© Aron Hsiao / 2000
- USPS Parcel Select. Oh . my . God . does . it . suck . Never, ever use it. For anything. USPS is now a one-service shop: priority. Send any other way and you’re looking at 15-30 days, packages that they don’t bother to scan for tracking at all, and a not insignificant chance that your parcel will never arrive because they allow it to fall off the back of the truck.
- The Democratic Party right now and liberals in general. Embarrassing cesspool of outrage porn, prejudice, tribalism, and anti-democratic activism. And I say that as a far-left liberal of many years. These people are currently lost. And I say that as a life-long leftie.
- The way that no watchmaker is quite on the ball. Swiss makers can’t come up with a cheap anything. Americans don’t even make watches anymore. Orient has beautifully accurate, inexpensive automatic movements, but only periodically come up with a good watch face and can’t get their bracelets or fit and finish right. Citizen makes beautiful faces, cases, and bracelets, but then stuffs an Eco-Drive into almost everything and makes precious few automatics. Seiko has reasonable movements, reasonable faces, reasonable cases, and reasonable bracelets, but excels in nothing, leaving you feeling as though you’re wearing a Toyota.
- The way that Apple now sucks. They used to make high-quality, world-beating products that made life better. Now they make high-quality products that are way behind the technology and size curve and make life more complicated and more frustrating, all while charging way too much.
- The American legal system. It’s a dumpster fire. Anyone hoping to get justice out of it in any area of law—family law, criminal law, torts, whatever—is going to be sorely disappointed.
- Facebook. Aside from being a cesspool, it’s also got the most braindead resources for businesses that I think I’ve ever encountered in a SaaS UI.
- Volvo. Which is sad. Because they once made great cars that ran half a million miles with the barest of service. Now they make expensive cars that run exactly 24 miles between $3,000 repair bills.
- The fact that nobody makes full-size Chinese Checkers sets any longer, and the fact that Levi Strauss & Co. keep changing (and cheapening) their recipe for 501 jeans while selling them as “the original.”
- The malaise in the academic world.
- United Healthcare. Never try to do business with them. Any little thing you want to do has to be done by phone because their online system is a joke. When you call, it only takes 25 minutes to wade through their voice system pressing numbers, after which you’ll be relieved when you’re finally told, “We’ll connect your call now. Your expected wait time is 55 minutes.” After which, at approximately minute 52 of waiting, they’ll summarily hang up on you without warning. After four days of trying and waiting, you’ll finally get through to someone whose English is so bad that even if you’ve lived in every major city in the U.S., communicating effortlessly with accents from new immigrants from all over the world, you’ll fail to understand the very first sentence that they make, and will then spend the next ten minutes asking them to repeat themselves over and over again until they (once more) hang up on you without warning.