Kevin's Weblog

Charitable organizations and I seem to be having a hard time of it this year. Yesterday, for the fourth time this year, I declined to make a contributation that I normally would have. All I really ask is that they not annoy me, but that seems to be an unreasonable request.

1. I did not renew my membership to MOCA this year. This was mostly because I hardly ever go. I hardly ever go because whenever I consider it, I go to their website to see what it currently on display and I rediscover how completely unusable their it is. I’m not just talking about bad layout or that sort of thing. Rather, they put all their content in this wierd custom scrolling box which has the unfortunate property of scrolling diagonally rather than vertically, so you can’t read past the first page.
2. Consequently, when I am in a museum mood I usually end up going to LACMA. Except that I decided not to renew that membership this year, mostly because they (or at least their security guards) are extremely un-family friendly and I end up getting in an argument with someone nearly every time I go. They have also been misleading in their marketing of various special exhibits.
3. I didn’t renew my KPCC membership because I was disgusted about listening to commercial advertisements on my “non-commercial”, “listener-supported” radio station, as well as the wierd product placement that seems to be sneaking into some segments.
4. Then, last night I gave up on donating to the Tour of Hope. A friend is riding and I wanted to sponsor him, but the online form had some broken Javascript validation that kept popping up windows claiming that my caps lock was on and that I should turn it off. After a couple of those, I gave up on the process.

I think that people think that these things (bad web user experience or quality of guards) don’t really matter. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just being petty. But the thing is, these people are asking for my money and it seems like in return I should expect, at a minimum, that they don’t piss me off. It that really unreasonable?