So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[dh66]

Of the three major services - UPS, USPS and Fed Ex, I have found the UPS carriers to be the consistently nicest of all of them. The post office is all over the map - from really nice to outright surly. Most Fed Ex carriers are okay, but not really friendly, but the UPS carriers are almost always very friendly and willing to bend the rules, be flexible to help you.

I knew a guy several years ago who drove for UPS. If I was getting paid that well, ID be pretty darn chipper all the time, too.

Sent from my XT1030 using Tapatalk

 

[GHT]

Have you ever come across the Britspeak vulgarity for making a monumental error? We refer to it as a cock-up. When UPS bought Lynx, one of our national carriers, it took a year or two to assimilate the new company into their modus operandi. Unfortunately UPS used the same phone logo in the UK as they did in the US: PICK-UPS, it didn't take long for them to become known as COCK-UPS.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

My brother does that on occasion! He more frequently will approach people working on the car or otherwise working outside at their home. It usually ends up with friendly gear head chat, but once it ended up in a sale!

The people I'm talking about are curbstoners, unlicensed used car dealers. So called because they sell from the curbside as if it was a private individual sale rather than a full-on business. They cruise the neighborhoods looking for cars to buy whether they're actually for sale or not.

 

[MisterCairo]

The people I'm talking about are curbstoners, unlicensed used car dealers. So called because they sell from the curbside as if it was a private individual sale rather than a full-on business. They cruise the neighborhoods looking for cars to buy whether they're actually for sale or not.

They're a problem in Canada too ("curbsiders"), but how can you tell? My brother's a city bus driver, not a car dealer, he just occasionally likes a car. It's a shame the jerks cause blanket resentment, but I guess that's often the case!

 

[tonyb]

Last year I had a fellow offer to buy a car from me. The car wasn't "for sale," but my circumstances were such (living a few states removed from the car's storage spot) that I was willing to part with it. We agreed on a price, I signed the release-of-interest on the certificate of title and mailed it to a friend who looks after our property and such back there. Then the would-be buyer started finding other faults with the car and attempted to get me to part with it for less money. I told him I would rather give the car to the local public radio station than take a
nickel less than the amount we had agreed to, which anyone who knows these cars knows was a relative bargain anyway.

 

[GHT]

View attachment 44740
This little scoundrel! Casey James. Gets us (two other dogs and two humans) up every morning @ 5:30 AM.

Sandpaper kisses
On a cheek or a chin -
That is the way
for a day to begin!

Sandpaper kisses
A cuddle and a purr.
I have an alarm clock
That's covered in fur!

 

[2jakes]

My alarm clock comes with a warm motor-boat purr
right in my ears.
And needle-sharp nails that knead into my chest
until I get up...
Cheers!

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

No matter what he's doing, even apparently sleeping, as soon as I sit back in my recliner and put my feet up the Mini Panther is suddenly in my lap.

 

[GHT]

Our neighbour has a couple of cats, one of which is a right bully, he terrorises all the other cats in and around, just like the school playground thug. One morning I caught sight of him on the far side of my garage roof. The garage has an apex roof allowing him to hide on one side and peer over the top without being seen. Remembering a plastic bag that I had previously disposed of, I fished it out, found it undamaged and half filled it with water. Quietly, I eased open the door that led onto the garden. The bullying tom was nowhere to be seen, guessing that he might still be lurking on the other side of the garage roof, I threw the untied bag of water in the general direction of where I thought he would be.
The bag hit the top of the apex, sending it's contents straight towards my neighbour's garden. It did so, just as Tom put his head up. Smack! He caught the entire blast of water, face on. He was gone and we haven't seen him in our garden since, in fact he seems to spend much of his time sunbathing in the conservatory. Perhaps it was just desserts for his aggressive nature, but I still get hang-ups at being cruel to a cat, even though it was the flukiest of shots and the luckiest hit, but not if you were Tom.

 

[tonyb]

Many local jurisdictions over here in the colonies forbid cats running loose. I suspect that such ordinances go largely unenforced, but in the case of "problem" cats, the neighbors got the law on their side.

I'm acquainted with some folks who went to considerable lengths to render their yard (garden, as you Brits call it) escape proof, so that their cats can roam out of doors and never venture over the property line.

 

[GHT]

I'm convinced most kids today don't learn how to write. Their handwriting is atrocious, and I say that as someone who came pretty close to failing handwriting in elementary school.

I blame the teachers:

 

[Edward]

I'm convinced most kids today don't learn how to write. Their handwriting is atrocious, and I say that as someone who came pretty close to failing handwriting in elementary school.

A surprising number of kids these days don't write in cursive. I imagine typing will take over eventually. My handwriting isn't what it was since I rarely handwrite for anyone but myself nowadays...

My landline is a finger dial, in fact it was our first phone, still in use and giving good service. We recently had a tradesman doing some work on our kitchen, a young fellow, and very good he was too. Come the time to leave he had a problem calling his wife, he had no signal on his phone. "Use mine," I said, gesturing towards the landline. Do you know, he had no idea how to. I had to dial his home number for him. That sounds like I'm mocking, far from it, I'm just as bad with smart phones, I'm too dumb to use the myriad of facilities that they have, took me a month to crack how to text on it.

My brother's kids are five and nine; I don't tihnk they've ever seen a rotary dial phone. It's as alien to them as asking the operator to put a call through would have been to me. I want to get a rotary dialer when I redecorate my hall next though. A wallmount one.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We're lucky here in that touch-tone service didn't arrive until the late eighties, and all thru the '90s rotary phones were still very common here. So it's not hard to find a kid in her twenties who had to dial numbers in her childhood, and it's really only those born since 2000 who have little or no awareness that such things ever existed.

Our last local manual-service line didn't go dial until 1970 -- and the last manual exchange in Maine didn't go dial until 1982, more than fifty years after the first dial systems were installed in the state. We are generally not early adopters here.

Of course, all the kids I deal with are very aware of rotary phones. I keep threatening to hook one up at work because our present phones are so irredeemably crappy and unreliable.

 

[2jakes]

Billboards !

 

[swanson_eyes]

Billboards can be just as distracting as texting.

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^
Very distracting

 

[Fading Fast]

We're lucky here in that touch-tone service didn't arrive until the late eighties, and all thru the '90s rotary phones were still very common here. So it's not hard to find a kid in her twenties who had to dial numbers in her childhood, and it's really only those born since 2000 who have little or no awareness that such things ever existed.

Our last local manual-service line didn't go dial until 1970 -- and the last manual exchange in Maine didn't go dial until 1982, more than fifty years after the first dial systems were installed in the state. We are generally not early adopters here.

Of course, all the kids I deal with are very aware of rotary phones. I keep threatening to hook one up at work because our present phones are so irredeemably crappy and unreliable.

Land line phones today are such garbage that it contributed to our choice, years ago, to give up our land line and just use two cells. What's funny is that - years later - our cable company basically gave us a better rate on our internet and cable-TV if we took a phone line as well. The phone line was, effectively, cheaper than free as it reduced the price of our other services. My guess is they either want to hook us into them more, can sell the data from our calling pattern or, as often happens, they will get tired of losing money and will reprice the service.

We decided to not give anyone the number (so that we don't have any connection to it if we drop it in the future) and just use it to call out to save cell phone minutes. That said, the wireless phones we bought (and could find) for it are all cheap pieces of cr*p - so, once our renovation is done, we are going to try to hook up an old classic Ma Bell phone (which will match our very vintage restoration) and - assuming we can get it to work (no reason we shouldn't, just haven't tried it yet) - will give us much better function.

 

[HudsonHawk]

A surprising number of kids these days don't write in cursive. I imagine typing will take over eventually. My handwriting isn't what it was since I rarely handwrite for anyone but myself nowadays...

Teaching cursive writing has been formally discontinued in most schools around here for a number of years. Basically, if you're under the age of 12 now, you almost certainly did not learn to write in cursive, and likely never will. The locals have decided that it's a skill that is just no longer needed, like knowing how many pecks are in a bushel (four, btw). My sister, a 4th grade teacher, teaches it anyway, despite complaints from parents and school administrators. She reckons if nothing else, the kids better learn how to sign their own name.

My brother's kids are five and nine; I don't tihnk they've ever seen a rotary dial phone. It's as alien to them as asking the operator to put a call through would have been to me. I want to get a rotary dialer when I redecorate my hall next though. A wallmount one.

We have two in our home. My wife has no interest in anything "vintage" other than she loves rotary dial phones. When I was a kid, we had one phone in the house, and it was mounted on the wall in the kitchen. It had a long cord that could basically extend to any part of the house, and dragged the ground when the phone was hung up. Both of my grandparents only had a wall mounted phone in their hallway that had a short cord, so you had to stand in the hall if you wanted to talk on the phone. It kept conversations short, if nothing else.

 

[HudsonHawk]

We decided to not give anyone the number (so that we don't have any connection to it if we drop it in the future) and just use it to call out to save cell phone minutes. That said, the wireless phones we bought (and could find) for it are all cheap pieces of cr*p - so, once our renovation is done, we are going to try to hook up an old classic Ma Bell phone (which will match our very vintage restoration) and - assuming we can get it to work (no reason we shouldn't, just haven't tried it yet) - will give us much better function.

As you probably already know, dial phones are pulse, not touch tone, so if you have tone-only dialing, such as you get with fiber optic or what you likely get from the cable company, you will not be able to dial without some sort of pulse-to-tone adaptor. The phone will ring, and you can talk on it, you just can't dial without the adaptor. You can buy adaptors online, or Lizzie probably knows how to hotwire one directly. She may even come do it for you if you promise her a Broadway show and a slice of pizza.

 

[Fading Fast]

As you probably already know, dial phones are pulse, not touch tone, so if you have tone-only dialing, such as you get with fiber optic or what you likely get from the cable company, you will not be able to dial without some sort of pulse-to-tone adaptor. The phone will ring, and you can talk on it, you just can't dial without the adaptor. You can buy adaptors online, or Lizzie probably knows how to hotwire one directly. She may even come do it for you if you promise her a Broadway show and a slice of pizza.

Not with your level of expertise, but yes, we do know we need to "convert" it to make it compatible with touch tone. What we are hoping is that the speaker will give clearer sound as the weighs-three-ounces-plastic-piece-of-garbage cordless phone we have now sounds like somebody is rustling a paper bag next to the receiver when they speak. And I would gladly treat Lizzie to both without asking for anything in return.