Category Archives: Curmudgeon

Shame on you, T-Mobile!

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Two months ago I needed to change my mobile phone number – A published directory had reversed some numbers and I was getting unwanted calls – Five minutes and $15 later, the nice folks at the T-Mobile had issued me a new number and I was merrily on my way.

About a week ago I started receiving calls from unrecognized 800 numbers. Sometimes they just hung up and sometimes a disembodied voice left a message. I tend to arbitrarily delete those. But when they kept coming, I listened to one.

Seems they were coming from a T-Mobile collection service, Enhanced Recovery Collections, and for the last week, I have been “pressing 3″ and sending emails trying to get the calls to stop. So far no luck.

What really peeves me about this affair is the relationship between T-Mobile and ERC – I understand T-Mobile’s frustration at debt collection could lead to them hiring a debt collector. And I understand a debt collector is going to use any contact information that T-Mobile provided.

But what’s missing here is that when T-Mobile gave me the deadbeat’s number as my new number, they apparently failed to notify ERC the number now belonged to a good guy. Idiots!

 

Gmail Storage

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Back when Gmail was in its infancy (probably not that long ago), Google offered a whole Gigabyte (!) of email storage for free. Not only that but Google slowly increased the cap – You could actually watch the counters increasing your capacity. Surely I would *never* need that much storage!

(Right, and PCs only need 640K and so on …)

Well, last week, I came up on 95% capacity of my now 7.5G mailbox. Google makes that threshold very painful. Just about every click in Gmail results in a red “Storage Warning” that has to be acknowledged.

Fine, I’ll do something about my bulging email box!

Finding and deleting the large attachments in Gmail is a challenge, but Lifehacker came to the rescue last week with a Gmail/Google Docs solution. That didn’t appeal to me because Google Docs would now have all my historical emails, and frankly, Google has enough of my information – I would prefer not to just give them everything else.

Plan B – Install a copy of Thunderbird and link it up to Gmail via IMAP. Then use Thunderbird’s attachment processing to find and manage those huge Gmail attachments. Installing Thunderbird was a breeze, configuring was a slightly greater challenge, but waiting the six hours while Thunderbird indexed my Gmail box was painful. Thunderbird would restart indexing every time an email (or SPAM) came in so I ended up disconnecting the internet to get anything done.

The next morning all those 20M emails were identified and unwanted attachments deleted. In a little over an hour, my 7.5G mailbox was down to 6.2G. Good enough, I thought and uninstalled Thunderbird.

Today, three days later, Google unveiled their new Google Drive. As part of the rollout, they’re increasing all Gmail mailboxes to 10G! Argh! They couldn’t have done that three days ago?!?!?!

And no, I’m probably not going to adopt Google Drive any time soon – For starters, I’m very happy with DropBox, and second, Google Drive is closely integrated with Google Docs, and as I said earlier, I’d prefer not to keep all my personal and business documents in Google’s cloud where they can index and categorize them easily.

Lottery Fever!

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While checking out at my local grocery, there was a line – a long line – at the lottery machine. OK, I don’t think I’ve seen that before. Lottery fever is here!

It started out a week or so ago with a CNN article instructing their readership how to “invest” in the lottery. Articles in Forbes and others within hours embarrassed CNN to pull their post. I’d love to find it on an archive site someplace.

No one won Wednesday’s $300M lottery so it’s rolled over to tonight’s drawing. Last I heard, Americans had spent $1.5B in tickets and the projected winnings would be $640M … and counting.

As a Stat Major, I was taught that lotteries are God’s way of punishing people for poor math skills. Anyone who buys a ticket in a 1 in 175,000,000 chance can’t grasp large numbers. Others tell a “You have a better chance of …” story but even that doesn’t stop ticket purchases.

Looking at it from another direction, $1.5B in ticket sales means every man, woman and child in the US bought 4.5 tickets each! Since children can’t buy tickets, practically speaking that mean the average (eligible) player must have purchased 10 tickets. Really?

Of course, 99.99999942857143% of the tickets are losers, and I’m guessing 99.99999942857143% of the population realizes that. And I’m also guessing they bought those tickets for the same reason I did … For the chance and for the thrill of being this (!) close to $640M.

So to that lucky 0.00000057142857% who wins tonight, congratulations!

Political Promises

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The Romney aide gaffe about changing political positions before and after the convention was entertaining, but the reality is every candidate shifts as the campaign unfolds. Borrowing from a CNN report, can you identify who said what?

1. “He won’t streamline the federal government and change the way it works, cut 100,000 bureaucrats and put 100,000 new police officers on the streets of American cities, but I will.”

2. “And after we fund important priorities in the ongoing operations of our government, I believe we ought to pay down national debt. And so my budget pays down a record $2 trillion in debt over the next 10 years.”

3. “My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors and stay within the public financing system for the general election.”

Hint: The comments were made by Clinton, Bush (#2) and Obama, but can you match statements and candidates?

Moving Servers

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Old Provider's Logo

There are about 50 companies on the web that publish RBL (Real-Time Black Lists). These RBLs contain lists of domains believed to be spammers. Then Yahoo, Comcast and all the other email providers subscribe to one or more RBL companies to know who they should be blocking. It’s pretty simple actually, if badspammerguy.com gets on a blacklist, it’s improbable that he can send any more email. Want to know if you’re on a blacklist? Go here and type in your email domain:

The problem with blacklists is there’s lots of collateral damage. Because websites share servers and networks, a blacklisting on one domain could affect others on the same server or network.

And that’s exactly what happened to me two weeks ago. Somebody else who shares space in the same networking center got himself black-listed, and I and several others suddenly lost our ability to email out. It took four days to get the blacklist company straightened out and all returned to normal.

Friday I lost email again. So I wrote to my provider asking to be reprovisioned far away from this bad guy. My provider said “No.” He said I should just deal with it because it’s a fact of life. Those weren’t his exact words but they were close enough. He also suggested several exotic (and expensive) ways to minimize issue. Three times I asked him to reconsider and three times he said “no.”

So even though I’ve been a four year customer, this morning I started the big move. Found a new provider and I’m moving domains one at a time. The first was this one, woodp.com, and it appears to be up and functioning fine. One down and another 200+ to go.

Then I’ll let my old provider know how expensive his stubbornness was.

Being different on eBay

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Anyone who’s ever bought or sold anything on eBay knows about feedback scores. Essentially, both the seller and buyer have the ability to judge the other party’s behavior in the transaction. A 100% score means the individual received positive feedback in 100% of their transactions – 90% means that 90% of all transactions received positive feedback. Average scores at eBay seem to fall between 98% and 100% indicating that buyers were generally happy with their purchases and sellers were generally happy with their customer’s payment. My score is 100% on 170-some odd transactions.

Historically, the buyer usually is first to provide feedback. If it is positive, the seller will reciprocate. If the buyer gave negative feedback (perhaps the seller shipped defective product), the seller might take revenge on the buyer even though the buyer did everything right – Paid promptly and went through the correct conflict resolution steps – and give the buyer negative feedback. I don’t like this “revenge” methodology.

My philosophy is to provide feedback when the other party satisfied their part of the contract. So, when selling, I give feedback (positive) the minute the buyer’s payment comes in. After all, they’ve satisfied their part of the transaction agreement and now it’s up to me to ship their item safely and quickly.

However, when I’m the buyer as I was three times this week, I expect the buyer to behave similarly and not withhold feedback until I provide mine. That leads to a completely befuddled seller some time …

Seller: Did you get your product?
Me: Yes, thank you!
S: Could you provide feedback?
M: Sure, could you since I completed my obligations to you over a week ago, and you only satisfied your obligation to me yesterday?
S: Is there a problem?
M: No, I just expect the same that you expect from me – PROMPT feedback.
S: Huh?

… and so it goes. Sure, I don’t get feedback from this seller, but it’s not as important to a little shopper like me than it is to volume guys. Maybe someday he’ll figure it out …

DIY Sushi

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Two Nigiri rolls in most restaurants runs $5 and up – I usually order Maguro, Sake and Hamachi and rarely does a lunch end up costing less than $20 . And I’ve on occasion paid more. But when you realize that one Nigiri roll is rice and less than an ounce of fish – Fish which averages $10/lb – The markup becomes very evident.

Around here we have a fish monger who will sell sushi grade salmon for $12/lb and tuna for $13/lb. Sushi rice (medium grain, not the normal long grain) is cheap, and the little rice vinegar to season it is equally inexpensive. Pickled ginger and wasabi powder can be picked up in almost any supermarket.

One drawback to DIY Sushi – Since you’re only using 3-4 oz per person, and most fish mongers don’t like to sell such small portions, it becomes a challenge to create plates with a variety of fish. Usually it’s Sake today, Maguro tomorrow and so on.

And my knife skills still need some work, but all in all, a sushi dinner for 20% of what the restaurant charges is nothing to sneeze at!

Email Foibles

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Regularly, I receive complaints from individuals who didn’t receive some mailing or special offer. 80-90% of the time I take one look at their email address and immediately recognize the problem – They’re using their employer’s email address for personal business. Wow!

In the personal email world, we rarely have any email filters (other than SPAM) and usually receive everything emailed to us. But the corporate world is different. Corporate IT managers work to ensure only work-related email gets to employees. My former employer blocked Facebook, Match.com, Yelp and a whole host of non-business sites. This is done for two reasons, to keep unrelated email traffic off the internal networks, and to prevent employees from wasting too much time on non-work activities.

Personal email doesn’t look like “work” to an IT manager. For starters, it frequently has misspellings, or long forwarding chains, or includes multiple pictures and icons – It just doesn’t look like business and it’s fairly easy to filter.

People who use their corporate email account don’t realize the potential problems they’re creating. When they leave the job they lose their emails and email directory, and I’ll bet even though they signed an email acknowledgement form, they still think IT would never snoop on their emails. Baloney, my former employer did. And I know another that flagged emails destined for outside the company that contained secret program names. We chuckled when the filter would intercept an innocent email containing the name  “Harpoon” or “Dolphin.”

Yeah, I know I’m whizzing into the wind. People are going to continue to use their faa.gov and ibm.com addresses for personal mail and nothing I say or do will stop it. But at least I feel better now.

Computer illiterate people

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As the treasurer of an organization, I’m responsible for ordering membership badges. At our Christmas Party last month, one member walked up and asked me if I could order a badge for his 10-year-old son. After I got home, I sent the member an email asking him to confirm his son’s name, mailing address and so on.

Today, 36 days (!) after my outgoing email, the father responded that I had the right name and address and then he offered the following editorial:

Sorry to take so long to reply. Our computer has been down since summer time and my brother-in-law just got it kind of working. It’s not perfect but it works so I’m trying to catch up on e-mails. We are the most computer illiterate people in the world – each of us has several thousand unread e-mails dating back at least 2 years. We live our lives in the real world and really could not [sic] care less if computers had not ever been invented.

The real world?

It’s not widely known, but the direct dial phone preceded the computer by 28 years. Prior to direct dial, you picked up the party line phone, Mabel answered and connected you … and then probably listened in. When direct dial became popular, you had to look numbers up and interface with that phone thingee – Actually dial the numbers yourself!

From a human interaction standpoint, I don’t see a lot of different between the transition to direct dial phones and the transition to computers/email. So when I apply the 28-year factor to this year, 2012, I come up with the following:

Imagine telling people in 1984 (28 years ago) that you lived in the “real world” and weren’t going to communicate via direct dial phone. Now that Mabel had been removed from the loop, you weren’t going to make the effort to master that confusing dial on the phone. After all, you now lived in the real world.

I feel sorry for the couple, and I really feel sorry for the 10-year-old who will soon want a computer of his own. What will be his parent’s reaction?

Official Christmas Resignation

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Dear Hallmark, Target, Barnes and Noble and all the rest:

Please accept this letter as my notice of resignation, effective immediately.

This was an easy decision to make. I have spent too many of my years mindlessly wandering malls looking for the perfect gift for that special relative I see maybe one, maybe four, times a year. After very little consideration, I have decided to ignore your Black Friday sales, your Christmas specials, your post-Christmas blowouts and anything else associated with the season. Why? Let me count the reasons:

  1. The hundreds of “valued customer” emails I receive that are obviously cranked out by some mindless computer with no special thought that I now have to sift through.
  2. The mindless idiots who hold up thirty cars waiting for one parking spot to open up when another spot two cars earlier would have been much faster for everyone involved.
  3. The throngs of shoppers who go as a group and use blocking aisles as a social event for themselves.
  4. The extremely narrow aisles at stores that just aggravate #3, above.
  5. The store managers who place interesting items at the end of these narrow aisles so #3 and #4 are more likely to occur.
  6. The other store managers who don’t manage checkout properly  so standing in the wrong line is a penalty. (Bed, Bath and Beyond, I’m talking about you.)
  7. The seasonal employees who offer to help, but then when asked a simple question respond with “Let me go check with my manager.”
  8. The [bleeping] teenager on her cell phone who didn’t notice my car and narrowly avoided hitting me, and whose slamming on the brakes scared the [bleep] out of everyone behind her.
  9. The other [bleeping] teenager on her phone who did hit someone while backing out of her parking space!
  10. The many Goodwill, Teen Rescue and others who further block and mug shoppers trying to get in and out of stores.
  11. The traffic.
  12. The stress of unrealistic expectations.
  13. And I’ll say it, some of the oft-repeated Christmas music barely qualifies as music. It’s so bad it deserves a place on the Gong Show.

So there you have it – A baker’s dozen reasons why I no longer want to play. Call me a Grinch - I might actually be proud of it – But I’m sitting the next one out. And the one after that. And so on. I quit and there’s no amount of money or perks that will get me to reconsider.

Any questions?