Author: Brandon

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Stupid customer service tricks

My life insurance company has an automated system for contacting customers who miss a premium payment. You see, I got a new policy and I am allowing the old one to expire. My agent told me to simply not pay the bill from the old policy.

So this automated system calls me up in the morning. This is fine; if someone misses a payment due to an error you’d expect this. But it’s automated.  It says that I need to hold to speak to a customer service representative.

So I hold.

And hold.

Finally, after being told that a customer service representative would be with me in “just a moment,” the system gives me a new recording: the phone number to call to speak to a customer representative.  Then it hangs up on me.

Huh?

You’d think that an automated system that calls customers and puts them on hold would have some kind of load balancing algorithm that would stop calling customers when all of the customer service representatives were already occupied!

Bible study spotlight: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (TSK in SwordSearcher) is probably one of the most important Bible study aids ever published. Many Bibles have cross-references in their margins, but these are typically anemic.  The TSK is like a Bible margin as wide as the Bible text column itself. I love this resource because it is all about interpreting Scripture with Scripture.  It does contain some commentary text, but that is limited, as the focus is on showing how words and phrases from each verse are used elsewhere in the Bible.

It’s part of SwordSearcher (shameless plug), but if you want a printed version, be sure to get the old (not newly revised) version. You might be able to find it at a bookstore, and it’s available used on Amazon for a few bucks. My Revell printing of the original TSK has ISBN number 0-8007-0324-3.

Government schooling trains for subservience

People don’t seem to realize this very often: allowing the government to control education is inconsistent with living in an individualistic and free society.

Case in point: A Judge rules that school administrators can take punitive actions against students for things they write outside of school.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Kravitz denied Avery Doninger’s request for a temporary injunction to overturn her high school election results Friday, but the Burlington teenager isn’t giving up her fight.

Doninger alleges Lewis S. Mills High School Principal Karissa Niehoff and Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz violated her First Amendment right to free speech when they banned her from running for Class of 2008 secretary after she posted an offensive reference to school officials on a blog site from her home computer.

If public schools are a function of the government, what does punishing students for things they say against it, on personal blogs, teach about free speech?

Is it any wonder that each American generation seems more willing to give up responsibilities to the government?  Why not?  They are trained to sit down, shut up, and do as they’re told.  And if they speak out against the agents overseeing their daily training, there will be consequences.

The Bible in Klingon?

Shakespeare is best in the original Klingon, as every Star Trek fan knows.  The Bible… not so much.

Joel Anderson has used a lexicon to “translate” the Bible into Klingon and compiled a SwordSearcher “Klingon Language Version.” Tranlsate is in quotes because as Joel says on his website, “It is useful for for entertainment value, not linguistic purity.”

Here’s John 3:16 in the KJV:

John 3:16 vaD  joH’a’  vaj loved the  qo’,  vetlh  ghaH  nobta’  Daj  wa’  je  neH  puqloD,  vetlh  ‘Iv  HartaH  Daq  ghaH should  ghobe’  chIlqu’,  ‘ach  ghaj eternal yIn.

Here you can see the difficulties of using a lexicon-based translation system (heh — lots of people try to do that with a Strong’s dictionary on a routine basis!). Should and eternal don’t seem to have corresponding entries in the English-Klingon lexicon.