Look, I know that the marketing team was trying to do something inventive with this ugly-yet-functional phone. I can really imagine the planning meeting where this campaign was conceived:

Bob: “But it’s so damn ugly.”

Pete: “I know Bob, it is. Butt ugly.”

Sarah: “Let’s make that a feature, highlighting its function over form!”

Pete: “Don’t be stupid Sarah, girls don’t have good ideas.”

Bob: “I know! Let’s make this phone’s utilitarian hideousness a sales feature, and contrast it with phones that are pretty!”

Pete: “Bob – I like the way you think. Sarah, you could learn a lot from Bob here.”

…but it does seem to me that implying women are vapid creatures who walk around applying lipstick all day while they cross the street without looking, and that we only like things that sparkle and those stupid useless sparkly things need to be crushed and burned and blown up by your rough and tumble penis phone is… well it’s just offensive. There have to be ways to market things like this that are not hateful and offensive to half your target market, right?

As a woman who was was actually quite interested in the Droid, I now think it’s the phone for dickheads. Nice job, marketeers.

Here’s what happened:

When you sign up for twitter you are (or, you WERE) given an option with regard to reading the messages of the people you chose to follow. You could either:

• read everything they wrote (including messages to people you don’t follow)
• read only the messages they send to the general public and those directed specifically to you (called @replies in twitter-speak.)

The first option works like this: I follow  my friend “Joe” but I don’t follow “Jane.” because I don’t know her. Joe says to Jane “@Jane hey what’s going on tonight? Did you want to go see this show? <insert link to show>.” I can see this message, and I realize that Jane’s a big fan of my favorite band. I can reply to Joe that I am already going to that show, and I will meet him there, and I can check out Jane’s tweet and maybe choose to follow Jane too, since we seem to have something in common. Connections formed. Social networking just happened. Hooray.

The second option means that I would have never seen the conversation at all and may have skipped the show because no one I knew was going. Boo. Maybe I stay at home and slice my wrists open in the tub because no one understands me. You never know.

Now Twitter has removed the ability for us to choose the first option, meaning that I can no longer see conversations that are happening unless I already follow both of the parties involved. Those conversations are invisible to me, as if they aren’t taking place. Since Twitter is ostensibly a service dedicated to networking and building connections between people, this makes absolutely no sense. Especially as what they took away was not mandatory before, but something people could easily turn off for themselves.

Twitter needs open @replies for two reasons:

1. Reading one side of a conversation between someone you know and someone you don’t know is a good way to get to know new people. Taking this feature away prevents new connections forming spontaneously. Consistently seeing what looked like funny/interesting messages directed at one person would make me interested in following them. It’s probably how I also gained most of my followers too, since they saw their friends talking to me. If you think about this in meatspace terms, it’s like being out at the bar and seeing your friend having an animated discussion with someone you don’t know. If that looks good enough you’d probably want to walk up and join them, and be introduced to the new person, right? Well, the way Twitter has now configured things, it’s like every time your friend walks away from you at the bar to talk to someone else, they become invisible – as does the person they’re talking to. So you’re left standing on your own with a watered-down drink in your hands, wondering why there’s no one cool to meet in this place. Wow, that’s really sociable of you, Twitter. Now, I could make periodic visits to my friends’ pages, checking who they’re following, clicking each person’s avatar to read their recent tweets (if their stream is even public) and deciding whether to follow them or not. But realistically, I won’t do that. And I could wait for people I follow to tell me specifically to follow other users – but many times they won’t do that. I certainly never pimp out any of my friends or tell other people to follow them.
2. Some of Twitter’s most-followed members converse with a larger audience via @replies directed to people that the rest of their followers don’t already follow. Taking this feature away breaks the communication model for those users. Take @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman) for instance. He is a big Twitter user at the moment, and has more than 300k followers. People ask him lots of questions, and he is kind enough to reply to many of them. Of course he doesn’t want to reply to the same question over and over, but it was easy enough to follow his stream and see that he tweeted @ someone else about the book signing you were interested in, or why he didn’t get a haircut, or whatever. If you have a look at his tweetstream, it’s 90% @replies to his followers. Yeah, that means he tweets a lot, and I have to filter out a lot of noise. But at the same time, I also learn the answers to questions I didn’t even know I wanted to ask. It’s impractical for Twitter to assume that all of us will start to follow all 300k followers of his, just in case he answers a question, posts a great link or recommends a book or a song or a site  in a reply directed to someone else.

What they should have done.

What Twitter SHOULD have done is implement selective open replies. Let users choose how much they want to read from each of the people they follow. I have been craving this feature for a long time, because people use Twitter in different ways, some of which are interesting to me, and some of which aren’t.

• There are some people I follow who use Twitter mostly as a broadcast medium. They post interesting observations and cool links, and they have some limited back and forth discussions with other interesting people. I want to continue to read their all of their tweets, so that I can eavesdrop on these interesting conversations and find new people to follow.
• There are other people I follow who use Twitter more as an IM client, constantly @replying everyone in the universe, and seemingly about the dullest things in the world. There are people whose individual tweets I like, but I have nevertheless unfollowed because they @replied too many people that I didn’t know or want to know. For those people I would like to turn off following @replies unless I follow both parties already.

I am not a programmer, I don’t know what offering these options would take to implement. But I do know that dumbing things down is only going to piss people off and cause extra problems when users try to circumvent the system. Right now you can get around the @replies thing by adding some extra characters in front of the person’s name.

For instance: if you don’t follow @superbadgirl, and I start out a tweet with “@superbadgirl” the system recognizes that as an @reply and you won’t see it. However if I say “To: @superbadgirl” or “Dear @superbadgirl” or even “: @superbadgirl” then it WILL show up in your stream, because the system just sees that as a normal tweet of mine, in which I mention another person. While this is helpful to ME, because I like to see @replies, it’s going to piss off some people who follow me, and had purposely turned off @replies. Now they have no way to turn this off, because I am doing it manually. They don’t want their streams clogged up with my tweets, and I understand that. But I am nevertheless angry because I can’t read what I want to read. And aggravating your users by preventing some of them reading what they want to read, causing them to force other people to read  a bunch of shit they don’t want to read is FAIL, Twitter – big time FAIL.

This is poorly thought out, poorly communicated and very, very aggravating. I expected better of the people at Twitter, and I am shocked that they did not better assess their members usage patterns before implementing this change. A 10-person focus group would have raised all the same concerns I just expressed here, and taken maybe an hour out of someone’s day.

WTPF Twitter? Get your shit together.

My head is resting firmly back on/near my shoulders. I can't say the same for this poor unfortunate Nordstrom model from another planet. (via Photoshop Disasters)

So that means today I am grateful for:

• Good friends who will listen to you rehash the same event three times in one day, and still pick up the phone when you call the fourth time.
• People who don’t always agree with my negative observations of myself and others, and tell me so.
• Being told twice by two different people that sometimes women have the right to play the douche card for no reason, and that it’s not the end of the world when I get jackassy.
• People who are laid-back, roll with the punches and can take things without falling down/apart. I have  a lot to learn by observing, since I don’t feel like I can absorb things with the equanimity I desire.
• Drugs that let me sleep through the night
• That February, that bitch ass month, can suck it and die in LESS THAN A WEEK. Fuck your cocksucking ways, you horrible, horrible death-month of disaster.
• Hot water
• Warm blankets
• Dog kennels

That’s all!

No, of course it’s not. I get a message yesterday from Virgin that they’re upping the price of texts from 10¢ to 15¢ as of February 15th. “Wait!” you say, because you’ve been paying close attention, “I thought you said you only pay 5¢ per text?” Very perceptive of you to notice. The whole thing is confusing me too. I went to their site to figure out what texts are costing me now versus what they will cost under the new plan. I tend to believe the things my service providers tell me, so I naively calculated at the 10¢ vs 15¢ rates:

120 messages/month @ 10¢ per message = $12.00

120 messages/month @ 15¢ per message = $18.00

They offer a 200-message pack for $5/month, which would clearly be an advantage to me.

So I was ready to sign up for that. But then I started trying to sign up for it, and looking closer at my current account, and here’s what I saw on the “add a text message plan” screen:

Wait, so why are they saying my texts are going from 10¢ to 15¢ and then saying that pay-as-you-go text is currently 5¢? I went to check what I was actually paying now. Here’s a shot of my account with a bunch of texts to Twitter on it:

So clearly I am only paying 5¢ per text right now. That means adding a messaging pack might not be such a benefit to me, because 120 messages/month @ 5¢ per message only = $6.00. And I think last month was extra busy because I was out a lot for the holidays and texting locations back and forth. So I probably don’t even send/receive 120 texts most months.

Interestingly enough, further up on that page, above the account information showing I am paying 5¢ per text, the  the section where I can add messaging packs belies what lies below:

Whatever the fuck, Virgin Mobile.

So they say they’re going to charge me 10¢ and they only charge me 5¢. That’s nice of them. But what’s going to happen on February 15th? Am I going from 5¢ to 15¢?Really? They’re tripling my rate? Not so nice of them.

Do these people even know what they’re charging me, or what they’re supposed to be charging me? I have been a customer of theirs for maybe 4 years or so, so perhaps I am grandfathered in at a cheaper text rate? But if that’s the case then don’t they know that before they contact me? I think I am going to just wait and see what happens on the 15th of February.

I know that compared to most people I pay almost nothing in cellphone bills.  I know because I have been looking at iPhones and Blackberries recently, and am staggered at what they cost per month. I mean, I like tech candy as much as the next chick, but  as tempting as an iPhone is, I really don’t need one. I can’t imagine myself ponying up $80/month in access fees just so I can fiddle with it  when I am out to dinner or at the bar or something. If I was a hardcore cell phone user, or needed it at work, maybe.

Regardless – Virgin Mobile needs to get their act together and get their website in order. I hate shit like this, these huge websites with complicated architecture and tons of bells and whistles, when it’s all totally useless because the information contained on it is  inaccurate and worthless. Tiresome.

A friend shared this with me, and of course I thought of Dim some of you. Immature people of the world, unite and take over!

So getting ready for work I discovered that I had weird hair. Like, really weird. I decided ponytail was a good way to go, so I did that. I went upstairs and broke out the new tights I just bought over the weekend (2 pairs at $14 each, for the record.) and put them on. Uh oh. They are bad tights. They’re the brand I always buy, in the size I always buy, but they’re wrong somehow. For one thing they took out the label, so I couldn’t tell the front from the back. For another thing, once I guessed vaguely at what was front and what was back and pulled them on, they sat about an inch under my waist. Ummm, huh? What is this, low-rise tights? I kind of hopped around, yanking on them, telling myself it would be fine, they’d stretch out in a few minutes or something, and I went downstairs.

I decided to wear some huge earrings, in order to distract the world from what my hair was doing. They’re pretty metal lattice-y things, and I rarely ever wear them when my hair is down, because they get stuck in it. So it’s all WIN so far, right? Then I decide to wear some intense lipstick, as further ammo to draw the eye away from my hair. I grab the lipstick that was so expensive that it OUGHT to be fabulous, and I put that on. Problem being it’s really sucky lipstick and always makes me look weirdly like I have tattooed lip liner, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away because it was expensive and it was bought online, and I think I might be punishing myself for believing the Internet marketing hype.

So anyway, there I am with these awful falling-down tights, weird hair, giant earrings and fucked up lipstick. Perfect start to the day, and I am also running late. Part of the reason I am running late is that just as I go to leave the house, I hear what sounds like gunshots coming from up the street, so I have to wait to see if there are going to be any shooters lurking out back by my car.

I get to work, and the tights are seriously losing the game by the time I am halfway across the parking lot. I begin to consider an emergency tight-ectomy, because I am wearing a long skirt and it’s actually rather warm in our office, but I can’t remember if I shaved my legs last night. Fuck.

I get in and go to cafeteria where the lady hassles me AGAIN about my perfume. I don’t know how many times I can tell her what it’s called, no I don’t have a sample, yes you can get it at Macy’s, no I don’t know if the lady at the swap meet sells an oil-based, knock-off version. I wonder to myself if I look like I hang out at the fucking swap meet, and decided that I probably do, considering the hair and the homeless lady lipstick.

Breakfast arranged, I go to my office. <<redacted for work-related content>>

<<redacted for work-related content>>

I am so aggravated by all of this, and my blood pressure is so high, that I check the calendar to see if I am hormonal or something. Unfortunately I have no hormonal excuse.

Then they start hammer-drilling the brick wall outside my office. I am serious. Hammer-drilling on brick. This lasts on and off for the next four hours.

One of my employees comes in and compliments me on my snowflake earrings. I grimace. These aren’t snowflake earrings! Holy crap, do I look like the kind of person who would wear seasonal snowflake earrings? Because that’s one short step away from wearing festive holiday sweaters, and using way too much hand lotion so all your desk accessories are constantly covered in a light, oily sheen. Now I want to take off the earrings, but then I will have nothing to distract from how entirely weird my hair is.

I go to the bathroom and adjust the tights. I catch sight of myself in the mirror and see that my ponytail has slid off to the side, so I am channeling Punky Fucking Brewster now, apparently. Jesus.

Back to the office, and the tights are still falling down. I can’t take it anymore. Tights in trash. No, I didn’t shave last night after all. Glamorama.

In the meantime, they’re still hammer-drilling outside my office, and I feel like I am going to lose it. A steady stream of people keep coming into my office asking me for stuff, <<redacted for work-related content>> Every person who comes into our area stops by my office to ask how I am doing. These are nice people, upon whom I do not wish to vent my spleen, so I lie, and lie and lie.

Also, now my bare feet are sweaty in these shoes, which really need to be worn with socks or tights.

<<redacted for work-related content>> That’s when it started to be ludicrous instead of aggravating.

What a day. What a goofy, wasted, nonsensical day. And I shouldn’t have let any of it bother me, of course. And telling myself that just aggravates me more, because it makes me feel like a broken, stupid kind of person who lets those kind of things bother her.

OK, exhale. Now I am safely at home, where no one can see my weird hair, and I don’t even have to wear lipstick. Now to enjoy my evening, forgetting all this work BS. It’s almost weekend, right?

I was sick yesterday, very faint and light-headed all afternoon. Which is funny, because in the morning I had just been thinking “Wow, I’ve only gotten about 6 hours of sleep per night this week, max, and I feel fine!” Guess that shite caught up with me. Came home and napped, then took my ass out for some recreation and fun times. Enjoyed it so much. Was accused later of looking like I wasn’t having a good time. Pondering wearing a shirt that says “I am having a better time than my face will comfortably express.” but then of course sometimes it wouldn’t be true. And a shirt with messages that change during the evening seems too much trouble entirely.

Longer post at some point about how my social wants and needs have 180-ed on me in the last year.

Anyway, MyTodd™ took off for Chicago this afternoon, but he’ll be back tomorrow. And my happy exhausted ass is headed to bed.

My Mom kept asking me what I wanted for my birthday and I kept saying “nothing” because there’s honestly nothing (that I would ask my Mom to buy me) that I can think of that I need. If there’s anything I want that’s low-to-medium priced I buy it myself, and I am at the age where it’s no longer OK-feeling to ask my parents to buy expensive things for me. So she ended up taking my word for it and giving me cash. I decided to spend it, and went self-birthday shopping for me.

I went to the Galleria which has instituted a policy of no under-18′s alone after 3 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. That was in response to some violence at the mall involving youth, and it’s been in effect for several months. Maybe a year even? Anyway, whether in response to the ban or the good weather or the fact that people now think the mall is violent, it was dead there. And even though it was dead it felt run-down and dirty. Like a big, sloppy crowd had just cleared out five minutes before. Lots of closed stores with no “coming soon” signs on the boarded-up storefronts. Things like the Kenneth Cole store and the BreadCo closed down. Who ever heard of a BreadCo closing? I grabbed some coffee at Starbucks and it was grimy there, like no one had wiped the counters down all day. Gross.

I went first to Sephora to get a new bottle of Euphoria, and they were doing a decent business. Decent enough that no one asked me if I needed any help, even though I was in there for a good 10-15 minutes looking around with a bemused expression on my face. Deciding that they must not carry Calvin Klein fragrances anymore, and that I was damned if I was paying $22 for a tube of Stila lipgloss, I headed into the Apple store. (That shitbag place is always hopping. I swear that if I had to work in there I would kill myself and others within an hour.) Anyway, I wanted one of those iTrip things like I borrowed from Todd for my Savannah trip. But if you can imagine, no one asked me if I needed any help, and I couldn’t find it on my own. I found one that was similar, but the price tag was torn off, and there was no one to ask about the cost. It wasn’t the same model anyway and I wanted to get the same one because it had worked so well. So I fought my way back out through the crowd and left.

OK, 0 for 2. I am beginning to form a theory of inverse helpfulocity, in which shop workers only ask people who are clearly browsing if they need help, because people who look like they need help may want… help. And that’s work. It’s much easier to swan around bothering people who are just looking. This is based on my own personal experience of being bothered by many, many shop people when I want to be left alone, and never finding anyone to help me when I want to ask questions and buy something. I headed to Aveda to see if they’ve come to their senses and brought back Deep Penetrating Hair Revitalizer. (They have not. I hate them.) If you can bring yourself to feel astonishment one more time, no one asked if they could help me as I searched fruitlessly for anything that might be a decent replacement. (Seriously. I got home last night and my hair looked like it belonged on a deranged maiden-aunt who’d escaped from a period romance via the tropical rain forest.)

Not quite so much gray, but seriously it was huge and scary-frizzy.

They have some new moisture line and I have to commend myself for not just buying it, but testing the conditioner on one wrist and the masque on the other. A few hours later when I was at Todd’s and scratching at both welt-covered wrists I knew I had saved myself a trip back to return the stuff. Anyway, I bought some Anti-Humectant pomade, as if anything could fight my hair’s attraction to humidity or vice-versa.

After Aveda I went down to Macy’s, where a girl actually asked if she could help me! I asked her if they had any Euphoria gift sets, and she pointed out to the ones which were cleverly hidden right where I was standing. Genius strikes again, in the form of my enhanced powers of perception!

So here’s where it gets funny. She walks away and I peruse the prices and the gift sets on offer. Small bottle (1.7 oz) of perfume = $58. Large bottle (3.4 oz) = $75. So I am getting the larger one. You know, value. So I look at the gift sets and realize they aren’t really all that gift-setty. They’re a silver bag that you could reuse for storage with a silver fabric headband wrapped around it, which you could use if you take up being a ballerina. But the price for the bag that contains the 3.4 oz bottle of perfume is $70. I look at the bag which contains the small bottle, and it’s $50. So basically I can save anywhere from $5 to $8 by buying the same size perfume and taking a free bag and headband. Sweet. I go to purchase it and the girl who’s checking me out doesn’t scan the bag, which has a regular price and bar code on the bottom. She opens the bag, takes out the perfume box and scans that. Which rings up $75. I point out to her that the bag says that it’s $70 not $75, and she talks to the lady at the next register, defaming some not-present “she” who “switched out all these gifts yesterday” and “must have not changed the prices” (sic). She then turns to me and says “This has gone up since yesterday.” Expecting that to make sense to me, when I know darn well that the price of the perfume itself is fixed, and if anything the price of the set was incorrect, not magically raising and lowering like a deli special.

Now, if there had only been one set like that I might have gone along with her unlogic, because I don’t want to seem as if I am scamming the store. But there were 3-4 sets just like that, with various sizes being sold at lower than face value because they were in this price-transforming silver bag. So I just raised my eyebrows and looked at her. (Eyebrow-lifting is the first step you take in your transmogrification from regular person to Angry Customer Lady.) Her companion at the other register said “Just give it to her.” (Note: Thanks Macy’s! I love for you to mislabel your shite and then make me feel like a scam artist!) So anyway, that was a bargain. I guess. Todd thought the headband was cute, though he didn’t want it for himself as far as I could tell.

I tried to look at shoes, but their whole shoe department looked like a bomb went off, and even the displays of regular-priced shoes were fudged up. The whole wall that had Born written on it was stocked with nothing but Easy Spirit shoes, and no matter how farked my feet get I will not wear Easy Spirit shoes. I was vaguely embarrassed to be inadvertently looking at them. So I just left. Wow, looking back at my total experience, that whole mall was a real shithole tonight.

I don’t know. All of St. Louis seemed totally dead. There was no one on the roads, no one at Borders when I stopped in there, no one on the highway. I don’t know if people were holed up in their houses or all out of town for one last hurrah before school starts on Monday, but it was dead as a doornail.

And that concludes all of Susan’s Wild and Soapy Showertime Shopping Adventures for this Saturday!

Oh, and one more side note regarding the bar on Friday night: Just because I am at the bar with my friends at/after last call doesn’t mean I am looking to be picked up by your drunken skank ass. I happen to like to stay out late when I choose to go out, and closing down the bar doesn’t mean I care to be treated as if I am easy-pickings, or the last-resort chick. I am planning to go home to bed, alone, and your drunken last-minute ramblings when you realize you’re inadvertently planning the same are not impressive. That’s all.

she says
any two points can make a line
but i know i can never make you mine
i can never make you mine

Deb Talan – Two Points

Which product never fails to make me do a marketing *boggle* at the insanity of the name. (but which I couldn’t get a picture of before it disappeared from my Target.)

Friends get each other pictures of things that make them snicker. That’s why you’re the best Jeni!