Unexpected errors, flats and going both ways

Dear Rachel,
Don’t you love when you’re filling out online forms and you submit and you get some vague error notice with no way to address it? You don’t know if your form went through or not. If you made an error or if the system did (but it was totally the system). No way to tell a human being that errors are happening and, for all you know, people are dying out there. I wish we could go back to the days of calling a human being who would tell you that your file was lost, or something like that. At least it was more personable.
– Does Not Compute
Dear ID10T Error,
*The Xfinity customer you are trying to reach is no longer in service.* Kidding! I would never actually pay for internet. I’ll pay for coffee to use the internet, though. Anyway. My favorite message is the “Oops! An unexpected error occurred.” Except it was apparently expected enough for some coder to program in a friendly little “oops.” We know they’re going to do bupkis about it, so I just wish they’d own up to it instead of passing off a faultless, toothless, useless error message.
– Whoopsie daisy, Rachel

 

Dear Rachel,
Can glass on the road actually give you a flat tire? Ever since I was 16 and learning to drive, I swerve around broken bottles in the road. I got to thinking, though. My car tires are thick. My car is really heavy. Other cars ran over the glass before I got there and the highway is not littered with crippled cars. There’s no way a Fat Tire is giving me a flat tire. Right?
– Old and Re-Tired
Dear Re-tread,
I never say never. Someone out there has probably gotten a flat tire from a hand puppet. No, god, no, that’s not a euphemism. But now I can’t unsee the euphemism. And you probably can’t unsee it either. I just meant that a hand puppet is flexible and floppy and soft, so there’s no way it could do anything to a hard, inflated tire. God. I just made it worse. Think asexual thoughts. Broken glass. Punctured rubber. Nope… that didn’t work. How about you just stay off the road, yeah?
– Life in the fast lane, Rachel

 

Dear Rachel,
I don’t understand why ceiling fans are supposed to turn one way in the winter and one way in summer. Both ways cause some air to go up and some air to go down. We’re not talking airplane propellers here. Can you ’splain to me the physics, or at least the logic, behind why fans go both ways, and why I always have mine going the wrong way?
– Philly Fan-atic
Dear Number One Fan,
When the number two hits the fan, you’ll care which way the blades spin. But which way is the right way? Beats me. I’m all for women’s lib, but I know bupkis about ceiling fans, and it’s a manly household task that I can give to a man visiting my household. He doesn’t know either, but he can look it up online and flip a switch and feel like a badass. And I don’t have to pull out the ladder.
– Fanning the flames, Rachel

 

Email Rachel at telegraph@durangotelegraph.com