Exchanges with People that Make Your Brain Hurt

[ladyknight1]

I have good thick hair. I don't have to do much to it, but I got it cut a month ago because I was tired of dealing with it and I need something much shorter for an outdoor training program I am participating in next month.

[violinp]

A note on height and brain hurt.

I used to work in a doctor's office and one of my duties involved bringing faxes to the appropriate folders which sometimes meant just pulling the files off the shelves and putting them in a cubby for the appropriate doctor but sometimes if the patient had been recently seen I'd have to hunt them down wherever the doc preferred them to be so he could write notes.

Well one day I happened to be looking through the files on the nurses station when she brought a woman back and measured her height.  Which was 5'2 3/4". (which is also my height, so my ears perked up at that)

The woman says "Boy, I've shrunk, I used to be 5'7!"    Good grief, if it's possible to shrink that much I'm in trouble! LOL!  Here I was expecting to end up maybe just under 5' when I'm older.  But man, 5 inches?

Osteoporosis does that to you. My great grandma was 5'6 in her prime, and was 4'11 (about my height) when she died - all because of severe osteoporosis. My grandma was 5'7 and has already shrunk 2 inches by 72. If she lives as long as her mother, she too may be quite a bit shorter and have a "widow's hump."

[Elisabunny]

Last night Middle DD came home excited because some band was coming and the choir (which she is a part of) was going to sing with them, and the orchestra and one of the bands would perform with them too.  Please, Mom, will you come?!

So I went.  Turns out, it was an organization that promotes kids becoming involved in music.  Good, right?  Except their performance was really, really, REALLY loud.  Even though I was out in the hallway, my ears were shutting down.  So my building headache was compounded by the brainhurt of, "You're promoting music by causing deafness."

(And yes, I probably should go tell those dang kids to get off my lawn. )

[Slartibartfast]

Oof, you reminded me of a literal "brain hurt" concert I participated in while in high school.  It was part of some initiative to promote musical literacy, so the high school's choir and the two junior high's choirs and the three jazz bands were all performing the same song at the same time.  There wasn't space for everyone on stage, so the bands got put on the stage and the choirs spread out along the walls in the high school auditorium.  We didn't get to practice it with all three schools together before the performance, which was a mistake . . .

Issue #1: sound takes time to travel.  This was a pretty big auditorium.  From where my part of the choir was standing, the band sounded half a beat late because they were so far away, so we inadvertently slowed down a bit to get back in sync.  And they did the same because our voices sounded half a beat behind them (to their ears).  Since nobody watched the conductor and half of us couldn't see him anyway, I think he just gave up - by the end of the song we were singing noticeably slower than we were at the beginning.

Issue #2: Choral songs often come in two versions, "high voice" and "low voice."  It's the same music, but transposed four or five steps - so sopranos/tenors could sing it in their comfort range, or altos/basses could sing it in theirs.  It's not usually an issue for four-part music, but for some reason this song came in the two different versions and one of the junior highs had the opposite one.  We had two bands and two choirs playing/singing in one key, while the third band and the third choir played/sang a tritone off (the most dissonant possible combination).

We. Sounded. Awful.  As in, awful enough that our parents in the audience were trying very hard not to snicker, and were failing.  I was absolutely mortified at the time, but now I can look back at that concert as a fantastic example of why dress rehearsals are important!

[ica171]

My bank, again.  The claim they tried to phone me (but didn't leave a message), then wrote to me to say they needed me to call this person between 9-5 Monday-Friday or I could email them.  As 9-5 is also when I work I can't call them so I emailed asking what needed to discuss with me, their response "It's best you come into branch as we can't deal with this over the phone".  Why didn't they just send me a letter asking me to go into branch?!

This is a while back, but it reminded me of something our bank did that still has my brain hurting, and that lost them some business.

We have our main account with Bank A, but when we went to buy a car they did financing through Credit Union B, so we have our car loan through them.

We paid off a significant amount of the principal on the loan and wanted to see how much it would cost to refinance it to make our monthly payments lower. DH went in and filled all the paperwork out, and we wait and wait and wait, then wait some more. After a month or so we got a rejection letter. They said we were rejected because they had tried to call us about our loan application but we never responded, so they were cancelling our application. First of all, no you did not try to call us. Our only phone is a cell phone and it records the numbers of incoming calls. You did not try to call us. Second of all, if you tried and couldn't get a hold of us, why not send a letter saying "this is your last chance, we've been trying to contact you [not really] but if you don't contact us within X days then we're going to cancel your application." So we will be going to Bank A to see what they can do and closing our accounts with Credit Union B. We will probably never do business with them again, which is a shame because their locations are more convenient than Bank A's. But either they're too incompetent to dial a phone number correctly or they're liars, neither of which inspires much faith in their abilities.

[MizB]

One last post on the changing hair and skin tone. I was born with black hair. As a small child it lightened a bit to very deep mahogany brown and I had skin that would tan beautifully. As I grew older my hair continued to lighten to where now at 27 I am a dirty blonde and my pale skin burns rather than tans.

[RebeccainGA]

Had one yesterday with my boss. We're going over a group of data points for a new database we're deploying, and part of the data included is survey data (physical surveys of structures). We had two measurements we were discussing that were measured in AMSL terms (above mean sea level, as opposed to AGL, above ground level, like many measurements are taken). He argued (and won, since he's my boss) that the term AMSL was jargon and confusing - but it's one that is an industry standard, and we are dealing with people who work in this industry exclusively for this data, and it's a description of measurement for pete's sake! That's like saying feet square or degrees below zero is confusing.

We ended up describing what went into the measurement instead of saying total height AMSL (which is ground elevation + structure height + appurtenance height).

[Margo]

I had one with my phone company recently.

The phone line went dead, so I contacted the company via their website and booked for an engineer to come out. This involved giving them contact details, so of course I changed the contact number to that of my mobile phone, rather than the landline which wasn't working.

I then got a confirmation e-mail which confirmed that the engineer would phone when he was on his way (the booking was for a 4 hour slot)

What made my brain hurt was that in the e-mail, which had the subject line "Problem with you phone line" and which appeared to have been written by a human being not a robot, included the line
"I notice that you have given a different contact number from the number you have with us. Are you sure you don't want us to call you on your land line number?"

My sister had a similar situation with the same company. In her case they kept not turning up for appointments because she had not re-confirmed the appointments with them, as requested in the voice-mails they had been leaving her. On the phone which she had reported to them was not working at all. In any way.  They also managed to disconnect her internet when fixing the phone, at which point they started sending the appointment confirmations by e-mail. To someone else's e-mail address.
I think they ended up giving her a free upgrade and 6 months free contract as a result of that one.

[White Dragon]

Lots of pain to go around on this one!

I needed to sign out some documents from a vendor.
I needed new documents so we could add content and then sign the documents back in.

I carefully filled out the request form and triple checked it to make sure I had the data right.
(I'm on a bit of a personal mission to improve my accuracy.)

So I emailed my request, mentioning several times that I needed them to please create *new* documents for us.

The very polite reply was:

"I'm sorry, we can't sign these out to you as they are already signed out to you." 

Ummm...huh? How can we already have these if they don't exist yet?
Double checked the form - yes, it clearly asked for new documents.
Checked all the hidden sections and other pages. Nope, nothing.
Had my supervisor check the request form. Yes, it was 100% correct.

By now, we were going "What on earth are they smoking over there???"

I sent a very polite email back:

"I’m sorry, but I’m really confused.
We are asking for new, not existing documents.

Did I fill out the request incorrectly??"

And I re-attached my request form. (You see where this is going, don't you?)

Shortly I got my reply:

"The attachment on the first email was very different than this one." And she sent back the form I *originally* submitted.

Which was, of course, the wrong one. 
It was a completed request (even said so in the name!) so yes, of course we already had the documents. 

My response was a very humble apology for wasting her time and a polite request to please pretend it never happened and could she please process the *correct* form for me? 

Some days, I look in the mirror and remind myself that sometimes, I'm a maroon!
My zeal for accuracy got the form right, but I selected the wrong file. 

[Midnight Kitty]

My zeal for accuracy got the form right, but I selected the wrong file. 

Are you my sister?  I do stuff like that with embarrassing frequency. 

(I'm on a bit of a personal mission to improve my accuracy.)

Me, too.  For the same reasons.

Some days, I look in the mirror and remind myself that sometimes, I'm a maroon!

I'm a plum.

[Black Delphinium]

Some days, I look in the mirror and remind myself that sometimes, I'm a maroon!

I'm a plum.

I'm a peach.

[Lady Snowdon]

Some days, I look in the mirror and remind myself that sometimes, I'm a maroon!

I'm a plum.

I'm a peach.

I'm your huckleberry! 

[Diane AKA Traska]

Some days, I look in the mirror and remind myself that sometimes, I'm a maroon!

I'm a plum.

I'm a peach.

I'm your huckleberry! 

::Blows a raspberry::

[mmswm]

Some days, I look in the mirror and remind myself that sometimes, I'm a maroon!

I'm a plum.

I'm a peach.

I'm your huckleberry! 

::Blows a raspberry::

I'm the strawberry

[ladyknight1]

I'm a blackberry!