Slaves to Pedantry

Fuck lawyers, fuck computers, fuck eBay, and fuck stupid fuckers that run our lives. 

I've had an item listed on eBay for months now, a Playstation game called Streak Hoverboard Racing. That's the actual title of the game. I said "GAME", not an actual "self-balancing scooter" device. But as I tried to modify the listing, I was unable to save because of this beauty:

It may be hard to read if it's too small in the graphic, but the key points are that "the term HOVERBOARD is a registered trademark, please ensure that you are authorized to use the term..." 

What it really is is total bullshit. I'm not trying to list a "self-balancing scooter" as any idiot looking at the listing category or the picture or the listing itself would be able to tell. 

People, this is the future. It's the intersection of stupid AI, stupid businesspeople, soulless lawyers, idiot programmers, and pedantic adherence to rules. It's the same dogshit I deal with at work where we can't even drop a file from an automated report into a network directory by request of the owner of the directory because there are three layers of security surrounding it and none of the actual people involved in the process have any control over the implementation pieces. 

It's another example of how American productivity is brought to its knees by risk aversion driven by all the wrong incentives. I've seen this in many companies I've worked for where it really feels that IT has forgotten its role is to serve its customers and instead management pushes policies that make it feel like we're really here to serve auditors and lawyers who bring $0 into the organization. 

And today on eBay I find that I cannot even save a text description of a silly listing for a little video game. So instead I have to reduce the accuracy of the listing by calling it "Streak racing" because calling it "Streak self-balancing scooter racing" would be both stupid and incorrect. Clearly since the title was accepted a few months ago when I first added the listing, this is something new. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before eBay would have had an audit drone look over a report, ignore context, identify the listing, and just cancel it without giving me a chance to explain. 

Ok, rant over, this slave will now go back to work. Have a nice day.