Minor things that bother you

[wanderer2575]

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

What's easier, having that policy and having to deal with a rich person throwing a tantrum every time you don't let them in to see the show that they paid for? Or just letting them go inside and mildly annoy the other customers, who if they complain you can just say "I'm sorry, sir, we have no policy prohibiting late arrivals, you got to see the show you paid for, so there's nothing we can do..."

The General Public is a hydra that always has one head trying to devour you. Customer service is a game of picking your battles to dodge whichever head looks the hungriest.

When "Professor" Peter Schickele toured with his P.D.Q. Bach concerts, knowing audience members would make sure they were seated on time and would look forward to late arrivals.  His crotchety-acting stage manager, William Walters, would come onstage (always dressed in a garish outfit that would make a used-car salesman look like a funeral director) and announce that the Professor had not yet arrived (the gag was that the Professor had confused the location with a rival town).  To kill time, Walters would ramble on with stories, but as latecomers arrived he would stop talking and silently glare at them until they were seated.  As more arrived, he would get more irritable, making a show of looking at his watch and delivering sarcastic comments.  At one theater where latecomers took extra-long to get to their seats, he remarked "Ain't continental seating a bitch?"  The audience would get a laugh out of the whole thing, which hopefully latecomers took to heart for future.

Why do the big 9s have tails, but the small 9s don't?

https://goo.gl/maps/s4icTzhWhCRZiujm7

There's zero point to that little 9 being there in the first place!!!

Of course there is.  When the price is posted as $4.299, your brain sees $4.29 but the pump rounds it up to $4.30.  Unless you get 10 gallons, in which case you can claim your triumphant victory in having paid $42.99 instead of $43.00.

[Scott5114]

Whatever happened to "late arrivals will not be seated until intermission"?

What's easier, having that policy and having to deal with a rich person throwing a tantrum every time you don't let them in to see the show that they paid for?

Let me guess.... that rich person is a potential contributor to the foundation that keeps that venue alive, right? 

Hah, I wouldn't know for sure, I've never worked in a performance venue. I've just had to deal with enough members of the General Public to know that someone losing out on something they paid for out of the consequences of their own actions is fertile ground for a customer tantrum to take root in. And it seems that as a person's income goes up, their emotional maturity level tends to approach the age of five.

I was brought up to be on time or early for events, and to allow enough time for traffic and parking. The focus of attention should be on the hard working performers, with both the backstage/technical people closely behind, followed by the theater ushers, and arriving late while the performance is in progress is disrespectful.

Eh, I can kind of see both sides of it. Yes, being unnecessarily disruptive to the performance is disrespectful to the performers. This is especially true if one is disruptive enough that the performers themselves notice it. But on the other hand...enjoying a performance is a leisure activity, and a policy of "butts must be in seats by 8:00:00.0000000000 sharp" would just add needless stress to what is meant to be an enjoyable activity. I couldn't stand having to adhere to that level of punctuality in a corporate job when they were giving me money to do so; I'm not going to do it just for fun.

It's been my experience that performances very rarely start at the actual start time quoted on the ticket anyway, and when they do there's very often an opening performer rather than the performance you are interested in seeing anyway. So to some extent the respect for one another's time that punctuality is usually cited as indicating is already eroded. Obviously, one should try to avoid being too disruptive to one's neighbors, but if something puts me behind, I'm not going to make up time by speeding or whatever to avoid momentarily distracting a stranger and annoying them such a small amount that they'll probably forget about it by the time the show ends.

But then again, I generally prefer watching performances on video rather than in person. I have just enough audio-processing latency in my brain that anything other than perfectly mixed sound with good acoustics makes it hard for me to discern things like instrument voices in a concert setting, and unfortunately most concert venues in this area don't often have those. And I usually can't afford seats close enough to have a good enough view of the stage to make out what's going on better than what's being displayed on the big screens. If I'm going to watch the concert on a TV anyway, I may as well get the better sound quality by staying home.

[ZLoth]

Eh, I can kind of see both sides of it. Yes, being unnecessarily disruptive to the performance is disrespectful to the performers. This is especially true if one is disruptive enough that the performers themselves notice it. But on the other hand...enjoying a performance is a leisure activity, and a policy of "butts must be in seats by 8:00:00.0000000000 sharp" would just add needless stress to what is meant to be an enjoyable activity. I couldn't stand having to adhere to that level of punctuality in a corporate job when they were giving me money to do so; I'm not going to do it just for fun.

It's been my experience that performances very rarely start at the actual start time quoted on the ticket anyway, and when they do there's very often an opening performer rather than the performance you are interested in seeing anyway.

If the published start time is 8:00 PM, the realistic start time is more like 8:05 PM. What had occurred is that this was part of a "meet the author" tour, so the start of the performance time was actually 8:15 PM.

I try to be very respectful of people's time, but as a team manager for a "tiny yet mighty" specialized technical support team for mission critical systems that has been work-from-home for the past two years, I have to focus on whats important. That happens to be making sure new cases are picked up in a timely manner, worked to resolution, and the customer being provided timely updates. That happens to be more important than if you are at your desk working at 8:00 AM... or 8:05 AM.

But then again, I generally prefer watching performances on video rather than in person. I have just enough audio-processing latency in my brain that anything other than perfectly mixed sound with good acoustics makes it hard for me to discern things like instrument voices in a concert setting, and unfortunately most concert venues in this area don't often have those. And I usually can't afford seats close enough to have a good enough view of the stage to make out what's going on better than what's being displayed on the big screens. If I'm going to watch the concert on a TV anyway, I may as well get the better sound quality by staying home.

Cheaper? Yes. But there is the energy and mood of an in-person experience that being at home can't provide, whether it be a concert, sporting event, or road trip.

[Scott5114]

Cheaper? Yes. But there is the energy and mood of an in-person experience that being at home can't provide, whether it be a concert, sporting event, or road trip.

I would agree with this in the general case (I certainly don't think GSV is a valid substitute for driving a road myself). However, with concerts specifically, I've found that any benefits the energy and mood add are a wash because I don't enjoy the product itself as much. If the mixing is bad enough that I can't make out the bassline, or the singer's words come across as indistinct, or the stage is so far away that I can't even see the expressions on the performers' faces...I'd rather save the money and watch it on video.

[1995hoo]

We were at a Paul McCartney concert that started two hours late once. Turned out a truck had overturned on the Beltway and delayed a large part of the crowd, so he pushed the show back. Once we learned the reason for the delay, we said "good for him."

The Kennedy Center in DC doesn't allow latecomers in during a performance.

[kkt]

Most performing arts I've been to start within 5-10 minutes of the announced time.  Everybody in the audience who got to the theatre before the announced time is allowed to get their seats, but if they're after that they don't get to march in front of the rest of the audience during a scene.  Only time we were late the house manager put us in a balcony to watch until the end of the scene and then moved us forward.

[GaryV]

People have walked late into church during prayers.

[Max Rockatansky]

People have walked late into church during prayers.

That's totally something I do.  But then again, I'm dragged to churches on occasion as a spectator by my wife instead of being a willing participant.  Therefore my level of respect for the custom at hand is likely to be lesser than others in the crowd by default.  I prefer not go, but sometimes not participating in family activities is just not something I have the option of.

[abefroman329]

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's the same with all opera companies, but the Lyric Opera WILL NOT seat latecomers until the first intermission.  Once, we had to watch the first act on a TV in the basement of the Lyric Opera House, and another time, they herded latecomers into a sparsely-populated section for the first act.

I don't know how they handle latecomers to operas with no intermission, since we've never been late to one.

[kphoger]

People have walked late into church during prayers.

Shame on you for having your eyes open...   

[Bruce]

We were at a Paul McCartney concert that started two hours late once. Turned out a truck had overturned on the Beltway and delayed a large part of the crowd, so he pushed the show back. Once we learned the reason for the delay, we said "good for him."

The Kennedy Center in DC doesn't allow latecomers in during a performance.

Something similar happened a few years ago in Seattle: a Sounders game had to be delayed by 23 minutes due to an overturned fish truck on the Alaskan Way Viaduct that caused a domino reaction across downtown and gridlocked the city. Goalkeeper Stefan Frei had to run through downtown to make it in time for warm-ups, since he was also caught in the jam.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Forms that require two family names to be mandatorily imputed in separate boxes. Although this isn't a problem for me as my full name has indeed two family names, it can be for anyone not from any Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries. In that case, one of the family names (the first for Portuguese-based forms, the second for Spanish ones) should be the maiden's name of one's mother.

[kphoger]

Forms that require two family names to be mandatorily imputed in separate boxes. Although this isn't a problem for me as my full name has indeed two family names, it can be for anyone not from any Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries. In that case, one of the family names (the first for Portuguese-based forms, the second for Spanish ones) should be the maiden's name of one's mother.

A similar frustration is programs that cannot accommodate two-word or hyphenated surnames.

For example, a program we use at work to run background checks cannot accommodate any spaces or hyphens in the surname field.  Not only is this bad for Hispanic immigrants who use both a maternal and a paternal surname, but also for a surname as simple as St James, and for the common Marshallese surname Chong Gum.  So then we have to choose what to do:  smoosh the words together with no space/hyphen, drop the second one, drop the first one...?  At any rate, then, it's bound to not exactly match the way the surname is spelled out in every other program–many of which don't have that issue.  Then, when one program needs to correspond to another program (such as background check and driving record), things get complicated.

Why did people set them up like this?  Did it never occur to them that some people have spaces and hyphens in their names?

[kurumi]

Why did people set them up like this?  Did it never occur to them that some people have spaces and hyphens in their names?

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

[kphoger]

Why did people set them up like this?  Did it never occur to them that some people have spaces and hyphens in their names?

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Falsehood #37 is the one at play in my point:  "Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person."

[abefroman329]

For example, a program we use at work to run background checks cannot accommodate any spaces or hyphens in the surname field.  Not only is this bad for Hispanic immigrants who use both a maternal and a paternal surname, but also for a surname as simple as St James, and for the common Marshallese surname Chong Gum.  So then we have to choose what to do:  smoosh the words together with no space/hyphen, drop the second one, drop the first one...?  At any rate, then, it's bound to not exactly match the way the surname is spelled out in every other program–many of which don't have that issue.  Then, when one program needs to correspond to another program (such as background check and driving record), things get complicated.

I deal with a similar issue at work when the race/ethnicity of an applicant isn't available and we need to use proxies to come up with an educated guess - the system just throws out entries where the surname is hyphenated or there's a space between two names, which is doubly problematic when there's a high likelihood that these are going to be non-white borrowers.

[J N Winkler]

Forms that require two family names to be mandatorily imputed in separate boxes. Although this isn't a problem for me as my full name has indeed two family names, it can be for anyone not from any Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries. In that case, one of the family names (the first for Portuguese-based forms, the second for Spanish ones) should be the maiden's name of one's mother.

The mirror image of this annoyance--which I suspect is not often encountered in Hispanophone or Lusophone areas--is Web forms which do not allow you to choose your security question for two-factor authentication and demand your mother's maiden name.

A similar frustration is programs that cannot accommodate two-word or hyphenated surnames.

[. . .]

Why did people set them up like this?  Did it never occur to them that some people have spaces and hyphens in their names?

The piece Kurumi linked to has a funny and by no means exhaustive list of assumptions programmers (and people in general) make about names.  (Andrew Vachss wrote a whole series of crime novels featuring a main character who is identified on his birth certificate only as "Baby Boy Burke.")

It is by no means a given that even educated people will recognize that a surname is an open compound.  "St. James" is easy to pick up as two parts that must go together, but there are plenty of Welsh surnames where the first part of the last name is easy to mistake as one of the forenames.  David Lloyd George (British prime minister during the later part of World War I) is well-known enough that this does not often happen for him, but I've come across multiple sources where William Rees Jeffreys (an influential advocate for highway funding in the first half of the twentieth century, but hardly a household-word celebrity) is identified just as "Jeffreys."

Things get interesting in terms both of capitalization and spacing when a last name consists of a preposition (not necessarily a nobiliary particle) and a placename--e.g., "di Renzo" versus "DiRenzo."



A related annoyance, in terms of bad form design, is the assumption that a place is uniquely identifiable as city and country.  British officialdom is especially susceptible to this one, despite the UK itself having duplicate placenames that are often used for certain types of fraud (e.g., telling officers manning a mobile weighbridge and checking driving hours that your load came from nearby Blackburn, Lancashire, rather than the more distant Blackburn, West Lothian).

[kphoger]

And then, even if you get it correct–let's use Rojo Zúñiga for the surname–it's a roll of the dice that the person didn't get a driver's license name under just Rojo or under just Zuniga, and therefore one of them should (unbeknownst to you) be considered an "alias".

[Scott5114]

And good luck knowing which one the first person to help that customer put their account under! Sometimes we had customers with three separate accounts because people would search one version of the name and come up with nothing, so they'd make yet another new account assuming it to be a new customer.

We had a customer named Carolyn once. That was it. That was her whole name. You look on her driver's license and where mine would say "NAZELROD, SCOTT" hers just said "CAROLYN,". Of course the system demanded we give her a last name. She was listed in all of our databases as Carolyn X.

[skluth]

Why did people set them up like this?  Did it never occur to them that some people have spaces and hyphens in their names?

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

I wonder how much is a legacy of older languages (like BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL) which had more strict rules regarding fields. It's been decades since I even programmed but I do remember being frustrated frequently by field syntax when I was learning to program.

[frankenroad]

The other situation where this can be a problem, is if you have a suffix in your name.   I recently tried to book tickets on Delta.com but I couldn't because the last name on my Delta Frequent Flyer account is, for example, "SMITH".  But somewhere in some ID system (including on my passport), my last name is "SMITHJR".  I had to book the Delta flight on Travelocity.

My legal name is and always has been Frank Mxxx Smith, Jr., but since my dad passed away 15 years ago, I am less diligent about using the Jr. than I used to be.  And don't get me started on sports players who put the JR or III on their uniforms - unless your dad is still playing in the same league, (e.g., Ken Griffey at one time), it's not necessary.  When I played soccer, my shirt just said SMITH on the back.

[kkt]

The Library of Congress made a pretty good attempt at coding names for their first attempt at an online catalog in the 1960s.  Okay, they punted on non-Roman alphabets, but at least they had trained specialist catalogers applying the same romanization scheme to all the names from one language group.  There was enough coding in the names to put them in a reasonable order, too.

They did decide not to include "Sr." "Jr.", "II", etc., for most people mainly because those suffixes are often changed during their life.  Instead, they put in dates of birth (and death, if applicable).

Most other libraries copied the Library of Congress coding for author's names, but often not for borrowers names in their checkouts system.

[formulanone]

The other situation where this can be a problem, is if you have a suffix in your name.   I recently tried to book tickets on Delta.com but I couldn't because the last name on my Delta Frequent Flyer account is, for example, "SMITH".  But somewhere in some ID system (including on my passport), my last name is "SMITHJR".  I had to book the Delta flight on Travelocity.

My middle name is sometimes crammed into my first name (no space) with one airline, set apart as a "second first name" with another, displays as a true middle name with another...so there's no consistency. It gets even more weird with the spellings for the hotel brands, but they're a lot more lenient about exact spelling than the TSA and airlines' loyalty programs. My understanding is that many airlines are using a lot of legacy superstructures that date back to the 1970s-1980s so there's inconsistencies with modern web platforms. From my vague understanding of coding, it seems to check out.

My 17-year-old self should have made it clearer to the Driver's License Office to not include my middle name on my IDs and I probably wouldn't have this issue. But who knows...maybe someone with the same first-and-last winds up on a Do Not Fly list, and having that wild card helps out.

[webny99]

When a company requires you to pay by credit card and then charges a fee to do so.

[abefroman329]

When a company requires you to pay by credit card and then charges a fee to do so.

And it got much worse during the pandemic, too.  "The only way you can buy this is online, and we're going to charge you a convenience fee to do it."