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This is the Beanie Baby anteater from McDonalds. Antsy. Misty persists
in referring to the "armadillo," and Jane said something today about the "aardvark." She had some sort of confrontation
with a counter clerk at McDonald's when she insisted that she wanted the armadillo (or aardvark, I can't remember now)
and the clerk didn't know what she meant. Or pretended not to know. How hard would it be, really? The only other ones
available were a leopard and a frog. A little hard to misunderstand. "Aardvark? Oh, you mean the frog."
The clerk could have been honestly confused. I wasn't there, I don't know. But I do know people who
do that purposely--they know what you're asking, but they put on an air of incomprehension, act stupid to make you
feel stupid. I have as little to do with those people as possible.
I always go out of my way to avoid making other people feel stupid. I think it's part of my empathetic nature--I can't abide
seeing other people be uncomfortable.
The other thing that this makes me think of is some people's air of incredulity to almost anything you tell them. There were
a couple of people like that at the last place I worked. They would ask me a question about how to do something, usually
software-related, and when I would answer it, they would say, "You're kidding!!!" or "That can't be
right!"
It got to the point where no matter what they asked me, I'd say I didn't know, or that I couldn't remember. It was
much less stress on my blood pressure to have them think I was stupid than to have to deal with that attitude.
Way back last week when I was complaining about
being asked to pay for content, somewhere in that search I was doing that led me to the Slate subscription
offer, I also ended up at MSN's Encarta Encyclopedia.
You could sign up for a free 7 day trial, which I did,
and then promptly forgot about. A couple of days ago I got an email reminding me that my trial period
was about to expire, and that if I wanted to continue to have access, I could subscribe for $50 a year or
$7 a month.
I wasn't interested, so I just deleted the message. Then, this morning, about ten days after I signed up for
my 7 day free trial, I got an email from MSN welcoming me to my free trial week, and telling
me about all the wonderful content they have, and hoping that I enjoy my free time to explore it. And the
email contained a URL with instructions to click on it to get started.
So I thought, well, maybe they're giving me another week since I didn't use the first one, or maybe you
could just sign up for as many free weeks as you wanted, consecutively, and no one cared . . . I went
to the site, signed in, and was presented with a page that said, "Your Encarta free trial has finished" and
asked me to pay.
I think it's pretty amusing when Microsoft is shown to be just as fallible
as the rest of the world.
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