meeting-scheduling software

I just used MeetingMaker to schedule a weekly meeting. It requires that you specify an end date -- or you can just check "ongoing". Doing the latter causes it to fill in an end date of 12/31/2039. (Which is a Saturday, just in case you were wondering. My recurring meeting is on Tuesday, so one could argue that it should have set the end date differently.)

It quickly reported the two dates this year that some attendee isn't available. This made me wonder whether it was, in fact, searching a sparse calendar all the way through 2039, in which case it gets points for speed but maybe not for appropriateness, or whether it has some built-in limit for how far ahead it will search for conflicts.

By the way, the odds are very good that the room in which my 34-year recurring meeting occurs will cease to be available later this year.

clueless collection agencies

I'd heard that collection agencies were annoying, but I didn't realize they were also clueless.

Today was the fourth day in a row that we received a computer-generated content-free message (no name, no business ID, no purpose -- just a phone number) on the answering machine. As demonstrated by the first three days of this, I usually ignore these on the theory that they're voice-spam. But after four in a row I figured the only way to make it stop was to find out who they were.

When someone picked up the phone I said "I'm returning a call but I don't know who you are or why you called". He gave the business name (something-or-other collections) and then asked to talk with "Claudia [butchered last name]". If you take two or three twists you can get from Dani's last name to what he said, but it wasn't even one of the common, direct mispronunciations. I had to work to recognize it.

I said "I've never heard of such a person" and he said "ok, we'll take this phone number off our list" and hung up.

This is not a relative of Dani's. This was, near as I can tell, someone randomly trying a matching last name (probably every one in the book), without even attempting to determine if they have the right number. A scrupulous business would have given either the name of the person they were calling for or the name of their business in the phone messages. They might have also, maybe, had an actual human being make at least one of the calls; even when I'm home I hang up on machines that call me unless I'm specifically expecting the call.

This did me no harm, but I feel mildly harrassed.