It’s 8:55am on Saturday, and the phone rings. Caller-ID shows it to be “800 Service”, but I decide to answer anyway.

The caller introduces herself as a paid caller on behalf of the American Lung Association. I ask her to remove me from their call list, which she agrees to do.

Then I mention that it’s before 9am on a Saturday, which is too early to call someone. Her reply: “we start at 8am”.

Dear American Lung Association: pissing off potential donors is a bad idea. Having your solicitors take a holier-than-thou attitude about the time they call is a terrific way of pissing off those donors. Be assured that your mail will go directly to my recycle bin from now on.

It’s been a strange week for Silicon Valley companies – I hope it’s not something in the water.

Facebook

There was a time when I felt compelled to keep up with my friends’ postings on Facebook. If I was too busy to check the site during the day, I’d make a point of scrolling back as far as it would let me so I’d miss as little as possible.

I remember feeling that way as clearly as I remember yesterday.

But yesterday seems far away; today, Facebook gifted me with their latest design change, and suddenly, I have no desire to catch up. In fact, I have very little desire to go to Facebook at all – the new design is complicated, what with a scrolling ticker in the upper right, an arbitrary division in the main text area between the “Top News” and the “Recent Updates”, and, in general, a lot of visual sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Google+ looks more attractive every day; I just wish they’d let me use it from my primary email address (hosted on Google Apps for Your Domain) instead of forcing me to use my depreciated GMail address.

Netflix

Perhaps Facebook’s new complication was inspired by the Sunday night Netflix announcement. If so, they have more work to do – after all, you can still interact with everything that Facebook offers on one website, while Netflix is going to force their remaining users to deal with Netflix and Quickster.

I didn’t mind the price increase much, but doubling my workload because Reed Hastings has a vision of the future…what do they think they are, an airline?