hall of shame

I bought a Desire S smartphone a little more than 2 months ago, but did not have a chance to really use it, yet. It came with an elusive and odd bug. The touch screen stopped responding once in a while. This could occur any time, but seemed to happen less frequently after 5-10 minutes of active use.

The first time I sent the phone to repair, it came back with flashed ROM, but the problem stayed.

The second time I sent the phone for repair, it came back with a new touch screen, but the problem stayed.

The third time, the repair shop replaced the motherboard. The initial problem disappeared, but the phone gained a new one. Part of the screen was not reacting to touch. Or rather, every time you touched a certain area on screen to select an item, items around it were selected or nothing happened.

I filed a 4th support request today.

Overall, I took no less than an hour talking to the call center, wrote several emails and paper notes to HTC and to the repair shop, recorded a video to demonstrate the bug and uploaded it to HTC, filed two complaints online and took a good hour each time it returned from the repair shop to setting it up and find ways to reproduce the problem.

The recent Doing Business '2011 report states on page 98 that Belgium has no limit on the maximum length of fixed-term contracts. AFAIK, this is wrong. The maximum length of fixed-term contracts is 2 years (exceptionally, 3 years). In some sectors, this is down to 6 months. My knowledge dates from 2007, but I bet nothing changed since then.

Here's a prooflink from 2006.

Just spotted this nice little euphemism slipping into the corporate newspeak. Is it because the old-fashioned nature of the word gives more weight to PowerPoint slides? Or it is because saying aloud "PowerPoint" has become suddenly reprehensible?

A composite requirement may state that the system shall do A and B and C, which can be decomposed into the child requirements that the system shall do A, the system shall do B, and the system shall do C.