Life Less Literary

Popular Science has a column on The Worst Jobs in Science. I reckon my sister Hannah could apply for a place on this list - her first job out of college was, I forget the exact title, but basically a lab assistant at the local hospital. She had to analyse all the various samples (yes) that people brought in. Low-point (or high-point conversation-killer-wise) was when she had to grow a culture on an amputated big toe.

As for the jobs on the column - Flatus Odor Judge at number one, nah, I’m sure some of the others are worse than that (the #2 job for example, Dysentry Stool Sample Analyzer - which I guess formed part of Hannah’s job, though I never asked her about that part in any great detail). Anyway, I just love that little elephant icon they have to represent “political quagmire” because I just had to go through the hell that is getting something changed on my Easyspace account (Easyspace? Ha! Difficult troublesome pain-in-the-arse fuckheaded could-this-possibly-be-any-more-complicated space more like) and these masters of quagmire use a virtually identical elephant as their logo. I hate them. I hate them. I fucking fucking hate them. Their “help” (ha!) pages which direct you to “contact support” get you to fill in a whole pointless form and then, once you click “submit”, instead of submitting your support request (aaargh) “helpfully” “suggest” a list of, erm, help pages that you may wish to look at before submitting your request. And they take forever to reply. And they’re so averse to hearing from their customers that not only is their website explicitly set up to prevent anyone with an IQ below 350 from succesfully submitting a support request, they even have a fax number listed as their telephone number on the whois information. And you can’t “configure your account” - once you login they just send you to the shop so you can buy more services (and they charge for everything, every minor pathetic config tweak). And… aaaargh. I could go on for hours, but I won’t because my blood is already only one degree off boiling point.

Suffice to say that, if you’re looking for an ISP, you would be wiser to cut your big toe off than to go with these wankers.

(And before anyone asks, NO, I didn’t choose them - what kind of idiot do you think I am - no, I use Rackshack for most of my hosting requirements and am just coming to the end of an almost-as-painful-as-Easyspace-though-that’s-not-really-possible-is-it? relationship with Host Europe [and to think, so many people recommended Host Europe to me, the damn fools]. No, I inherited Easyspace when a client “migrated” to me from a Mac-headed design agency who didn’t know any better. And the only reason I haven’t moved their various sites from there is that <sob> Easyspace make it so damn hard to do anything, and the only reason I was in there now is <sob sob sob> said client has now gone tits-up leaving me with a large hole in my pocket in respect of all the Easyspace “services” [like changing a fucking IP address pointer, I ask you!] and I want to change all the passwords so the bastards don’t start up under another name and hijack all my hard paid-for domains <sob sob shudder shudder wail>).