact economy car for Christmas, and looks next door to see Mrs. Jones' ribbon wrapped BMW?   The ink on the divorce papers would be dry by New Years Eve, because the odds are the only schmucks buying their women cars for Christmas are doing it as a last ditch effort to save the marriage, or because they're dating a gold digger wayyy younger than they are, either way a Hyundai aint cutting it..  Here's a hint Hyundai, if I'm going to do something ridiculous like sign up for a 5 year payment plan for a Christmas gift, I'm not springing for the practical car with good gas mileage.

Password Day At Work

Password day, the antithesis of pay day at work.  Just a miserable day of trying to synchronize all 83 or so of your log-on's you've accumulated on one single day per month (or in my case every 45 days, which makes no sense).  Perils abound at every turn.  

What if you forgot to change one of your passwords the previous month? That access is probably now locked, big decision to make there.  Do you call the help desk (India) and wait an hour to have your account unlocked? Or do you decide to go on with out it, you obviously didn't need it for the last month, maybe you won't this month either?

Then there is always that one access point that changed their security parameters on you to something ridiculous like "need two upper case, one lower case, three symbols, and a six digit number."  This always throws me off, especially when this happens after you've already changed a couple of passwords.  Now I've got to go back and change all of those again to match this phrase that I have no chance of remembering and will undoubtedly tack onto my cube wall, thus defeating the purpose.

Password day also leads to more lockouts than any other day.  Once I change my desktop's password for the day I'm guaranteed to lock myself out a minimum 2.6 times.  No one remembers on the first day.  I'll sit there punching in my old password a couple times then it'll dawn on me that I changed it, except I had to change it to some overly complicated Morse code like sequence and I miss type it on the third frigen time.  

Now I'm stuck calling India again, answering things like "what street did I grow up on" and "who was your childhood best friend."  Who came up with these standard security questions a pedophile?  Why not "do you like candy little boy?" or "do you want a ride in my windowless van"?  Before you know it I've wasted an entire day on the phone with Mumbai and haven't gotten to type one blog, never mind do my real work.  Exhausting. 

Color Terror Alerts Going Away?

WASHINGTON -- The Homeland Security Department is proposing to discontinue the color-coded terror alert system that became a symbol of the country's post-9/11 jitters and the butt of late-night talk show jokes. The 8-year-old system, with its rainbow of five colors -- from green, signifying a low threat, to red, meaning severe -- became a fixture in airports, government buildings and on newscasts.

Finally. We've been stuck at yellow for like a decade, yet every time I step in an airport they sound an alert letting us know the status and to be on the look out.  And every time there is that one jittery flier who starts freaking out in the terminal because they don't realize we've been living at threat level yellow basically since September 12th.  Causes more havoc and concern than anything.  

How about a new system, no colors, because really, unless you're trying to appeal to kindergarten teachers and their pupils there was never a need to color code this thing, just tell us the level and we're good.  And we can skip the basement level "low threat." I'm pretty sure we won't be needing that any time soon, with two wars on going and one about to break out.  Just three levels, A) Be on alert, B) Shit might be going down, C)GTFUG (Get The Fuck Underground).  Simple, to the point, no one will ever be confused.  Just another case of The Alt-Tab solving our countries problems.