From Craigslist

[KabeRinnaul]

Spotted this story while looking through Best Of Craigslist, and felt it was appropriate.

Best of Craigslist: My Paychex Odyssey

[Sarlon]

I'm going to helll....I laughed through most of that....not because of his situation....but because of how he told it.

[Exaspera]

He did tell a great story all right! But, what a nightmare!

Question, sometimes when I go on a link, there are question marks in diamond-shaped things sprinkled all over the page. I'm on Firefox on a Mac. Would that have anything to do with it?

[BookstoreEscapee]

Too funny...poor guy. Love the ending!

Question, sometimes when I go on a link, there are question marks in diamond-shaped things sprinkled all over the page. I'm on Firefox on a Mac. Would that have anything to do with it?

In this link I see little squares wherever there should be an apostrophe. Sometimes I've seen multiple question marks or other strings of characters I assume is some bit of code, generally in place of certain punctuation marks (usually apostrophes, it seems). I think it's a formatting thing or something in the code is getting chopped off so it doesn't display the way it should. (I'm on Internet Explorer 8, on a PC with Windows 7, for the record.) Perhaps one of our more tech-savvy friends will be able to explain better.

[r2cagle]

Move over Sarlon.... cause I'm apparently going to be beside you.

[LillFilly]

Oooohhh, Wow.

Yeah, that's a doozie. I think I've read similar here!

[Midorikawa]

Perhaps one of our more tech-savvy friends will be able to explain better.

This can be caused by any number of problems.

A common one is the software and the database not having the same character set, especially for non Roman character set languages. Some languages, like Russian, for instance, have 5 or 6 DIFFERENT character sets for their language, and can be different depending on OS, various settings, and any number of other things. The equivalent would be having problems reading documents typed on a British computer, a New Zealand computer, an Australian computer, and having to navigate menus to change your set so you can read documents from different areas, even though it's the same language.

This is where UTF8 comes in. UTF8 is fairly complex to explain in a technical sense, but let me simplify it thusly: It's a universal character set. Fortunately, the guys who developed UTF8 were here in the US, so all of us English speakers using ASCII automatically pass over to UTF8. Prior to UTF8, there were multiple character encodings, especially thanks to Microsoft and their attitude of "What standard? We are better than your standards!", among them, Windows-1252 and ISO8859-*.

Unfortunately, it looks like his computer is set to use ISO-8859-1, which isn't commonly used any more. This means one of a few things: 1) He's played with settings on his computer for one reason or another, 2) his computer is older and defaults to that standard over ASCII or UTF8 like modern computers do, or 3) he knows what he's doing and is doing it to annoy you. :-P

Those of you in Firefox, you can go to view -> character encoding -> ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF8 if the boxes annoy you. Just make sure you put it back, or you'll end up with the same problem as him. :-)

Hope that didn't confuse, and served to clear things up a bit. :-)

[BookstoreEscapee]

Perhaps one of our more tech-savvy friends will be able to explain better.

This can be caused by any number of problems.

See? I told you.

[Aethian]

I got teary with this one,

Shadow Kitty - Thank You - m4w

[BookstoreEscapee]

I got teary with this one,

Shadow Kitty - Thank You - m4w

awwww

[Evil Queen]

That poor poor man, having to deal with Paychex.