Tonight's installment of "Chronicles of Stupid People" is brought to you by Rochester drivers, and that stupid idiot who tried to pass me doing 45 in a 30 while we were in a merge lane. Needless to say, stopping short of a curb dead ahead is not my idea of a good day.

I figured that I'd let the car on my side merge in front of me, then I'd go, then the car behind and to the left of me would fall in line. I let the first car pass, then i started to make my move to merge down, then shiitehead behind me decides he is going to pass me instead, leaving me little recourse but to slam on the brakes or get sideswiped. I'm glad the guy in the SUV behind me wasn't yapping away on a cell phone, because my car would have become a road pizza.

*sigh*

On to the real topic of tonight's episode. I'm going to talk about two companies who don't seem to care whether or not they get new employees. I won't name names or anything like that, let's just say that their names are synonymous with copiers and contact lenses here in Rochester.

Being unemployed, you pick up little trinkets like toys and such form various job fairs. These two companies gave me CD-ROM's with cute little flash presentations on them. Both of them had links to "Submit a resume" or "Careers on-line" or somesuch.

Slight problem. The copier company's flash toy wouldn't launch a web browser. This really sucked because there was no feedback in the user interface that even indicated you clicked on it. It rolledover when you moved the mouse pointer over it, but no click.

Great.

So, I move on to the contact lens company. Their flash eye candy is a lot better looking that the one created by the copier company. Much cleaner interface, much nicer information architecture. However, when I clicked the link to visit their "career Center", I got a good old "404 Page Not Found" page on their website. Granted, it was nice enough to tell me whereabouts I should look, but if your major source of advertising to people looking for jobs has a URL inserted into it, one would think that you would keep that link active, even if you completely redesign your website, right???

*sigh*

Welcome to the real world. Leave your common sense at the door.