Comedian Jenée: People are Idiots

Dos Anos Aqui­

I’ve become such a bad blogger that last week the biennial anniversary of “People are Idiots” passed with nary a word from me. I’m compensating for it by using terms that haven’t been used since Truman was in office and I’m not sure if I’m even using them correctly.

Part of the reason I didn’t post that day is that my damn site was down for 10 hours, instead it was redirected to a page that said: “Account suspended. Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.” Naturally I read that 15 minutes before leaving town so all I could do was shoot off a nasty email to my hosting company demanding that they get my site back up. The message included at least one variation of “fuck” because this was the second time that message was splayed across my site in the last two months and neither situation was a billing issue since I pay for the entire year in advance.

When I was able to check on my site again about seven hours later the message was still there so I sent off a few more “fucks.” Mind you, there were no “fucks” the last time this happened, I was actually quite polite but I also made it clear at the time that it better never happen again. I exchanged several emails back and forth with tech support (because their “24/7 phone support” apparently means they answer it 24 minutes out of every 7 days) and they told me that my site was receiving too many connections and exceeding its allotted RAM. I asked what was causing it and they basically said, “We don’t know what’s causing it and there’s no way for you to verify the problem exists while your site is down… but you have to fix it before we’ll put your site back up.”

I informed them that I would work to fix the problem but directed them to their own Terms of Service, which states they can take my site offline for such an issue, but nowhere does it state they can redirect my site to another page, particularly not to one that publicly humiliates me. My demands were ignored until finally I called the sales department (someone always answers the sales phones) and insisted that he get a techie on the phone for me. My man Jude took some time and figured out what the actual problem was and it turned out that some people had posted images from my site on other sites but hadn’t uploaded them elsewhere so I was doing the hosting for them (and actually, it was a breakdown on my web host’s hotlink protection that even allowed that to happen so it was their fault). If anybody reading this did that, allow me to say, fuck you. I renamed the images that were the biggest culprits and fixed the hotlink protection but there were a couple images used by people in MySpace comments that I decided to have a little Photoshop fun with by editing the pictures in profane ways that will surely guarantee removal and hopefully embarrass them into learning not to steal my bandwidth.

All bitching aside, two years and 249 posts later, I’m still here (I know, barely). Way back then I remember looking at other bloggers’ long lists of archives and thinking I’d never last that long but I have. And I want to thank my loyal readers- both of you mean a lot to me and I plan to stick around for a long time to come. Or at least until my web host screws me over again.