The Sporadic Curmudgeon

If you are running a site on Dreamhost, you got a nasty little surprise this morning: depending on how your hosting service payments were set up you either had sites down or were missing between $100 and $9,000 from your bank account. Dreamhost had screwed up, and mistakenly billed their customers $7,500,000 more than they were owed. That’s right: Seven Point Five Million Dollars. My own chunk of that came to $518.00, which put me seriously in the red. I am normally billed $20.00 on the 16th of the month. Despite their email claiming that the problem is now fixed and it was all just a dream, the half-grand has yet to reappear in my bank account.

Oddly enough, that’s not what I’m complaining about. Mistakes happen, and believe you me, I have plenty of experience with software mistakes. What’s got me really pissed off, though, is the reaction of some of the deeply empathic people posting to Digg and Dreamhost’s blog about the incident. Here’s a few sample quotes:

If your account get overdrafted because of $400 in the middle of the month, then I dont understand how you can possibly afford a paid host in the first place *lol* how do you eat?

It appears to me that some people just want to complain in the hope of getting something for nothing and to all those big talking idiots threatening to contact VISA, get real. If you are so piss poor this mistake has virtually bankrupted you, you won’t be able to afford to move to a different host company if you disrupt Dreamhost’s operations.

How broke are yo ass’s??

$120/$240 isn’t a lot of money (especially on a credit card) lol, and it’s already been refunded - get over yourselves!

Also, I’m amazed at how many people are one bill away from over drafting their bank accounts and defaulting on their mortgage.

I love how self centered our society has become. Each little minion creating their own little bubble to live in. When that little bubble collapses the world is just falling apart. Really though, with you and your bubble gone the world moves on and no one cares. We go about our business no ever knowing you existed.

It’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t matter. A lot worse would happen. You could have no home, no family, living in a ditch surviving off rat meat… Do something constructive and move on.

If you’ve set yourself up that you are now bankrupt and living in the ditch, what the heck were you doing in the first place… intelligence is hard to find… wisdom even harder…

If only everyone wasn’t so self-prioritized…

To those who keep no cushion in the bank to cover unforeseen circumstances, I definitely sympathize with the situation you’re in but take this as a lesson and give yourself a little wiggle room. If you’re living that close to the bone then you’re definitely living beyond your means.

LOL at the people who overdraft on their checking accounts when the bill is just $100. Come on, don’t you leave any padding at all in the bank?

Talk about bad money management. You probably shouldn’t be wasting any of it on webhosting at that point.

Yeah because everyone who hosts with DH has mortgage payments on the 15th on January and only has the exact amount in their account to cover it, leaving them completely broke until their next payday, gimme a break.

After all what’s $100?? A C-note won’t even fill up the fuel tank on my truck.

Do you realize that when you tell us that you are not managing your money correctly that it does not make us pity you, but think you are stupid?

So… do I actually need to point out the simple fact that some of us were not born into the middle class? Or that some of us, in spite of being lower caste, would still like to entertain people once in a while, and that costs about $20.00 a month? Or that some of us actually do live paycheck to paycheck, mostly because we were not expecting to be supporting both a young child and an invalid spouse with insanely expensive medications on one measly salary? Or that some of us were also not expecting to be assraped by medical bills and a sleazy insurance company that finds it cheaper for you to die than to pay? Or that some of us are not even able to go to the fucking doctor ourselves to have mysterious painful holes in our hip bones checked out because the same fucking insurance company won’t even admit to the doctor that we have a policy there even though we pay them a full god-damned THIRD of my stupid miserable salary? Or that some of us are trying to deal with all this unbelievable shit at the same time as we’re half-suicidal and still trying to help another relative who’s having trouble and are not asking the state for so much as fucking food stamps?!? How fucking DARE I not have five-fucking-hundred-goddamned-motherfucking extra dollars in my bank account. I have trouble finding the gas money to drive the thirty-five miles to my pathetic job, much less feed us. And I really ENJOY having to ask friends and relatives for help. It really makes me feel good about myself. Maybe I should get one of those fucking cushions in the goddamned bank they’re talking about.

And these kind, compassionate people, ladies and gentlemen, are exactly why the world is such a lovely place to live.

Jesus Christ, I loathe my fucking life. If I hadn’t been deserted by my own father, I’d blow my worthless brains out. But I can’t do that to my daughter. She’s the only person that loves me, and I mean that utterly.

Second Thought Update: In case you’re wondering why the hell I’d write something like this, it’s simple. I’m depressed, pissed off, and I just don’t give a flying shit about much of anything anymore. Dreams are lies and hope is what God spits in your face. What an original observation.

Actually, I don’t feel funny at all, and that’s why I haven’t posted in a while. Entertainment has always been my chief goal here. Nobody wants to read an account of my multitudinous personal catastrophes without a big steaming gob o’ humor slathered on top to render it more palatable, myself included.

The problem is that my 50th birthday is looming over me like the sole of Godzilla’s foot, and I just haven’t felt like making jokes very much lately. Humor, unlike people, can’t be forced to work.

So this is an apology to anyone who has been impatiently awaiting my next literary effort. (Also, please seek psychiatric help.) You can console yourself with the knowlege that anything I would have written during the past few weeks would have been irredeemable crap. That thought has been a great, though pathetic, comfort to me as the days pass and I continue to write NOTHING.

I finally upgraded to the latest and greatest WordPress version a few minutes ago. (Apparently if you don’t frogs will rain from the sky and the Earth will be enshrouded in darkness.) It appears to be fine, except for the weirdness in the category listings in the sidebar. I do not have time to fix this right now, since I have to make dinner and the family is battering at the door with pitchforks and torches demanding food, dammit!

My apologies for the tech problems, and I hope to have them fixed within a few hours.

Update: The “Categories” problem was being caused by an incompatible plugin, “Category Manager.”

You may now leave comments on any Atomic Deathray post. May God have mercy on me.

Man, that was easy. There may be a few kinks here and there, but I’ll take care of them as they arise.

By popular demand (no, really!) I will be allowing comments on Atomic Deathray sometime in the next few days. New reader Lauren (who runs a number of great sites including one dear to my heart: 365 Halloween) wrote me a wonderful letter requesting that I enable comments. So, Lauren, thanks for the swift kick in the ass. You’re getting your wish.

There may be a few new features added in the next month or two also, but more on those anon.

Oh, and everybody enjoy the New Year. It’s statistically unlikely to suck as bad as 2006. Unless there’s a nuclear strike, or a huge asteroid, or another big tsunami, or the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting, or religious fanatics killing us all, or…

Face it; we’re all screwed.

Just to let you know, I’m about to attempt an update to the Wordpress install that runs this site, so if all hell breaks loose you’ll know what happened. I’ve made backups just in case, so I can bring it back up quickly should disaster strike. Catch ya on the flip side!

Five years ago today I wrote the very first Sporadic Curmudgeon post. After one more on January 14th, 2001, I didn’t post again for just over a year, but in my defense the word “sporadic” ain’t just there for show. Who would have thought that my crankiness, which in real life sends people scurrying away like I’m Pepe LePew, would end up being the website’s biggest draw?

Things didn’t really get going here until December 29, 2002, when I made some extremely impolite remarks regarding David Caruso’s acting ability. My traffic spiked almost immediately. (It wasn’t a fluke: another big jump in page hits came on May 18, 2004 after I compared his acting to Gary Sinise’s on the CSI:NY pilot. Caruso may not be able to act his way out of a torn wet Kleenex®, but the man sure drives internet traffic. It’s one of those unsolved mysteries like the Loch Ness Monster, or how Donald Rumsfeld can look at himself in the mirror.)

By far the most popular non-Caruso Sporadic Curmudgeon feature, though, has been the Genitalia in the News category. Go on and look. You know you want to.

Anyway, a while ago I made a page of links to some of the most notorious posts to separate the wheat from the chaff. (Hint: chaff wins.) I’ll go back through the past few months tonight to make sure it’s up-to-date.

I’d like to thank all of the people that have come here over the years to read my painfully meaningless blather, and especially those who took the time to offer encouragement and story tips. To those who sent death threats: you, I’m not so fond of.

So. Five years of my life spent bitching about everything in sight and writing horrible puns and bad jokes. Not a bad gig.

Due to this morning’s little visitor Atomic Deathray will be going down every once in a while this evening while I change a few things around. Actually, as the good people at Dreamhost reminded me, it’s a good thing to change all your passwords regularly anyway. You might want to do that yourself. Catch you on the flip side!

As you may have noticed if you tried to come here earlier today, all of my sites and subdomains were hacked and replaced for about an hour. Until I’ve had a chance to go through all of it carefully this evening, it’s probably still vulnerable and will probably go down again. If so, please bear with me and rest assured that this site will be back to its old obnoxious self soon. I apologize for the difficulties.

I’d like to especially thank the people at Dreamhost who helped me out. I’ve been with Dreamhost for many years, and have nothing but good things to say about them, which if you know me is quite an accolade.

You know, I don’t make a penny on this site. Never have, probably never will. You see the Google Ads over to the left there? Have yet to get a single hit. I didn’t figure I would, either. I don’t go to all the expense and bother of putting this idiotic site up here to make money. I put it here to make people laugh, and call a few pompous asses on their bullshit once in a while. If somebody wants to hack me, well, there’s not much I can do about it. It’s not like it’s hard to do; this isn’t Fort Knox. I never bothered much with security because there’s nothing here anybody would really want.

Yes, the hacker made me spend my lunch break dealing with the invasion. Big deal. I understand it’s really easy to knock old people down, too. Might want to give that a try sometime if you’re bored.

So here I am, it’s the last weekday of my vacation, and I realize I haven’t written a single thing for the website since Sunday. What’s a lazy-ass mofo such as myself to do other than actually sitting down and writing something, which I think we can all agree is not in anyone’s best interest? Luckily, a cunning plan came to me while I was changing the cat’s litterbox. (Somehow I feel that’s germane.)

I’ve added a new section to the Obnoxicon listing some of my funnier posts (according to me, anyway) since this blog started lo these many years ago.

Violá!* Problem solved, and I didn’t have to write a damned thing. Work successfully averted.

* If that’s the wrong little squiggle above the “a,” I don’t want to hear about it. What kind of lame-ass language makes you hunt all over the web for HTML entities anyway?