JoeBeaudoinDOTnet

Ok, so here’s the thing Best Buy… you suck.

Seriously, I read this article at Bloomberg that mentions that Best Worst Buy lowered their earnings forecast for the year. Of course, while I could care less about their earnings (I hope the company and its outlets of pure evil burns to the ground in a night of blood and of fire) I read the comments that came from the top people at that company…

They were excuses. They cited the increasing cost of gas, the slumping housing market, and the economy. They also noted that people don’t need anything Best Buy has to offer, since all of it is electronic junk anyway.

Of course, their comments were ones that supervisors at my Best Buy made over a year ago, when the economy began turning to shit.

The response from upper management: No excuses, just results.

That became the standard answer for everything. Staffing. Missing budgets by several grand. Basically, anything worthy of honest complaint or observation that went against the bullshit from on high.

Now I find it funny that the same people who condoned that bullshit line are regurgitating this feedback from supervisors (and intelligent managers) for the press.

Of course, I’m not curious as to the messages management and those minions under them will receive from on high… because the message to them will be quite different than what the big-wigs defecate to the press.

What will happen in the next six months? Simple. Restructures. People losing jobs.

Thank god I got out.

I ran across this video. Although it has that overused “Requiem for a Dream” music running in the background, the information there is priceless. Scientology is truly a dangerous cult, and its “founding father” is nothing more than a “sci-fi” hack who couldn’t hack it as a writer and concocted the ultimate pyramid scheme: a “religion” based on a “science”.

For more, take a look at Operation Clambake.

So I received this little gem in my e-mail. It’s from BusinessWire.com and covers the fact that a class action lawsuit has been filed in New York over the fact that people are being forced to work through their lunch breaks and are being held in the building for “security checks” after being punched out.

Basically, your standard Best Buy SOP that I can fully attest to, because I’ve worked through my lunch breaks and have had to wait for the fucking closing manager to stop playing with themselves. (Oh, I’ll also mention that I’ve had to search manager’s bags while off the clock as well during closing! Yeah. Go figure.)

Now, if this class action lawsuit becomes a country-wide thing, that would be wonderful. Hell, I’ll happily join in, even if the result is a monetary pittance.

To much fan fare from the Wikipedians and Wikia, the for-profit service, launched their vaunted human-editable and maintainable search engine a few days ago. Essentially, the philosophy behind it is the same as it is with Wikipedia in that you can create and edit what search engines spew out whenever you search for a term.

Of course, having just tried it, I am wholly unimpressed. Then again, this is the same group of people who are involved in MediaWiki development who can’t give us an internal search engine worth a damn… I have to use Google to look up terms on Wikipedia! Bah!

I know that it is a beta, but there are several concerns which ring the alert klaxons immediately.

The more immediate one for me is this: I don’t trust Jimbo’s Jabronis to tell me what I need to know. Just look at the watchdog group Wikipedia-Watch.org and what they’ve dredged up over the years about so-called power-tripping Wikipedians in high powered positions. Frankly, I find the most ardent Wikipedians to be blood-shot eyed liberal extermists who believe in raping and pillaging information to suit their worldview. It really is like the concepts laid out by The Party in 1984 are coming true! “Neutral Point of View” my ass. It is more a case of “Might makes Right Point of View”.

Now, I must note that the ardent, outspoken bloodshot eyed liberal extremists who comprise Wikipedia and some of Wikia are a small minority of their contributor base. However, they are in positions of power, and thus explains my “might makes right” comment. (Axiom of the day, courtesy of Shakespeare: “There is little choice in a barrel of rotten apples.”)

Secondly, there is a reason why search engine algorithms are hidden from the public. If they were released under GNU or other open software license, spammers and the like would easily be able to manipulate search engine results to produce more garbage. Wikia, which says that it’s search engine code will be revealed to all, will be exploited ruthlessly by spammers and scammers wanting to make a buck because they know how it works. It’s like telling a thief who wants to steal from Fort Knox everything about the security setup!

To summarize, it’s really simple why Wikia’s Search will fail, and it all boils down to these tried and true axioms:

1. Money talks, bullshit walks.
2. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
3. History is written by the victors.

I’ll leave you with this tidbit from 1984:

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

This is the future. Fight it ’til we can’t.

… well, besides the idiot management making idiotic decisions, or the idiot employees, or even the idiot customers, this gem nearly killed my cognitive reasoning centers.

It starts with a manager coming up to me and commenting on what a rabid customer was screaming about last night. The rather customer made the claim that the horror DVD section should be moved from the aisle containing the Disney DVDs, because children shouldn’t be subjected to horror. (The customer was apparently incoherent and rambling; the epitome of someone who should have been neutered prior to any sexual intercourse.)
Now understand that on one side of the aisle, the Disney section is to the extreme left of the row, while the horror section is to the extreme right. With 12 4-foot sections in this side, the Disney DVDs take up two sections, with the horror (on that side) taking only 1 4-footer. This leaves, oh, 9 sections (totalling some 36 feet) separating the two. Just for good measure, let me draw this out for the folks paying attention. After Disney, this is the breakdown of what is between Disney and the oh-so-dreaded horror:

1. 1 section of Nickelodeon videos.
2. 1 section of young children’s movies.
3. 2 sections of family movies, which “Over The Hedge”, “Open Season”, and “Ice Age” are a part.
4. 3 sections of Anime, which is not that kid friendly either.
5. 2 sections of science fiction movies.

If this were not the case, I would understand the parent’s concern. (Although I won’t cover how the parent presented his concern, because the way he did it isn’t something to hold up as an example of maturity.)

So to add salt to my brain hemorrhaging, as it were, the manager who brought this to my attention asks me to send an e-mail to the “media bus”. (The media bus is where media employees in the field go to ask for help when a problem is encountered on the battlefield that none of the imbeciles in upper management is able to answer, either consistently or at all. Sadly, this is only a theory since media bus is hardly helpful and doesn’t respond to queries in a timely manner; the lowest response time I’ve ever received from them is roughly 72 hours.) He asks me to ask them whether or not we can move the section, which I know we can’t because the DVDs are in a certain order, or what we refer to as a “flow”. This makes each Worst Buy consistent, since (in the bloodshot-eyed-world of Best Buy corporate) a customer should be able to enter a Best Buy and be able to gain the same experience, regardless of region. My thoughts on that are for another entry, but anyway I wasted 15 minutes trying to write the e-mail.

Yes, I wasted 15 minutes on composing a one paragraph e-mail essentially asking “Can I move the horror section because it is in the same aisle as the family-oriented DVDs and one dim-witted, incoherent mentally deficient cunt had a hissy over it being in the same aisle?” The reason for which is because of how I worded the letter, so that I personally don’t look stupid to the monkey reading the e-mail at the other end…

But then again, I guess I’m assuming good faith in my assumption that the monkey can identify stupidity when it sees it.

Either way, I’m morbidly interested in seeing how this all plays out.

It reminds me of the time when a Best Buy employee asked where the 1 year Xbox Live cards were and then, in the same breath, commented that all he saw were the 12 month cards, the 3 month cards, and the one month card.

Perhaps abortion should be legalized after all.

… they copy your MySpace page and add some crappy attempt at slander to it.

That’s right. Someone copied (some) of my MySpace page.  It’s not really all that creative, and it’s pretty asinine since the only thing that was done, in an attempt to slander, was “I like jacking off to porn all day long”. (I’ll be the first to point out that I’ve already tried this and it’s not good for the hand or for the organ in question. For Christ’s fucking sake, I don’t care to murder the kittens! PETA would be on my ass in a minute. Shit.)
Quite witty, this queen of wit. Apparently last login for Captain Intellect was 12/11/2006.

So I sent “Joe” the following message:

Must say, you have very sexy profile. Very sexy picture.

Now you must excuse. Must make sexy time with the hand.

High five!

Here’s the link.

Note: You’ll have to turn off the page style, since it won’t show up otherwise. If you have Firefox, simply select “View”, then “Page Style”, then “No Style” to see the thing.

As I lay sick in bed, and likely unable to call out tomorrow from that hell (which I shall soon be freed from, I can only hope) runneth over with spineless hypocrites, I nauseatingly reflect on Shitmas 2006.

The following quote sums up my feelings on Christmas (or any holiday that has been raped and hollowed out for the sake of making a quick buck) more eloquently and ferociously than anything I could come up with:

Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artifical responsiblities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year…in short, of being brutalized by a ‘holiday’ that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color tv set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands.

— Harlan Ellison, “No Offense Intended, But Fuck Xmas!” (1972) The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

I make no apologies for my firm beliefs in this matter. After experiencing the atrocities wrought by so-called human beings out to placate their spoiled progeny with vapid toys and intellectual devoid time wasters, Christmas has been perverted from a childhood joy into a steaming pile of fecal matter.

Or perhaps it was always like this, and my brain just finally realized this idiocy.

Went out to the Post Office in Zero Beach today to pick up the Mooby’s shirt I ordered from Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. (I wasn’t around when they delivered it, as they needed my signature.) Now I have a costume for that “Octoberween” party at work. Fuckin’ A.

In addition, I have a Technoranti listing, which is here.

Also, I’ll be updating both the Battlestar Wiki Blog and my own personal blog with the new WordPress. Boring, eh?

Woulda had a great day if I didn’t walk into that shithole today to give money for the walkathon. (It’s a walkathon on muscular distrophy and altzheimers. It’s supposed to happen on November 4th or something.) No good deed goes unpunished.

Oh, BTW, if you see me on GTalk and you don’t receive a reply from me, don’t get offended. I often leave my gmail/gtalk window open, simply because I’ve been really run down lately and I’m running around trying to juggle my online life (read: Battlestar Wiki), work life, and my own godsdamned life.

I’m also feeling like I’m getting sick: I’m hoping its not a damned cold virus; I don’t need it now.

Went back to hell today. It turns out that my own department was hit for $150+ worth of CDs just yesterday. (11 CDs at around 13 bucks… you do the math. Please.)

Anyway, I needed to vent because that pissed me off greatly. I was ready to yell, scream and pontificate in a vulgar matter at the morning meeting, prior to opening the store. Fortunately, someone else broached the issue, but I’ll hear about this shit from my discipline manager again on Tuesday when I go into work. And I was really looking forward to going back to work too.

Ah, well, reality check. Dee dee dee.

So here’s what I am going to do:

If I catch the fucktwit who is stealing from my domain, I will fuck you up so badly that you won’t even realize you’ve been fucked up. I imagine golf clubs covered with blood and your ability to procreate damaged beyond repair — we don’t need your kind contaminating the world, after all — however, sadly, that’s only in my imagination. Instead I’ll leave that to the inmates when your ass gets arrested and sodomized by your fellow scum of the earth; nothing like honor amongst thieves after all.

What I will do to facilitate this: I will be there to publicly humiliate your ass with my camera. I will take pictures of you and your accomplices being escorted out of the fucking building. If the police are pussy-shit and let you go with a slap on the wrist, I will humiliate you in the court of public opinion. Call it a public execution, if you will, because that’s what it’ll be. I will post a page on my website with your picture and what you stole.

Nothing like humiliation to correct deviant behavior.

Hence the reason why I ask that anyone in retail (or anyone seeing theft occur), to take a picture of the thieves and publicly humiliate them vis a vis the Internet. Expose them to the light, because if we leave them to fester in the darkness, then this shit will only go out of control.

So, the ultimate question is, how much is your pride and dignity worth to you? $150? $13? $1?

Today’s my last day of vacation and I really feel like that fucking whiney-ass bitch-kid who is getting dragged to school. I can literally feel the heels of my feet being dragged along the asphault as someone has my collar bunched up in their hand, screaming and whining with arms outstretched. Tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a red-line across my neck from the collar’s tension, when I wake up at 6 A.M. and work the 10 hour shift I’m supposed to pull on Sunday.

JOE
(little kid voice)
Oh boy! Yipee!

And I don’t want to be feeling this way. I want to just enjoy my last day of vacation before the Hell known as the “Holiday Season”, “Merry Fucking Festivus”, or whatever politically correct terminology we’re supposed to use descends upon me and drowns me in its shit-storm. (It’s bad enough that the name “Black Friday” has been perverted into terminology like “Blue Friday”, “Green Friday”, et al. To me, it’s Black-and-Blue Friday, because I will be black and blue after that day. Or at least the remnants of my thrice-damned soul.)

Ah well, Hell’s worse I suppose…

Now back to my regular scheduled vacation.