It's All For The Best

CAUTION! Upcoming rant on: Overcomplexity

Have you seen that bank commercial lately where the guy walks into the bank to get cheques or something and he ends up giving her ten pieces of identification and she staples that bar code to his forehead? I laughed hysterically when I first saw it, but when I got thinking about it, in light of recent events (or lack thereof), I questioned "How far are they from the truth?"

Let's take a workplace for example, such as my new home, The Bay. Every large corporation has a set amount of rules that they bestow upon the employees (I like to think of us as the vassals). Be curtious and attentive, act professionally, a dress code, etc. Most rules make complete sense, and I wouldn't be against them. A business can't run without all the employees on the same page, right? Now what bothers me are the excessive rules, the ones that give you that fun face-twitch (it's fun at parties).

For instance, The Bay has me mandated to sign up one HBC Credit Card per week per year for all of eternity. That's 52 cards in a year. Now, let's do some simple math. Let's take all the employees of the Bay Pen Centre: approximately fifty. 50 x 52 = 2600 cards in a year (managers and full-timers have to sign-up many more than one a week, so keep in mind that number is below what it should be.). Now let's imagine there are 25 Bay stores across Canada (we know there's more, but let's just pick a number). That means that every year, Bay employees have to sign-up a minimum of 65000 cards! I know Canada is a big country, but let's be realistic! Those who would sign up for a card will do so, and then what? Are we going to immigrate 65000 more people a year to sign up for these pointless cards? The reason I'm ranting about this is because people lose their jobs if they don't get these figures. I may lose my job at The Bay, no matter how great a salesperson I am, because I can't sell a credit card.

The Bay isn't the only company who enforces pointless policy. EB Games, my former employee, had us also enforcing a card, warantees, certain games, etcetra, simply because some corporate powerhouse fool signed a deal with another company. "Sure I'll sign that, Mr. Satan. I won't have to deal with it at all! My measly vassals will enforce it!" ...followed by evil laughter.

The other side of unneccesaryness that bothers me is similar to the bank commercial. It deals with a newer "company" that I am quickly losing respect for: Mozilla.

For those of you cute li'l non-computery types out there, Mozilla has their own browser, Firefox, as well as other utilities that make computer-time so much more fun. My beef with Firefox came when I decided to add colour to my sidebar of my blog. If you have Internet Explorer, you'll notice that "The Rants", "The Movie Reel", etc. are in different fun colours. If you use Firefox, you'll see nothing but bland blue.. you poor unfortunate souls.

So, in order to fix this, I went to find out at Firefox Headquarters why the colour wasn't showing up. First they asked me to read through the FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions, silly). I can understand that. It would be quicker for me and them if I could find it on my own. But I couldn't. I searched for days and found nothing that helped. Since I couldn't find anything, I wanted to send them a bug report. They should fix this so all you unfortunate bland coloured fools can be enriched. In order to fill out a small bug report, I had to sign up for an account, which includes address, personal information, operating system, followed by a search for the type of bug, where the bug falls in terms of the FAQ's (because heaven forbid that someone working for the all-powerful Mozilla would have to designate a type of FAQ on their own!), followed by me throwing my computer out the window and never seeing colour again. Long-story-short, I did not fill out a bug report. One hundred pixels of colour is not worth one hundred hours of torture.

In the end, my frustrations just come down to the fact that everything today is overly complex. Zehrs's are getting bigger, small business are becoming more scarce, and my sanity is going with them. Wal-mart is devouring entire towns and Time-Warner owns six nations (a joke that's probably true). It's going to get to the point where everything's going to be so fast-paced and huge that everyone will simply crash into each other.

I feel like opening a small local business just to keep my sanity. I'd probably have to sign a deal with Mr. Satan though, because other formerly small local businesses, like Wal-Mart, would probably make me sign up for a credit card.

--Jam