bunsen_h

When I saw this product at the grocery store...



"Made with Fairy Dust and Princess Kisses" ...

... my immediate thought was of the monstrous working conditions.  Slave labour camps for the princesses and fairies, assuming that the fairies aren't incorporated directly into the product.  Princesses in agony from being forced to pucker for hours on end.

Perhaps someone could do a movie about their liberation.

The packet I received from TD with my new credit card is headed: "Thank you for consenting to your TD [blah blah] Card." Though I know that that's based on recent scandals involving people being signed up for bank services without their consent, it still seems like a remarkably negative way of putting it.

Also, I consented to receiving services from the bank. I haven't consented to the card itself. What does this card have in mind? Do I need a safe word? The PIN is probably not appropriate / sufficient for that purpose.
 

A couple of months ago, Steven McNulty from Edward Jones financial advisors stopped by our house.  mentisiterinvit gave him our phone number.  (I don't know why, but that's up to her.)  Since then he has been calling every few weeks.  This afternoon he called again, while I was busy and unable to pick up the phone, and left no message.  I called him back.

"You've been calling us, well, semi-regularly, and I'd like you to stop, please."

"But you gave me your number."

"My girlfriend did.  At any rate, we'd like you to stop calling."

"Then why did she give my your number?  That's pretty immature."

"She was interested.  She isn't any more.  Please stop calling."

"Fine.  I wouldn't want to deal with you anyways."

I called him a twit and hung up.

So.  If you're looking for a financial advisor who isn't, well, an ass, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

I was very careful with my tone of voice to not be rude, condescending, or otherwise offensive, right up until the final word "twit".  He was given our number; he had the legal right to call us -- until I asked him to stop, with my first sentence.

I cannot fathom why he, and other salescritters, try to argue with such requests to stop calling.  It's not like they're going to change my mind.
 

I'm trying to install a new bathroom fan.  The spinning part of the old unit gets loose on its axle and develops loud and complex beat patterns.  ("RA-ta-ta-TA-ta... RA-ta-ta-TA-ta... RA-ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-ta-RA-ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-ta...")  The new unit is much more sturdy and appears to be better constructed, with a more solid motor.

But the installation isn't going according to the manual.  This is because the instructions appear to be impossible to follow.  Since the joists are 16" apart (center to center), I'm apparently supposed to use wood screws to attach the fan to two of them... but the screw holes in the fan are only 11" apart.  I'm also supposed to slide a support strut into the body of the fan, but the instructions don't tell me to attach it to anything.  It also appears to be physically impossible to either insert the fan body through the hole in the ceiling with the strut already in place, or to slide the strut into its place after the fan has been pushed through the hole.  The strut would have to pass through either the ceiling or the joist.

I'm currently leaning towards cutting a couple of short lengths of 2-by-4, and screwing them to the joists so I've got solid wood on either side of the fan to screw it into.  And forgetting about that strut.

Is this another case of a company providing impossible-to-follow instructions so that if there's a problem, it's not their fault?
 

Don't make long-distance calls from a pay telephone using a credit card. Seriously.

A month ago, I needed to make a couple of phone calls from my hotel in Mississauga to Ottawa. Since the hotel tacks on a surcharge to make such calls from its rooms, I figured I'd save myself a couple of dollars by using the Bell pay phones in the lobby.

The charges appeared on this month's credit card statement. The charges were applied by a company I'd never heard of, WiMac Tel, in Calgary. A 2-minute call on Friday evening was billed at $12.72; a 1-minute call on Sunday afternoon billed at $11.49 .  Mississauga-to-Ottawa, off-peak hours; the charges should probably have been more like $0.72 and $0.49 .

Apparently Bell outsources long-distance pay-phone calls on credit cards to this other outfit, which tacks on ludicrous surcharges, with no warning. My research on the net indicates that WiMac claims that callers are given notice of the charges in advance, in a message on the phone. This was certainly not true for the calls I made.  I'm obsessive about such things; I would have listened to such a message and checked for details.

BMO MasterCard would not allow me to dispute the charges.  Since I gave Bell my credit card number and they provided the service (or, to be more precise, the service was provided), it was out of BMO's hands, even though the service was provided in a way I had not authorized via an expensive third party.  BMO told me that I needed to take the matter up with Bell.

I spent some time wandering through the maze on Bell's website, trying to find some way of contacting them about pay-phone service.  There isn't one.  I gave up and called the contact number for home-phone service.  I think I was lucky that I reached a Bell customer-service rep who was on my side.  He will be applying a refund for the credit-card charges towards my next bill from Bell, for internet service.

But... sheesh.  I'm not impressed by BMO.  Nor, in general, by Bell, though that's nothing new.
 

Doofes.  Rhymes with "roofies" and "Goofy's".

We had the 8 a.m.-to-noon "morning window" with Sympatico.  This required me to set my alarm for 8 a.m., which is much earlier than I tend to wake up these days.  (Yeah, I know, whine whine.  Regardless, I'm sleep-deprived and on lots of medication.)  The Sympatico doofes arrived at 8:35, which was quite reasonable under the circumstances.

( Bell, booklet, and candles )

I'm not holding my breath on this; I think it's likely that I'll have to complain to Sympatico and have either them or Rogers back.

If all he'd left screwed up was the disconnected phone jack in the bedroom, I'd have taken care of it myself instead of dealing with the hassle of getting him back.  But there are several phone jacks not working upstairs, and that's stuff that is much easier to trace with the equipment that he's got and I don't have.

At least we do have internet back, and the phone jacks we use most often are working.

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?
 

Got a few extra body parts?



They seemed to be doing moderately good business earlier in the day.
 

I've been comparison shopping for a heating pad. Almost every local store I've checked sells essentially the same items made by Sunbeam, in some cases house brands labelled as "made by Sunbeam". There are a few other models around. Canadian Tire's website seems to show that they've switched to units made by a different company but haven't properly updated the site to reflect the changes.

Every model I've seen has instructions which specify that one should not sit on or against the heating pad, and that one should place the pad on and not under the "affected body part".

This is bizarre. It seems to be very close to "any plausible use of this device will void its warranty", since most of the pads are definitely not designed to be wrapped around the body nor conveniently attached to it. I've got back pain -- am I supposed to lie on my stomach and try to keep the pad positioned on my back? I've been to physiotherapy sessions and massage sessions in which I was lying on a heating pad -- were those "professional" units?

From the CBC: "Bell Canada Inc. is not breaking any laws by slowing internet speeds and will be allowed to continue throttling its customers, the CRTC has ruled."

Yeah, Bell's treatment of its customers has been pretty poor.  I didn't know they were being that violent.  My problems have generally been limited to always having my service questions routed to illiterate idiots in India.

Over the years, I've tended to categorize salesbeings into three categories. As the man says, “Just a useful distinction, to clarify thought.” The categories aren’t hard and fast; poor business ethics, for example, tend to make me downgrade a salesbeing to a lower category.

Salespeople understand what their organization can produce, and what prospective customers need. They help to put the two together. Everybody wins. Sales people can be extremely important for a commercial organization.

Salescritters don’t understand what their organization can produce, or what prospective customers need. Or they just don’t care very much. The important thing is to make a sale and get a commission, or at least to remain employed and collect a salary. They may commit their organization to something that it simply doesn’t have the resources to do in the available time (or at all), or the customer to purchasing something they don’t need and can ill afford. They may claim that a product has features that the customer is specifically looking for, when it really doesn't.  They can cause trouble for an organization.

Salesthings don’t understand what is physically possible, and may attempt to sell something that not only has nothing to do with their organization’s business, and doesn’t exist, but violates the laws of physics. For example, a salesthing for a software company who tries to sell a mining-exploration company on a potential new product that they can just pour on the rock to make the rock go away, on the principle that “one of our guys is a chemist, I’m sure he can figure out how to do it.” They tend to cause a different kind of trouble than the salescritters, primarily by being so obviously incompetent and insane that they scare away clients who might actually be interested in what the organization can do.