The Threadless Nut

So we have one of those “rewards” credit cards like I’m sure 143% of you do. Since it’s free money, we use the card for most purchases and get a not insignificant amount of “reward” back. It used to be nice and simple. Every year our friendly banking conglomerate would send us a check with whatever we had earned. It was an easy to understand 1% thing. Spend $100 get a buck back! And we didn’t have to do anything to make it happen. How could it go wrong?

Well, here’s how.

A couple of years ago they changed it. Now, instead of cash, we get “reward points”. 1 point for every dollar spent. You can use 2500 of these points to get a $25 gift card to various merchants, or even a $25 check. So, on the face of it everything looks OK. It’s still the same rate of return, they’ve just abstracted the idea of “dollars” to “points”. I’m sure this is a multi-step plan to slowly increase the number of points it takes to get a dollar, but that hasn’t happened yet, so I’ll save that rant.

Anyway, there is a bit more hassle involved since instead of just sending us a check every year, we have to go through the web site and cash in our points. Not a huge deal, but here’s where it gets dysfunctional. I just cashed in our points, we had 74,000ish points accrued, which if you do the math, works out to 29 $25 gift cards or checks with some points left. Not seeing the benefit of committing to any particular gift card when there is cash as an option, I took the check route. And you know what they’re going to do? Do you? I bet you can guess.

They’re going to send us 29 individual $25 checks. I know because they did it last time. Anyone want to bet if they optimized this process enough to not send us 29 checks in 29 separate envelopes?

UPDATE

Well blow me down, corporate America is not completely brain dead. It seems that someone realized what was going on and fixed the insanity. I receive a single check for the entire amount. Sorry to disappoint you.

Alright, the title of this post doesn’t actually relate to the contents, but it was the phrase that triggered the following horrific series of events.

Apparently, some lucky students in some lucky schools had the pleasure to experience what it’s like in the inside of a cow’s stomach. You see it seems that someone thought it would be a good idea to cut a giant hole in a cow and stick a porthole in it. Someone (it may have been the same person, or not) thought students would learn a lot by sticking their hands in those holes to feel around inside said cows. I had never heard of such a thing, not sure how I managed to avoid it, but that’s neither here nor there.

If you will direct your attention to this site you will see some evidence of this practice. According to them, the cows don’t seem to mind when you poke around inside their digestive system. There is even a student’s account of what’s in there. It includes descriptives like “warm peanutbutter with grass mixed in” and “the constistency of a melting Wendy’s frosty”. Lovely.

This kicker here is those weird little shadow puppet animations that are on the page. One of them discusses some poor bloke name Tom. It seems Tom made an error when he was 9 and rapidly ingested some very hot chowder. This destroyed his throat, so the doctors cut a hole, um… I mean, fistula, in his stomach. From that point on Tom’s form of sustenance required him to “chew his food and spit into a funnel directly into his stomach”, Yum!

Enjoy clicking around other links behind those shadow puppets. It’s an art piece about the Tom Thumb story with interleaved fairy tails, recipes and medical facts.

I just decided, while sitting on the second conference call about the 3rd reorganization that I’ve enjoyed so far this year, that if I could have any superpower, I would choose the ability to magically summon Al Pacino into any situation.

I’d close my eyes, concentrate, and in a puff of smoke he’d arrive. He’d start dealing out “HoooAhhh!”s, “You’re out of order”s, unrefuseable offers, and generally being Pacino like. It would be so useful on a daily basis. Just think of the inane situations you end up in every day that could be fixed (or at least made more entertaining) by a dose of Pacino. The possibilities are staggering.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to be content with my heat-vision.

One of my co-workers had the pleasure of experiencing a drive-by shooting near his home. While this on its own is certainly distressing, here’s the best part. This particular crime occurred on a dead-end street. So here’s how it went:

Vroooommmm…..

Bang Bang Bang…..

Vrooooo….

Kachunk…

Vroo…

Chasnick..

Vrooooommmm…..

You see they had to do a 3 point turn at the end of this cul-de-sac to get out. Somehow at the big meeting when various dashing criminals gathered to plan this job, probably at a casino in Monaco, not one of them thought that it might be a good idea to perform the multi-step direction reversing maneuver before loosing the deadly hail of lead. Either that, or the driver was taking his road test, wonder if he passed?

The other day, out of nowhere (which is where most things actually come from), Declan fires this at me:

Dad? Do you get a new computer when you die?

That got me wondering, assuming that there is some sort of afterlife, is there even a need for computers? What about the Internet? Does some sort of perfect awareness of all things make it unnecessary?

If there an internet there, what’s on it? Is there a huge iTunes Music Store where everything is free and without DRM? Is there any porn? Can you get spyware on your PC? Is there a fallen angel that just needs my account number to transfer his vast wealth, paying me a “modest” fee in the process?

Are the PCs any better than what we have here? Do they crash randomly and require reboots to stay running? How often do you have to upgrade, if at all? Is there a Blue Screen of …. umm… Death? Can you get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?

All tough questions which will likely never be answered. All those near death and death returnees talk about is the white light and their deceased relatives welcoming them. Not one of them noticed the really important things, like were they Macs or PCs? (Though I know they’re Linux boxes)