Oh, Be a Cry Baby

Would you like a little cheese with that whine?

People love to gripe. To write a gripe is even better. And, thanks to the Internet, the gripes no longer need to be vetted by publishers or newspaper editors. The Net lets anyone complain about anything at any time.

Sigh.

Today’s little surfin’ safari takes us to Negativeville, the land of complaints.

We’ll start with the universal truth that work stinks. And trust us, there are a lot of people out there who won’t let you forget it.

The poster child of the disgruntled is, of course, the postal worker. The Disgruntled Postal Worker (https://www.disgruntledzone.com/index.html) delivers the dirt on our heavily armed friends. It’s mostly a comedy site, but malcontents can submit their own non-postal workplace gripes.

* Temps have their own site at Temp 24-7

(https://www.temp24-7.com/LIVE/issue/current/splash_frames.html), but there’s no telling how long it will be up.

* Waiters and waitresses have Fly in the Soup

(https://www.flyinthesoup.com). You feel their pain, and you may never eat out again.

* At https://www.disgruntledhousewife.com you’ll find the Disgruntled Housewife. (Yeah, it is a job, you got a problem with that?) It has gripes about guys. Bad man. Bad. The confessions section has gems such as this: “I have over 30 tubes of red lipstick, but I can’t pay my phone bill.”

There’s probably a whine spot for almost every job. Employees also complain about individual companies. Some of those sites are password protected. Some have faced legal action.

* Flame Broiled (https://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2645/index.html) showcases one really angry ex-Burger King worker.

* A more political site is Face Intel (https://www.faceintel.com), created by a former engineer at the chip-making company who now says he wants “to influence positive human resource policies.” OK, we feel a little guilty looking at it with our Pentium-powered PC.

When we’re not at work, we’re shopping, and consumer complaints are just as common.

* EComplaints (https://www.ecomplaints.com) is a well-organized compilation of complaints against consumer companies and includes company responses. You can search by industry or by company name.

* Complaints.com (https://www.complaints.com) is organized by product. Unlike EComplaints, though, companies are told to respond directly to the complainer.

* Our favorite gripe at consumer site Gripenet.com (https://www.gripenet.com) is that Gripenet is too hard to find on the Web.

But enough about bad customer service.

What about the real whiners--people who just live to complain? There are plenty of outlets for them, too.

* At Gripes.org (https://www.gripes.org) there are forums for every peeve. And it’s very thought provoking. “Where do all these cars come from?!?!” complains one contributor. Yeah, traffic’s a pain, guess we’d better post it on the Web in case no one else has noticed.

* Groovy’s Gripe Gallery (https://www.dndwebdesigns.com/gripes) has more of the same. We like the mother whose complaint is: “I totally detest when my kids yell, ‘Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!’ and I’m looking right at them!” We totally detest when kids steal for their heroin habits, but it’s probably all a matter of perspective.

There are a lot more sites to complain about, but all this griping is bringing us down.

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