Sounding Off!

That last Blog Post in which I lambasted Google for their lack of service sure felt good! There are times when you get so frustrated with a situation that it is positively therapeutic to sound off and vent your hostilities. It may or may not do anything to solve the problem. I have no hope for better dealings with Google, but it actually made me feel better to let it out. There was a time when I was working as an engineer for Bell & Howell Company, when I had such a showdown with the Purchasing Department. They were very upset that Engineering was treading on their turf by placing direct Purchase Orders. Without getting into the details, I read them the riot act about maintaining schedules and having sufficient technical knowledge to purchase the proper components in a timely manner. I don't ordinarily sound off, and my confrontation so surprised them that they went out of their way to be courteous and apologetic from then on. It almost approached friendship. For best results, however, you should save your sounding off for a very special situation, like Google.

Google Adsense Customer Disdain

I'd like to sue Google Adsense for Non-Support. I have spent several months trying to make contact with them to find out how to test my account to see whether it is even working. When you try to contact customer support, they tell you to ask a question in their forum first. When you ask a question, you run into so many other questions from people who are having problems that you can't even find your posted question again to see if you have received any answers or suggestions. If you give up and say that you have to contact Customer Support, they tell you that you can only check off one of a few topics they will answer, and they won't let you write a word about your case. Well Google, I don't think that you really exist. If you do, tell me why I have been on both your Adsense Content and Adsense Search Programs for more than a year on two websites and two Blogs (one more recent), and there has been absolutely no change in my account statistics for many months. I don't think you ever check to see whether sites are functioning properly. It just lets you post ads without ever having to pay off. Google Analytics is even worse. I had one site on there, and then I added three more sites only to find that the system claims that all four sites get exactly the same number of hits. Does anyone else have a better ad system available? Google is too big to know what it is doing.

Happy Birthday

The biggest thing in the news for the last couple of weeks has been the Swine Flu, more formally called H1N1. One of the more interesting points in all of the news coverage is that your first line of defense against this previously unknown virus strain is to wash your hands frequently and thoroughly. The best way to avoid getting sick and to keep this contagion from spreading is to carry on your normal activities, but keep your hands clean after touching anyone or anything that comes into contact with other people. Dr. Tim Johnson, consultant to the ABC broadcast network has suggested that when washing your hands, you should scrub them together with soap for as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday". This advice gives me the picture of people at side-by-side sinks in public restrooms all washing and singing "Happy Birthday to you..." The singing would probably help them cheer each other up, but the danger is that in their enthusiasm, they would give each other hand slap high fives, which would mean that they would have to wash their hands all over again.