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Have you tried to use the credit card machine in a Philadelphia cab lately? I have tried several times and the overwhelming resistance I got from the cab drivers was very telling. These guys don’t want you to use the credit card machine. And they’re so determined to have you pay cash that they’ll argue with you for the entire length of your trip. They bitch and moan about losing money but the fact is that when you DO use the credit card machine you get an option to give them a 20 percent tip or enter another value. I’m sure that they’re still getting their tips so why the hostility?

All I am left to assume is that they’ve been skimming money and scamming their bosses for decades and now the credit card machines are cutting into those margins. They fought them from the start and they’ve now turned that fight to the consumer. It’s extremely uncomfortable to have a cab driver ridicule you for taking money from his pocket. The customer shouldn’t be subjected to this. It’s someone else’s fight.

Mark my words. The day will come when we hear a news story about how cab riding customers prove that they don’t want to pay with a credit card because they aren’t doing so. The machines will be removed or disabled. I guarantee that it’s coming and I guarantee that it’ll be because of the intimidation tactics of the Philadelphia cab driver. Most people will just bow to them instead of arguing. Why should you have to have that fight when you’re just trying to get where you’re going?

From this day forward I will absolutely insist on using the credit card machine if that’s what works for me and if I have to get out of one cab and get into another then that’s what I’ll do. Philadelphia cab rates are some of the highest in the country and we as consumers don’t need attitude from the driver on top of that.

Hey, jackass. Don’t walk around wearing your Bluetooth headset all day. You look stoopit.  Thank you. 

Hey, motion picture industry. You just turned a perfectly honest, hard working American consumer into a raging pirate. You took 10 hours of my life and now it’s “go time.”

All I want to do is hook up my TiVo and DirecTV DVR via HDMI to my friggin’ receiver and see it on my tv. Nope. Can’t do it. See, these fokkers who make movies are so afraid that we’re going to copy their precious stuff that they’ve convinced the manufacturers of electronic equipment to cripple the stuff.

Well, guess what? I used to pay for all of my music and movies. I used to lecture people about doing the same. I used to believe that people deserved to to be compensated for their product. That was before today. Today I was treated like a criminal. Today I spent ten hours trying to get a simple configuration to work because the instruction manual didn’t tell me that it wouldn’t. After doing a ton of internet research I found out that the feature that I had been trying so hard to make work had been intentionally disabled in order to keep me from copying some piece of garbage that Hollywood passes off as entertainment.

You’ll die like a rag doll and I’ll be laughing as I copy and distribute your crappy programming. You brought it on yourselves.

Dicks.

How can someone who doesn’t communicate with his clients make a decent living as a freelance camera guy? That’s the question I’m asking myself after having a really odd experience with a guy I was trying to hire for a shoot in Dallas. This guy ignored every email and voicemail for an entire week after accepting an easy job. Then, the day before the shoot, he leaves a voicemail for me explaining that he has taken another job and has passed his responsibilities to another freelancer in the area. Nice.

And how’s this for a topper. On the voicemail message, he tells me the name of the replacement camera guy but he doesn’t leave me any contact information for him and he doesn’t answer my return call.

In the event that you’d like to hire this genius, his name is….well, I better not say. Actually, I’m glad it happened because the guy who replaced him was a real pro. Sometimes things work out.

Jeez, I wish America Airlines was the dominant carrier in Philly. Their checkin system and customer service in Nashville is the best I have encountered in many years. In fact, the Nashville Airport Marriott was exceptional as well. Maybe it’s the city. Too bad I’m not into the whole cowboy thing.

I usually have to check a bunch of equipment when I travel for work and it’s just a hellish nightmare with US Airways. I have to stand in long lines in order to get checked in and I’m never sure that my gear will get to my destination no matter how early I check in. They’ve taken bad service to another level. Yeah, I know, you just turned your first profit in a decade. Good for you. You still suck.

American on the other hand has a newfangled kiosk that allows me to check in and pay for extra gear using my credit card. There’s no waiting and I can even make seat changes and pay for upgrades in the same transaction. It’s truly a gift from the travel gods. As I write this I’m enjoying a $90 upgrade to first class. Thanks, American.

Proving that they’re no slouch when it comes to crappy pictures and sound, the NBC network continued its long track record of shitty productions today during the telecast of the Saints/Seahawks game. Fans everywhere were treated to hideous motion blur, snowy images during camera pans and a lengthy delay for an NBC equipment malfunction.

“We’re really hitting our stride as an ass-log of a network,” said Dick Ebersol, Chairman of NBC Universal Sports. “No other broadcaster offers our unique combination of overcompressed, blocky high definition images, lameass celebrity shilling and overall wretched production value.”

Ebersol’s statements were backed up Sunday night when the floating overhead camera that NBC uses to supplement its already horrifically bad NFL coverage malfunctioned in the first quarter, delaying the game for several minutes and angering football fans already poised to turn the channel.

“There was no game action while the camera was being serviced so the compression artifacts were fairly low,” said Seahawks fan Mike Rosenfart, “but as soon as the game resumed and players were actually moving around on the field, that horsecrap HD picture came right back.”

“It’s hard work to produce something that no one has a good word to say about…ever,” said Ebersol. “It has taken our dopey executives years to shape our product into the revolting, turd shaped log that it has become. That doesn’t just happen overnight.”

Ok, so last Saturday we got new Yellow Pages directories delivered to every doorstep in the neighborhood. It’s now Wednesday and the cancer queen next door continues to step right over this big-ass, bright neon yellow, encyclopedia size phone atlas in order to get into her house. That’s five days, folks. Maybe all that cigarette smoke gives you the can’t-see-the-crap-you-gotta-repeatedly-step-over-itis.

These chicks are such lazy asses that they’ll separate the mail that they wanna read and leave the rest in the mailbox! There are newspapers and other assorted trash on the sidewalk in front of their door and they’ll just walk right over it several times a day for days on end!

Right next to the phone book lies an empty Marlboro box that the slack-jawed one dropped nearly two weeks ago and neither of them has bothered to pick it up. I could see guys doing that but girls?

Sheesh.

When did the post office start using so many friggin’ rubber bands? In the old days, the mail carrier would actually have to rub two brain cells together and match up the number on the letter with the number on the house. This was craftily done in real-time, on the fly, with angry dogs in hot pursuit. Nowadays we’re depleting the world’s rubber supply so that these dipshits can deliver an entire bundle of the wrong mail to my house instead of just a single letter.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be disrespectful but we enjoy the distinction of having the world’s worst post office right here in my neighborhood. The service at the walk-up window is bad on an olympic level. One clerk for a line of 15 people and another clerk looking over her shoulder while mowing through a bag of chips. They’re both surly as rattlesnakes and the line moves slower than New York traffic. It’s maddening.

They will routinely disappear into the back room for 10 or 15 minutes looking for someone’s package - a long line of customers left staring into that stylish, bulletproof room with nary a sign of human life. Please, make it stop.

My post office has one of those news ticker things with information about all the wonderful services they offer. Unfortunately, they’re not big on grammar so the ticker informs you that they now _except_ credit cards. It’s as if the ticker was programmed by a pro athlete. Ouch! That’s gotta hurt.

I’m the kind of person who can’t just throw crap in the garbage can. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with this rubber band. Maybe I can use it. I’ll just put it in a drawer. And I better pick up all the other rubber bands that the letter carrier dropped on my sidewalk and put them in the drawer too.

So now I have roughly a metric ton of rubber bands in a kitchen drawer and if I don’t clear them out soon, the entire kitchen could very well collapse under the strain. Can you recycle these things?

Dear Sporting Event/Rock Concert Video Director,

Why do you insist on showing me so many shots of the crowd? When I go to a sporting event and someone scores, I never EVER look around at the other people in the stadium to see what they’re doing. I want to see the interaction between the guy who scored and his teammates.

And when I go to a concert, I watch the band the entire time. I don’t care about the guy in the front row who is air drumming or the group of chicks who know all the words. I’M A HUGE FAN AND I WANT TO SEE THE BAND!

So why is it that so many TV directors engage in the amateurish act of repeatedly showing crowd shots to their television viewers when the television viewer wants to see the focus of the event, THE ATHLETES AND THE ROCK STARS! Jeezus H.

I wanted to gouge my own eyes out with a fish fork this weekend while watching the crunchy and, dare I say a tad pretentious, Live Earth broadcast. The show was reasonably good until NBC took over. The performance I was most looking forward to, the Police, had so many friggin’ crowd shots that I nearly spun into a rage right there in the living room. And when they did decide to show the band, all we saw were tight shots of Sting and John Mayer. JOHN MAYER! He’s not even in the band! Stewart Copeland is a great performer and we didn’t see the guy! Ugh.

Have I made my point?

We have this chick who lives next door to us and she’s as nice as can be. Trouble is, she has that slack-jawed look that tells you she’s as dumb as a box of hair. One of her more annoying habits is chain smoking in the back yard of her non-smoking rental while our tiny row-house next door fills with her disgusting exhale. Every time she sparks, the stench fills every room of our house. We have to constantly run around closing windows to keep the place from smelling like ass. It’s REALLY annoying.

Smokers can’t stand to hear this kind of talk because they think we’re putting their rights in a full nelson. Let me fill you in on something, dude, just about every time a non-smoker gets on your case, it’s because you’re polluting their air. We don’t care if you smoke till your small, neandertal head caves in. Just don’t make us breathe it. It’s a simple concept. Jeezus.

In Philadelphia we have fairly new anti-smoking legislation that says you can’t smoke in bars and restaurants. So now we have dozens of people smoking at the entrance to the place instead of smoking inside. Trouble with that is many of the eateries in my neighborhood have outdoor table seating and open-air dining rooms. You can’t sit outside without being HAMMERED by smoke, so you go inside where the entire restaurant fills with the smoke that pours in the windows. Nice.

In the winter it’s really pathetic as the smokers huddle on the sidewalk in freezing temperatures, usually with no coat on, just to get that fix. That’s gotta be embarrassing. And if you really have to smoke something, wouldn’t you rather it have some benefit? People smoke pot on the streets all the time. I smell it every day as I walk through the city. Phillip Morris should mix in a little kush and watch their stock take off.

I truly don’t understand the appeal of the cigarette. I really don’t. I tried smoking with a pal of mine when I was like 15 years old and it was such a disgusting experience that I never wanted to do it again. I’ve had friends, colleagues and family members who smoke and I just don’t get how they ever smoked enough to get addicted in the first place. Is it peer pressure, a character flaw, a desire to look ‘hip’? It sure as hell ain’t the smell and taste.

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