I had a disappointing experience with apple’s tech support (surprise). And i admit, while i wouldn’t say i generally obsess over it (slick and functional design lets it slip into the background), my life is pretty preoccupied with the OS X, and when things go wrong i’d admit to obsession. Anyways, for this post, while hopefully i’m not cheating by maybe avoiding the software itself, i was thinking about the feeling of pre-programmed pleasantries and flattery. Personally I hate it at all times, and it just makes a bad transaction even worse. Maybe it’s a kind of uncanny valley thing. I was talking to my friend Nicole about it and she brought up the metroPCS customer service, where the real humans on the line seem to be forced to be extraordinarily complimentary (along the lines of, when you ask them how they’re doing, they say things like “well just GREAT now that I’m on the phone with YOU!!”), which I started to roll my eyes at, but Nicole admitted that it eventually seeped into her consciousness and made her feel better.

after arguing and going nowhere:

post-chat-window email follow-up:

update: follow up email sent around 6am this morning

I thought I’d try my hand at crowdfunding some snack money off of Facebook, but I was a little bit wary from the start as I cruised down my timeline for the first time in about a year. All this evidence is anecdotal, but I was only seeing content about monumental life events (some of which were also asking for cash: totaled cars, lost jobs, etc., which made my request feel a little trivial and irreverent). It’s hard to say whether most of my peers on the site have moved on to only sharing these kinds of things, or if the newsfeed algorithm pushes that kind of content that hard, but I imagine it’s something like both, and probably something else I’m not thinking of. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t been on here for a long time so it’s a kind of bangers-only playlist, if you know what I mean. After the third day of posting and scrolling I started to see less significant content, but the likes were also down on those (a dozen or so for an interesting photo instead of hundreds for generic babies and engagements). I intended my posts to be somewhere between so lackluster/monotone as to stand out against the usual content and extravagantly attention-grabbing, in other words, average. I have no idea how it fared algorithm-wise, or how many people actually saw it in their timeline, but I did only get one like from the series and that was when I tagged Ben. I had thought that Ryan Griffis donated to the snack fund, but when I checked my venmo account later I realized it had happened in a dream. I was interested in this project because while I was hoping for success, in my gut I didn’t really think that would happen. Which is interesting because I’m used to running these sorts of one-off barter/art-trade arrangements IRL, but I don’t think I’m too savvy at it online.

facebook recognized my call for donations

not sure if it was the “snaxxx” but I got this ad after that post, and maybe my image looked like a macro? Hard to say.