At work the other day, and the local news had a story on about cheap gas prices in the area. My coworker saw the piece and I heard him exclaim, “Man! Gas for $2.35? Awesome!”

No, it isn’t.

Think back a year. $2.35 a gallon was high. Ridiculously high. People were bitching left and right about this, demanding the government step in and regulate this somehow. The fact that gas has since gone almost a dollar higher doesn’t change this fact. And now that we’ve seen gas selling in excess of three dollars, people see this as some sort of bargain. It’s not. It’s still high, just not as high as it has been.

C’mon, people, try to remember a little more history than “last week.”

1 Comment »

Just a helpful little tip to companies: If you’re going to hire someone to work in a customer service capacity, either phone support or cash register jockey or restaurant waitstaff or anything requiring actual communication with the customer, could you please make sure that they speak the language fluently? Call me a racist if you must, but I am growing exceedingly weary of calling customer service and having to spend an extra twenty minutes either repeating myself because they can’t translate what I’m saying fast enough, or asking them to repeat themselves because I have no idea what they just said.

I know times are hard and language-challenged folks are going to be cheaper to hire than public speakers. I know shipping off your call centers to some dirtball country with huge populations and no labor laws really increases your bottom line. I know that taking care of your shareholders (and your own personal portfolios) is far more important to you than taking care of your actual customers. And yes, I’ll even admit that, usually, eventually, despite the increased difficulty, hassle, and frustration, the transaction ends more or less with the customer getting something close to what they want. But still, it should not take me ten minutes and seven attempts to order a freakin’ cheeseburger!

So here’s what I’m going to do. Next time I get on the phone with the credit card company and the phone is answered by Apu, I’m going to hand the phone over to the SBM and let her handle the transaction. In French. Or Dutch, her choice. They’re going to offer up someone who doesn’t speak English, so will I. Probably won’t get anything accomplished, but I wasn’t before, either.

No comments »

I can’t be the only one who’s thought of this. The whole economic bailout plan they’re debating in Washington right now? The one that’s going to require taxpayers to save the banking industry as we know it? Why don’t they just shelve it for the time being, and get money from a different source? Specifically, I’m thinking the CEOs, CFOs, COOs (and whatever other alphabet-soup titles they have), the presidents, the vice presidents, board members, and all the higher-ups of these failing companies. Take away their salaries for the past year or two, sell their multiple houses, auction off their cars, liquidate their stocks and bonds, cash in their IRAs and 401(k)s, have a garage sale with all their expensive clothes and jewelry, ebay their yachts, and turn their polo ponies into hot lunches for the school kids. Now, I’m guessing even that won’t be enough, so I’m also suggesting that each of them also be required to remove and sell at least three organs. Kidney, lung, pancreas, their choice. Carve ‘em out and offer ‘em up to the highest bidder. I’m betting there’s some oil sheik someplace who could use a new gall bladder.

Come on, if this happened in Japan, there’d be executives over there killing themselves right now.

No comments »

The SBM and I are getting ready to move to a new apartment and, after slogging through nine pages of legalese in the lease contract they sent us, I would like to propose a new shorter, simpler form that every rental properties could use to save everyone some time. Because having read several leases in my time, and this one proving to be no exception, they all seem to say the exact same thing. So here is my suggested easy-to-read, easy-to-understand standard lease agreement for apartment complexes:

1. We are the rental property. We are more powerful than all your gods.
2. Nothing is ever our fault.
3. Even if it clearly was our fault.
4. Like, say we barge unannounced into your apartment while you’re entertaining guests, and we randomly open fire with high-caliber automatic weapons and destroy all your belongings and put holes in the walls and puncture all the pipes causing water damage and injure your guests, including your boss who you were trying to impress in hopes of getting that big promotion. That’s still your fault.
5. You have no rights beyond those which we grant you.
6. We grant you no rights.
7. You owe us money for everything, including rent, water, sewage, trash, keys, cards, keycards, parking spaces, package pickup, pet ownership, repairs for damages you didn’t actually cause, cleaning that we never actually do, that little hole in the door you look through to see who’s knocking, oxygen, and sunshine. If you’re late with your payment, we can—and will—kill you.
8. You have no legal recourse.
9. So shut up.
10. Sign here.

See? Short, snappy, easy to understand. It says exactly what the actual lease agreement said but didn’t take me over half-hour to get through it.

1 Comment »

So I’m at the grocery store the other day, buying food and whatnot. My current job pays for squat, so I’m always on the lookout for bargains, sales, discounts, that sort of thing. Glance at the list and see we need some dryer sheets so our clothes will come out of the dryer softer or drier or something. Never fully understood what dryer sheets actually do. So I’m looking over the boxes and I see a 200-sheet box of Bounce dryer sheets with a large sticker on the front boldly proclaiming “11% More!” Eleven percent more? Kind of an odd upsize, I think. Not, say, twenty percent more or thirty-three percent? Isn’t that what they usually do? Still, a bargain’s a bargain and eleven percent more free is still more.

Then I take another look at the sticker. It doesn’t, technically, say that extra eleven percent is free. Looking at the tiny type under the gigantic “11% More” declaration, I read “than the 180-sheet size.” I do some quick math in my head and, yes, two hundred is roughly eleven percent more than one-eighty. But it’s for the same price, right? A glance at the prices shows that it’s not. The two hundred count box costs almost a dollar more than the one-eighty box.

So this is in no way a deal for the consumer. They’re advertising the simple mathematical fact that this box contains more than that box, hoping you’ll just assume that the prices are equal and buy an extra twenty sheets for about a nickel a sheet. Thanks but no thanks.

I bought a box of Snuggle brand dryer sheets instead. That little bear is creepy but, dammit, he’s honest.

1 Comment »

Dear University,

It pains me to write this letter, but you’ve left me no choice. We had some good times, some laughs, and I enjoyed our time together, but it’s over. It’s been over for years. You need to accept that. You need to stop living in the past and move on with your life. I have. You need to get over me, let me go. And you really, really need to stop asking me for more money.

Seriously, this has been going on for over a decade now. Roughly once a month, you send me a letter saying how much you miss me, how great our time was together, and then you slip in a request for cash. I paid plenty when we were together and I was actually benefiting in some way from the relationship. Why you expect me to keep footing your bills now that we’re apart is utterly beyond me. Besides, I certainly don’t remember you paying for a lot of the stuff we did together. Seems like I was the only one shelling out the money. And, as I recall, the only thing I got for my contributions at the end of our time was a piece of paper and that stupid hat I’ll never wear again.

Come to think of it, you probably wouldn’t need quite so much money if you would just stop wasting it on postage, envelopes, and those clearly expensive brochures. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for your financial woes if it looks like you just wasted a wad of green on a presentation to convince me of how much you need money. If memory serves, you offered a few economics courses; maybe you should take one yourself.

So please, leave me in peace. I’m not coming back and I’m certainly not giving you any more money. It was a good four years, it really was, but that time is over. We’re done. There will be others in your future, new people that will give you what I no longer can. Forget about me. Live your life without me. It’ll be better for both of us.

Sincerely,
Me

P.S. And stop sending me the glossy four-color notifications of who has what job now or who just had a baby. I don’t care. They were your friends, not mine.

No comments »

A local children’s hospital has launched a new advertising campaign for the summer. It features a large number of billboards and neighborhood signs showing children dashing after dogs, balls, a kite, that sort of thing. The tagline for the ads is “Children dart. Drive smart.” The message, of course, is kids are tiny little idiots who will run directly in front of your car without warning, so you should be extra careful during the summer to not crush them under your wheels.

Now, that’s all good and fine, but the thing is, I don’t believe their sincerity. Think about it. This is a children’s hospital. They make money by healing sick and injured children. Why would they want you to take extra precautions to avoid driving over them? That’s money out of their pocket. The more kids you run over, the better their bottom line. I know, from a PR standpoint they can’t actually advocate the vehicular mauling of toddlers, but I don’t buy that they’re going to be all that upset if you do. It’s the same thing as Philip Morris encouraging you not to smoke, or Budweiser admonishing you to drink responsibly. Sure, it sounds like they care, but it’s less cash for them if you actually take them up on it.

Never trust when a company encourages you not to use their product.

3 Comments »

I think it’s fantastic that Lunesta, the sleep-aid drug, designed and marketed to help you fall asleep, lists among its side effects: May cause drowsiness. Well, yeah, I would really hope so. That’s what people are paying for, after all.

Even better, the asthma drug Advair warns patients that taking it “may increase the chance of asthma-related death.” Well, that’s a nice change from all those regular medicines that try to prevent your disease from doing more harm to you.

I think my personal favorite, though, has to be the anti-depressant drug Zoloft. Not for the side effects, but for the actual effects. They come right out and say this in their ads: “Although the cause is unknown, depression may be linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain. Zoloft may help to correct this imbalance.” So they are admitting that a.) they don’t know what causes the problem b.) they might have kind of an idea about something related to the problem (c.) their product might affect what they think may be related to the problem although it doesn’t outright cure it and d.) they’re not entirely sure what, if anything, their product does.

Of course, if you want to talk side effects, Zoloft lists “sexual dysfunction” as a possibility. Great, take a guy who’s already depressed and make it so his junk doesn’t work. The suicide rate’s going to skyrocket.

The miracles of modern marketing… er, medicine.

No comments »

I was hunting around on the Adobe User Forums today to try and find an answer to a Flash software error I was having. At the bottom of every page, they have the usual admonishment that this is just user-to-user information and does not represent direct assistance from Adobe. As a helpful tip, they offer this bit of advice:

“If you require direct assistance, or prefer to contact Adobe support staff directly, please contact Adobe support.”

So, just so I’m clear, if I want to contact Adobe support, I should contact Adobe support? Weird how that works.

No comments »

Speaking of businesses and their signs, there’s a dry cleaner down the street from me that I pass every time I go to get groceries. Just a little shop in one of those typical strip malls, flat front, glass door with two big windows flanking it. The place has put a large neon sign in each window, big custom jobs. The window on the left has the name of the place, Morelli’s Cleaners, spelled out in glowing neon. The right window, in an advertising move I can only describe as bold and daring, has the message “Customers welcome.”

Y’know, that is such a welcome change from most businesses that actively try to chase shoppers out of the building as soon as they set foot in the door. A company that welcomes paying customers… Refreshing.

No comments »