small weird political note

I've called the governor's office a couple of times this year. The phone tree starts with "if you know your party's extension, please dial it now" and, since I don't, tells me that all staffers are assisting other constituents, please hold. OK, I can do that.

After having me on hold for a couple of minutes, it offers the chance to bypass the queue by leaving a voicemail and having someone call me back.

When I choose that, the next message is "if this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911."

If this is a medical emergency, would you really call the governor's office?

More to the point, if they think people will be calling with medical emergencies, why doesn't that message come up before the caller has been asked to enter an extension and then waited on hold for a couple of minutes?

(So far, they haven't called me back, but IIRC, the first time I said I didn't need a call back, and this time I called at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. By 5:30 the governor had done what my message said I wanted him to do, so while a call back saying something like "Thanks for calling, the governor agrees with you" would be nice, I got what I actually wanted. (I don't care much about the "thanks for contacting me, here's my position on $issue" emails from Sen. Markey, either.))

crossposted silliness

A comment I just left on rachelmanija's most recent post:

"How about the Flintstones diet: nothing but dinosaur and rocks.

"Absolutely nothing. No breading, no sauce, no parsley, just salt. If you want fried dinosaur, you have to fry it in schmaltz from the previous dinosaur. (There's some debate about whether it's okay to use an iron nail instead of soup stones if you want boiled dinosaur.)"

cattitude doesn't think the characters are ever shown eating anything but dinosaur, despite the tie-in marketing for Cocoa Pebbles.