Beth spoke the other day about our new guilty TV pleasure, The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search. It’s fine programming, to be sure, and tonight’s episode promises to be outstanding — literally. Here’s the program description Tivo gives for it: Contestants undergo the rigorous volleyball challenge and a photo shoot in extremely cold temperatures.

My comment to Beth on seeing that: “A swimsuit photo shoot in extremely cold temperatures? Every red-blooded heterosexual man in America is going to tune in for that one.”

Including me. See ya…

The customer support department at the company I used to work for provides what they call “award-winning customer support.” What they don’t tell you is what the award they won was. My advice to all users at the sites I worked with was “Don’t call them — ever” because I knew that it had to be a “Worst Possible Performance” award. Really, they were a gang of halfwits. I know everyone always says that about whatever customer support they’re dealing with, but these people really were stupid. If you looked up “stupid” in the dictionary, there’d be a space for a picture of them but instead of the picture there would be a notice saying that the picture didn’t come out because they didn’t take the lens cap off the camera. They were dmub!

I’ve ranted about them here before. Read about my love of them here, here, here, here, here and here.

I bring this up because I got a call today from the Santa Barbara site I converted to the software back in February. They had a problem with pulling a report that customer support just couldn’t solve after multiple calls, and customer support’s final diagnosis was that “Your computer must be broken.” Seriously, that’s what they told her. The software is working fine in every way but one, so the computer is broken. Incredible.

So I helped her out. Now, bear in mind that I haven’t seen the software in nearly five months — I left the company 3.5 months ago and I basically slacked my way through my last month there literally without doing any work at all. So it’s been awhile, it’s not like I’m fresh on using it.

It took me two minutes to get her what she needed. And about 90 seconds of that was me talking myself through the steps to help me remember what the screens looked like.

I think that deserves an award.

In related news, my voicemail there is still up with my last message. Give it a listen at (949) 425-3344.