It has become clear to me that Scott Adams works somewhere in my office as a mole. He clearly gleans up to 75% of all strip ideas and themes from conversations and initiatives dreamed up and put into place at my place of employment.
I’ll find you…
I think you are supposed to laugh at least seven times each day for health, etc. etc.
This should get you at least one, if not you are either too jaded to be worth talking to or a poor reader.
A list of some of the all-time worst domain names in history.
Thanks, Rigsy.
Thanks to Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing fame for this link. A bizarre Japanese game show where contestants endure pain and discomfort while trying to keep from laughing, screaming, or talking.
My two favorites are ‘Slapping Machine’ and ‘Bad Smell Air.’
[Edit: I didn’t want to imply that I actually knew Mike, I am just a reader of his blog. Also, Soul Coughing was a great band, but I think Mike’s solo work (especially Skittish) is much better. He came to KC a while ago and it was the best small-venue show I’ve seen for a long time.]
I have stepped into the ring several times with Sprint (together with Nextel, apparently) over the past year or so. The root cause was a questionable practice by one of their in-store associates upon the purchase of a new Treo 650 for my wife. It breaks down like this (It’s legal to own it, it’s legal to carry it…wait, different topic).
For Christmas I bought her the phone, but since she uses the phone number (MIN, for all you outsiders) for business, I didn’t think it would be sage to switch it out from under her and have her customers calling into a gift-wrapped box under the tree. The associate says the simplest way to handle it is to set up a ‘dummy’ number, assign it to the new phone, then after the cat is out of the bag she has it switched back over. Sounds simple enough, right?
Admittedly I am less than dilligent about checking the bill, as it is charged auto-magically to my credit card each month, but when I did check it almost a year later I saw that the ‘dummy’ phone number was incurring a service charge every month. Not a huge figure, but irritating all the same.
I call in and let them know about it and they assure me it was a mistake, and they’ll take care of it right away.
Fast forward to April of this year, I’m calculating expenses for taxes, and I notice it is still being charged. I call in again (very cranky - remember, I’m doing my taxes) and grandstand about mail fraud (a trick I learned by reading The Firm), cancelling my account, etc. etc.
The guy then has the nerve to tell me they’ll be happy to cancel it, but there will be a $150 cancellation fee. To start with, that is complete bullshit anyway, but the fact that they swindled me into the line and that it had never had a single call placed made me even more furious. Fast forward about 30 minutes of me being on hold while he talks to his supervisor and he finally relents and agrees to cancel it with no charge AND to credit me for all the ahem…fraudulent charges.
I relented and returned to my taxes, feeling at peace with the world.
Today Jill is filing her expense report, and notices our bill is nearly $175 more than it should have been. I immediately picked up the phone and called customer care (on speed dial by now) and lost my mind. They had charged me a cancellation fee of $150 and tacked on tax of over $20.
So now they claim to have removed that fee as well, but color me skeptical. As a parting shot, I told the CSR that they had to do *something* to compensate me for all the time I had spent on the phone and mental anguish, otherwise I would soon be sporting a ‘Can you hear me now’ visor.
After another fake ‘check with the supervisor’ pause, she grants me a $25 courtesy credit. Somehow I feel less than satisfied.
So please, if you have Sprint service, call up with a fake concern and demand a ‘courtesy credit’ or you will start shopping for a new carrier. Does a company that charges you to stop using their service deserve to be treated any differently?
I just read a disturbing article about the diamond industry - my friend Deets once said that the most accurate way to describe the DeBeers organization was a ‘cartel’ but I thought that was more influenced by his recently paying a great deal for jewlery.
I suppose if you have access to a resource that not many others do, you will go to great lengths to protect your interest. DeBeers has done so in such a masterful way as to enlist consumers like me into their web of deceit - I would have had serious reservations about buying a similar engagement ring that cost 1/2 as much - i.e. ‘What is wrong with it?’ or ‘Does this mean I don’t love her as much?’
I remember taking some comfort in the fact that although the price I paid for ‘my’ engagement ring was exorbitant, it came with an appraisal ensuring me that it was already worth significantly more than I had paid. Of course you can never envision a scenario in which you would sell it, but it was a reassuring thought.
Henceforth all emails and voicemails marked urgent will be summarily moved to the end of the queue. Before tending to any such ‘urgent’ message I will first complete the following:
I have another site that I posted to a lot a few years ago regarding some … er … medical issues I had - namely Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I kept an online journal regarding my diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. It was very therapeutic for me, and based on the feedback I have gotten it has helped a few people going through similar situations.
Starting yesterday I must have crossed some threshold related to page rank with that site, or the spammers sunk to an all new low. At the rate of about one per minute, I began to get posts to the ‘guestbook’ that were nothing more than advertisements for cheap Cialis, Viagra, etc. Doubly annoying when you consider that each one of these posts sends an email notification to me. So not only do I get the normal glut of spam from them every morning, I get a whole extra assload of spam emails that come from me.
I had a client have a similar problem and he tried to block the IP address to no avail, they kept rotating through using different ones - I assume this is some sort of an automated spider that trolls around looking for forms to submit to.
Anyway, a quick keyword filter may not be perfect but it will keep them from posting and in the unlikely event that it is a human it will send them directly to a fun location.
I’m sure I’ll be back in the states from time to time, but some things are just too good to pass up.
