Watch out for these guys. I am not sure how they got me but they have been getting me for quite a while. I am likely to flush $350 down the toilet because I wasn’t watching a credit card I almost never use. I take the blame for that definitely but I still want my money back from these assholes:
Here is their “claim to fame,” “raison d’existence,” or really their “how can we screw you now without you knowing it until we have sucked some bucks out of you” statement:
“24 Protect Plus members can enjoy greater peace of mind through a variety of benefits designed to provide greater security and protection for their homes, family members, finances, pets, cars and more. As a 24Protect Plus member, you can protect your family budget as well, thanks to more than $1,500 in savings each membership year.”
What the hell does that mean? I obviously missed a check box somewhere and/or did not read the fine print and, as I well admit, didn’t look at my credit card statement carefully enough. Nonetheless, I cannot see how any responsible enforcer of business law could find a reason why anyone would sign up for this “service.” Look at the web site…what services are they providing that one would pay a monthly fee for?
I tried to get some money back from these assholes but will be lucky if I get 20% out of it. I will be taking this one further because there are certainly others out there that have been sucked in to the same scam. And I don’t like taking it without lube…
As you may or may not know, I order green coffee beans online and roast them myself at home weekly. I have been ordering from the same company for months since I started home roasting. I have never had any issues with the deliveries from UPS until now. According to the UPS website, they tried to deliver the package to me three times unsuccessfully, then they decided to hold it for pickup, then the address was wrong and they corrected it, and then it was scanned for delivery at 4:03 this morning. It is now 8:30 in the evening, I have been in my apartment all day, and I am not seeing any packages, eh?
Here is what I have seen from those “InfoNotices” they put on your door. On 9/27, “Your written signature is required to leave package(s). I signed the back of the notice and left it on my door when I went out midday on 9/28. Unfortunately, I did not do so when I headed out about 5:15 PM later that day so I missed another deliver attempt. Another InfoNotice dated 9/28 was left on my door stating that the package had been left in the “office.” This is normal but when I went to pick it up yesterday, 9/29, the package was not there. I went out later on in the day, 9/29, and left the signed release form on my door but when I got home sometime around 6:30 PM I had another InfoNotice on the door, right next to the signed release form, stating that “The sender required a signature at the time of delivery.”
I confirmed with the sender that all they required was a signature, it did not have to be in person, and the package could be left in the management office, as has happened numerous times before. I have talked to UPS twice. They wanted to send the package back which was unacceptable. They wanted me to come pick up the package which was again unacceptable. Then they wanted to charge me to redeliver which was of course totally unacceptable. Get some customer service eh? And were are my effing coffee beans?
I saw someone driving the other day in a vehicle with the license plate “YBU BME.” I may be wrong but that sounds like “Why Be You…Be Me.” In my estimation, this person must have an awfully inflated sense of self-worth. That’s something someone like Muhammad Ali, in his day, might have put on their license plate, if they could. You might as well have a plate that reads “IM GOD!”
The last thing I want to see at the grocery store is someone sitting on the counter where I place my groceries prior to scanning them. But when there is some kid who looks young enough to still be in diapers sitting there, I am likely to want to hurl. What are people really thinking of? It is bad enough that so many people are “self checkout” incompetent but do they really have to put “poopy boy” on the counter too? They should have stools for the kids…
The other day while I was getting ready to take a left turn on a green light (not the green arrow), the fool who was across from me waiting to do the same thing, decided to go straight and cut right in front of me just when I was getting ready to make my turn. The next day, while waiting in the left lane of two left turn lanes (green arrow only), the guy in the right hand left turn lane decided to take his left hand turn (on red) just as the opposing traffic was starting across the intersection. WTF eh?
In the Washington Post article dated May 16, 2010, “Conservative thinkers tout three innovative and controversial proposals,” Robert Stein, who served as deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomic analysis in George W. Bush‘s administration, suggests that the tax code benefits retirees who didn’t have children. His theory is that those individuals who marry and have children contribute more to the Social Security and Medicare systems because their children contribute to the system also. More “buck for the bang” as it were…
Personally, I thought that what each individual pays into the Social Security benefits them as to the return. Just because you as a parent have one or more kids paying into the system does not make you any more worthy. While it might look good now to have more people paying into the system, those individuals are just as likely to avail themselves of the retirement benefits in the future as anyone else.
As a parent with children, one already gets significantly more Federal tax breaks than does a single filer. It was always a quasi bone of contention with one of my military coworkers, who had four children, that he paid next to no Federal taxes after all his deductions while I, with no kids, have paid taxes for 32 years…allowed to take only the standard deduction. To take it one step further, non-parents have no children burdening the public school system which makes me wonder even more why there should be so many tax allowances for having children. I am not really complaining but saying that childless taxpayers who put less of a strain on and contribute more to the public well should pay more into Social Security and Medicare is a bit of a stretch.
I am am no tax specialist but to simplify what Mr. Stein suggests which is to up the child tax credit from approximately $1500 per year to $4000, here is how I would have made out on my Federal tax return in 2008 if I had had four children. Could I really have had the government pay me $8000? Just think, if I had ten kids, I could get paid $80,000 a year by the government. What a concept, eh? Right…the tax burden is just reduced to nothing.
Who is responsible for cleaning up all the trash that local businesses hang on my door knob? I live in an apartment complex with open walkways so any maggot can come through and hang restaurant menus or solicitations on my door.
I hate those things. They go right into my recycling bin though many other people might just trash them. Lately, as a form of protest, I just leave them on the hall floor. It speaks to the cleanliness of the complex in that the trash stays in the hallway for weeks without anyone cleaning up.
Can I, can anyone be they a renter or an owner, be responsible for cleaning up the trash that vendors and solicitors leave at their doorstep? Can I save all the crap up for a year and send it back to the deliverer COD?
I hate Tuesdays in the summer at my apartment complex because that is normally when the landscaping company comes in. The lawn mowers and blowers are so loud it is ridiculous. To make things worse, the company milks the situation often by mowing and blowing the same plot twice. There is no apartment management representative around to observe what is going on. Of course, were I working, I wouldn’t be present to observe the shenanigans myself…
Last Tuesday, I watched three guys, two with man portable gas powered blowers on their backs and another guy with a wheeled gas powered blower clearing the debris out of the parking lot, onto the dog walking/pooping area below my balcony, and then into the tree line. The blowers are so powerful that they flatten out the grass for about a 1 x 2 foot area.
In truth, I bet the three guys manning these gas powered tools could have raked all the debris to the tree line sans noise and petroleum burnt pollution in the same time it took them to blow the debris away. Meanwhile they stirred up a dust and pollen storm that forced me to close my balcony door and apartment windows.
Is it time to get back to the basics of yard work and employ some college kids for the summer? I don’t want to put any “immigrants” out of work but WTF?
I was recently reminded of a work incident that occurred a few years ago whenn I needed to retrieve a forgotten password. The coworker/system, instead of generating a new password and emailing it to me and forcing me to immediately change it, brought the password up in the clear. I use, shall we say, racy, embarrassing passwords. They haven’t been compromised and I remember them but I don’t want others to know what they are for the obvious reason that they are passwords but for the less obvious reason that the might be construed as very weird.
So it is weird and bad enough if one of your coworkers pulls up a password which embarrasses you. The other day I was at the library and…yep…you got it. I ask to see if I can view a history of books that I have checked out and the female librarian asks for my card number. I give it to her and as she is saying “the default password is “111111” which I had changed at first logon, she is somehow pulling up my account with my “not for public consumption password” and telling me that I have such and such checked out.
Well I know what I had currently checked out. I wanted to see a history of all of the books I had checked out. I think that they can’t keep that info for privacy reasons though I may be wrong about that. NTL, the librarian said that they might not be able to store all that info due to storage limitations. I kind of doubt that because all you need are a few fields like a card number linked to a user name, and every book that had been checked out on that card number. That database would not require that many fields and take up that much disk space in my estimation.
The bottom line is why do we still have major databases systems out there that store passwords in the clear? If you are a system administrator and can reset passwords, whether or not the password is in the clear is no matter. But if you are a hacker, it is a different story. No serious computer system should store passwords in the clear!
What madness! I took the Metro into town on Thursday, April 1, to see the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin. Last year I rode the scooter down to check them out but the area was so packed with people I just cruised through for a quick look and headed home. This year, I wanted to walk around and get some pictures so the Metro was the way to go. I got on at the Vienna, VA, station and off at the Smithsonian station. From there it was a reasonably short walk to the Tidal Basin where all the action is. I ended up walking all the way around the Basin at a leisurely pace snapping pictures of the trees and the Jefferson and Washington Memorials.
There were people all over the place. The advent of digital photography has not boded well for tourist destinations since now everyone thinks they are a photographer. Walkways were blocked by phototogs trying to get snaps of their friends, family, and the monuments. I believe that I can assuredly say that if all those people had to pay for film and developing, most of them wouldn’t be taking pictures. I certainly take many more pictures using my digital camera than I would using my analog cameras. At least I have a history going back 26 years of taking analog photos and have four analog cameras to my two digital cameras.
That being said, I think I got a few decent photos. I went into town late with the intention of staying through sundown. I did do that but ended up shooting sunset photos on the mall of the Capitol and the Washington Monument rather than of the cherry blossoms. This was mainly due to the fact that I had to pee and was thirsty as hell. I walked down the south side of the mall near the Capitol looking for an Irish bar that I had been to years before but haven’t been able to find for the past few years. I am not even sure it is there any more.
What is really odd is that it is so hard to find someplace to just stop and get a brew or quick bite to eat around the mall. There are huge government office buildings everywhere and people have to drink and eat. D.C. is very much a commuter city so perhaps the government workers are just in and out for work and there isn’t a good restaurant business environment. I ended up going to Capitol City Brewing Company on Massachusetts Avenue just of Capitol Hill. It is adjacent to Union Station which is a good venue for getting chow and such, not sure about brews, and also catching the Metro.
After making my bladder gladder, I managed to find a seat at the bar in the very packed restaurant. I was so thirsty from walking around for four hours in the sun that I pounded down a pint of Kolsch and a pint of water in no time. Since the sun was setting, I had to get back out on the mall, about 5 blocks away, snap some pictures and get back to the Smithsonian Metro station. Even though it was about 8:15 PM, I just barely managed to get a seat and was hemmed in by people as the car reached standing room only a few stops later. That lasted until about four stops before the end of the line where I disembarked and headed home.
When I got home, I realized that I hadn’t eaten the sandwich I brought with me so I showered the city off of me, scarfed a quick brew, ate my sandwich, and chased it all down with more water. Meanwhile, I was downloading 203 pictures from my camera to my computer.
Here are a few of those pictures. More will be posted in my photo album in the not too distant future. Once that is done, I’ll make a note and put a link to them here in my blog.
