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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

WTF Wednesday Moments

Well over the course of the last several days I have encountered several WTF moments almost worthy of sharing with you this week for WTF Wednesday.

Captain Picard WTF Wednesday

It started with a toy we got our grandson on Friday evening at Wally World. It was a Paper Jamz guitar. Now if you don't know what that is, it's basically a guitar that's not a real guitar. I guess the theory is that it's made partially of paper, but that's kind of false advertising because it's comprised of far more plastic than it is paper. But I guess "Plastic Jamz" doesn't have quite the same eco-conscious ring to it so they kind of had to go with Paper Jamz to sound better. Or something.

Paper Jamz Guitars

Well the product packaging on that semi-paper guitar pissed me off to no end. I mean, WTF is it with product packaging anyway? Supposedly it is designed to prevent shoplifting, or at least make it a bit more challenging. But, um, hello? IT'S A GUITAR! I don't think too many people are cunningly crafty enough to get away with stealing something that is almost the same size as my 7-year-old grandson. But that doesn't seem to matter to the maker of this guitar. It was so completely locked into the plastic wrap, twisty-ties, and little plastic doo-dad-thingamajigs that it took me darn near 15 minutes to free it from its un-eco-concsious confines! And all the while I'm trying not to curse in front of my grandson, even though on the inside I was screaming at the top of my lungs...W.T.F?!

But oh well. The grandson was happy and quickly got lost in his I-am-a-would-be-rock-star-jamming-on-a-plastic-guitar-world, and that's all that really matters.

Then there was the trip to the movie theater with the grandson to see Hop. We go to a nice theater that is about 25 minutes away, simply because it's far more comfortable and much nicer than our local theater. But my primary gripe with them has to do with their Soft Pretzels. I love their pretzels. They're totally yummy! BUT, they put them on the world's most flimsy paper plates and then give you this plastic thing of cheese that has to sit on top of the pretzel on that flimsy paper plate.

Soft Pretzel with Cheese

So there I was trying to juggle two pretzel plates, a bag of popcorn, a large pop, and my purse, as we walked up the steps in the theater to find a seat. And because the plates are so flimsy, as we turned to go into an aisle, one of the cheese containers fell off of the flimsy, stinking plate and, you guessed it, the cheese sauce went airborne! So again came the internal WTF?! that is always necessary when the grandson is in tow. I mean, seriously, how hard would it be for them to invest in a paper plate that would actually support the food that's on it long enough to get from the snack bar to a seat without creating a flying cheese sauce panic in the process? Is that too much to ask? I think not.

And then tonight, it was my laptop causing me some serious techno-stress. My laptop is old, OK? Old enough to be an incredibly good paper weight, if nothing else. It's older than my PC...which is older than the Hubs' PC, which used to be mine. So we're talking extreme XP dinosaurs here, people. But we're just trying to squeeze every last ounce of life out of them, since buying 3 new computers isn't exactly gonna be cheap. And as much fun as it is to get a new computer (or two, or three!), we don't want to spend that money until we have to.

Anyhoots, my laptop, it seems strangely possessed at times. And sometimes I think it acts up just to mock me. And that's what it was doing to me tonight when I simply tried to open Paint Shop Pro, and My Documents at the same time. Apparently it didn't like that exact combination of tasks, so it kind of just hung there for a bit. Laughing at me. Then as it often does, it seems to get over its little masochistic hiccup and start working again--only to do the same thing a few minutes later.

Windows Error Meme

Well, since I was just trying to edit one simple piece of digital art, which was what I was trying to open in My Documents but couldn't, I finally just got fed up. This laptop has been mocking me for months. I can only take so much. I'm only human, after all.  So, I looked that damn laptop dead in the monitor and literally screamed, WTF, YOU STUPID PIECE OF TECHNO-CRAP?!

And amazingly, just before I was seconds away from throwing it on the floor and stomping on it with all the pent-up stress and anger I could muster, it started working again. I guess it just wanted me to fight back. Or something.