I swiped my card, and the machine asked me to choose “Withdraw,” “Transfer,” or some other option. Come to find out, the sign sticking up from the back of the machine says that this thing is an ATM, and that whoever provides it charges a $.99 operating fee over and above the amount of each transaction placed with it.
Still a bit confused, I assumed that “Withdraw” was what I wanted, so I pressed that and then I get options of 5, 10, 15, 20, and “More”. Since my total was just over $5, I pressed “More” and “Other” (which showed up on the next screen) which allowed me to enter the exact amount. Oddly enough, the machine rejected the entire transaction when I did this. I asked the cashier about it, and he said I had to pick one of the $5-increment amounts. Grr.

So, grudgingly, I chose “$10″, entered my PIN, and waited for the receipt to print. When it did, the paper started coming out at an angle and then stopped, while the machine started to make a growling sound as it tried to print on jammed paper. I then tried to help it along by pulling on the little bit of paper sticking out, and then it started printing again — but by now, the crucial part of the receipt was mangled beyond recognition. This would have been the part the cashier would have looked at to see how much I had paid, since the ATM receipt acted like a cash voucher. Thankfully, I was able to just tell the guy behind the counter how much I had paid, and he proceeded to process the transaction and give me my change. Whew — close one.

That has got to be the WORST transaction I have EVER had to deal with. I mean seriously, why can’t they accept cards the way normal places do?!

Couple that with the fact that the spigot on the soda fountain that dispensed water had something wrong with it, such that if my cup didn’t completely surround the outlet, it would spray all over the place.

I was ANNOYED, to say the least.
I did fill out one of their comment cards though, so MAYBE the manager will take the appropriate heed to what I had to say.

Oops, sorry, that wasn’t short and sweet like I said it would be. I kinda started getting into it. lol

Tonight, I picked up a tray and did like I always did – told the lady I wanted fried rice – but then she asked me if I wanted a Panda Bowl or a Plate (she might have said A La Carte, I don’t remember). This understandably caught me off-guard, so I proceeded to examine the menus above to see what on earth she was talking about. I just wanted the normal 2-entree thing; didn’t she know that?!

Now, here’s where my grade of F is manifested. As I started perusing the menus, she just stood there, waiting on me to tell her what I wanted. If I had given her a response reasonably quickly, that would be fine, but I didn’t; I stood there looking at it for about 10-15 seconds because I wasn’t really in a thinking mode. In this situation, an employee (I’m not sure of the proper title for one who serves food from behind a counter) who really knows what they’re doing would have waited for a response for no more than 5 seconds, and then pointed out the meaning of the two options she had expressed to me verbally.
I think that sounds reasonable.

The whole transaction ended up feeling a bit awkward to me.
/fail

I think the perfect OS would be a mixture, really, of Windows, MacOS, Linux, … well all of them, I suppose. I mean, they all have good aspects, but none of them are perfect. I would make one that’s perfect for noobs and power users alike.

Vista is very nice; I like it a lot more than I originally thought I would, but of course you know how many other people are now saying that same thing. For one, I have noticed its stability over XP. XP installations seem to be hit-or-miss: some people never have any trouble, and others have all the trouble. For instance, I recently installed a copy of XP Pro on my machine. It started out rock-solid, with a much, much better MTBRDTOSC (mean time before restart due to OS corruption – hehe) than my previous installation of XP Home. And after I got most of my programs installed, it still seemed ok. But here recently I’ve had more trouble than I should expect (which would be none). I’ve had programs start acting up (Adobe Audition, Firefox, Skype) or even crashing (Firefox, Google Chrome, Winamp) after less than 100 hours of uptime. And one or two times, a restart didn’t fix it – but most of the time it does, which confirms to me where the issue lies.

So, Vista is stable. And it looks nice. However, the Basic theme (which I use, to avoid the unnecessary RAM carnage that comes with using Aero) needs a bit of help; I’ve seen mock Vista themes for XP that put it to shame. Additionally, getting rid of the cascading menus under “All Programs” was a good step, but just cramming it all into one small box, to me, is actually worse: at least with the menus, I could see all the folders at once (at any given depth). The search box in the start menu is a great idea. I wish the people that complain about the “Run” option being missing would at least bother to look at the start menu’s options. Anyone who even used “Run” should be able to figure out how to enable it in Vista – which, by the way, is possible but not necessary since the search box is basically “Run” on steroids.

Next gripe: the disparity of the look-and-feel of core dialog boxes. They should have paid enough attention to detail to go through everything and make sure it doesn’t reek of pre-XP flat colors and square corners and bad layout. (Of course, they should have done this in XP too, so it may have been unreasonable for me to expect that they would behave any different this time around. Maybe Windows 7?)

Lastly (only because I can’t think of anything else at the moment), I think renaming the desktop right-click option “Properties” to “Personalize” just oozes with feel-good self-centered individuality and the like. Granted, the name “Properties” needed to change. And maybe they wanted to keep it starting with “P” so people wouldn’t get lost like they undoubtedly would if that first letterhad been changed. I just think that I would have preferred “Customize”.

I’ll add more about Vista if anything comes to mind. But I can’t leave without saying something about the smug and pompous Apple and their OS. One thing that I like about Windows is that I get to choose how I go about doing what I need to do – and that’s what I don’t like about MacOS: you do things the one way that is allowed, or else you don’t do it at all. Case in point: window resizing. Not that I use this very often, but Windows gives you 4 borders to drag around to your liking; MacOS forces you to use only one corner, and if you can’t drag it far enough, then you’ll have to grab the title bar, pull it back far enough to give you the room you need, and THEN go all the way back down to the corner from whence you came, to FINALLY get the window to be the size you want.

Task switching in MacOS is … well, a lot different, for starters. First, in Mac land, people aren’t used to using maximized windows… thus, you could often switch tasks just by clicking in another window that peeps out from behind the one you’re in. If that’s not an option, then you have no way of knowing, at a single glance, what all programs you have open. You have to open a menu to see them (and then pick one to switch to). Ugh.

Would someone please explain to me Apple’s choice to make the OS’s menu bar also represent the menu bar for all other applications, instead of letting each program have its own?

For an OS that’s supposed to be sooo easy to use, why is it so easy for people to inadvertently leave programs running after closing the last window the program opened? Any normal program (like the ones that would do this in MacOS) in Windows would show itself on the taskbar if it was running – and if it’s not there, then under normal circumstances that also means it’s not running. In MacOS, there is no visual indication of this that can be had by simply looking at the screen.

<More to come, probably>