Here We Go!

Carnac predicts:

1. Much slicing and dicing of the healthcare legislation in the “reconciliation” process.
2. Constitutional challenge to the participation mandate contained in the legislation (assuming it survives reconciliation)
3. A massive purging of the Senate and House in the mid-terms
4. A single term for Obama.

None of this has to do with my personal feelings on the legislation itself, it’s how I’m reading the public reaction.

Just as ‘W’ insured the election of anything that the Dems nominated, through his short-sighted strong-arm tactics, Ms. Pelosi has just returned the favor and given the GOP an early gift.

 As my Razorback, Yalie, Pinko Kalifornia brother pointed out – FDR didn’t get accolades in his time, he was often accused of being a Commie.  The negative perception of health care reform (does it have an official name that is less than 20 words long?) on top of the struggle for positive spin over the past year means that Obama will get covered up by the fallout.  Everyone who is not in lock-step with the administration now has fodder to carry them well past the mid-terms.  The mid-term fallout will overshadow the beginning of the 2012 Presidential campaign season and Obama will be fighting an uphill battle to clinch a second term.

As usual, the public reaction is unfettered backlash that is lacking in thoughtful examination of the reality of the proposed program.  A monumental amount of work has gone in to the legislation, and anything this large and complex is going to have warts and blemishes.  Along with the rough spots there are some sections that give much-needed relief to people with genetic diseases. 

We’re on the brink of a system that will allow people, regardless of their genetic predisposition for (pick a disease) to be screened at an earlier stage without fear of jeopardizing their future health care coverage.  How many lives will we save or improve from this single aspect of the program?

At first glance my biggest problems with the plan are:

1. Mandatory participation
2. Any involvement of the IRS in the enforcement of participation

The IRS is marginally competent (at best) at managing our tax system, they need to stay far away from our health care system or we’ll all be signing up for the death squads to put us out of our misery.

The last election gave the Dems the opportunity to bring things to the center and hold power for at least 2-3 Presidential terms, but by all accounts they have replicated the failings of the GOP and overestimated their popularity, ultimately to their own detriment. Term limits, anyone?

Common sense is certainly dead within the halls of Congress – time for that change that Obama promised….

He was making a reasonable argument, for a while.

Toben F. Nelson and Traci L. Toomey, along with their co-authors (listed at the end of the original article) start off making some good points with respect to how the drinking age impacts binge drinking and injury statistics in other countries.  Then they fall off the deep end as they wrap up the article and revert to scare tactics by making absolute statements such as;

“College student drinking is a serious problem. Each year more young people are injured, sexually assaulted and die as the result of drinking. These statistics would be even worse without the age-21 law.”

Where is the proof behind that hypothesis?  While I agree that it is certainly POSSIBLE they haven’t provided any indication of how PROBABLE it is.  They might as well say that lowering the drinking age will result in global warming and cause a decline in the Dow.  They go on to say;

“Lowering the drinking age will not save lives or make our campuses and communities better places to live. It will increase heavy drinking and the problems that accompany it in college communities and push the problem back into high schools.”

Again, certainly possible, but please provide a foundation before building the house.

I think everyone is overlooking the fact that we have some of the least restrictive laws in western society with respect to obtaining a driver license.  Furthermore, once you have your license – barring any egregious infractions – all you have to do is renew it periodically to keep it for the rest of your life.  No additional testing to speak of (NC requires vision and sign tests at renewal.)  Let’s take the lousy drivers off the road if we’re really concerned with automotive fatalities!  (While we’re at it I think an ignition interlock should be mandatory for anyone convicted of driving while impaired.)

Now that we’ve handled the drinking and driving aspect of the argument, how about some compromise?  In the cruise ship industry there was a policy that allowed guests between 18-21 to consume beer and wine with parental consent while in international waters.  Let’s take that model and allow young adults to consume beer and wine while under the direct supervision of their parents.  No loopholes, no exceptions, they must be with a parent.  This way we’re not sending young adults  the message “you’re old enough to vote, marry and be drafted, but don’t ask about drinking!” and society looks less like a bunch of hypocrites.

The Fine Print

The fine print is the root of all evil.  Today’s example of corporate absurdity comes to you courtesy of Best Buy.  A year ago we purchased a new laptop for my son to use for school.  Being prudent parents, with full knowledge of the various situations that can arise with teenagers, laptops and schools we opted for the extended warranty coverage.  It wasn’t horribly overpriced, making it at least digestible when viewed as an insurance policy.

Fast forward to today, almost a year to the day after the original purchase:  The laptop (running that fantastic operating system from Microsoft known as ‘Vista’) is being its usual, less than agreeable, self and I learn that this has been the normal condition since it was purchased. (Thanks, Microsoft!)  I suggest that he check microsoft.com for a service pack that might address these performance issues.  He does, there is – and the wheels proceed to come off.  After installing the service pack the laptop devolves into a useless pile of components, taking an hour to fully boot and equally as long for a browser window to appear.  Ugh!  Time to call Best Buy to see about getting the Operating System reinstalled.

Or so I thought.

After calling the local store and spending over 30 minutes total listening to a phone ring in my ear through several failed transfers (nothing like a technology store that hasn’t figured out a 19^th century invention…) I’m informed that the extended warranty only covers damage – “software issues” are not covered, and an operating system [sic] reload will cost you a cool $130.00 (well over 10% of the cost of the laptop when it was new!)  In this day of manufacturers shipping computers without media it’s more than a little underhanded to slap that kind of fee on a clean O/S reload that requires neither diagnostics nor backup – nothing more than a few keystrokes.  Keep in mind that if a drink were spilled into the keyboard or it were dropped it would be replaced, free of charge (but, according to the customer disservice goon at 888-BESTBUY, once you make a claim the warranty disappears…) The goon was quick enough to notice from my Best Buy Reward Zone profile that I am (was) an “excellent customer” – but guess what?  I’ll no longer patronize Best Buy as I have in the past.  They have proven to be nothing more than a corporate behemoth that only gives lip-service to customer service and chooses to gouge their customers at every opportunity.  I’ve got a bit of experience loading operating systems on computers, so I’m well aware of the effort involved.  Mr. Goon insisted that $130 was an industry standard fee for this service.  When I asked him to name a competitor that charged this fee he gave me Circuit City (umm, they’re bankrupt – I don’t think you want to compare Best Buy to them, do you?  Thanks for playing….) His next comparable company was CompUSA – hmm, 25 stores in 4 states plus Puerto Rico.  Again, not a flattering comparison for Best Buy.

So, we’re hunting up those media discs and embarking on a reloading session.  Thanks for nothing, Best Buy, we won’t be seeing you later.

Corporate Websites Suck

Yes, plain and simple, no two ways about it.  More often than not – in an attempt to appear fresh, new and pertinent – large corporations invest countless hours in a “redesign” of  their web portal.  Of course, when all they have done is move content around (randomly for the most part) and maintained the same look & feel all they manage to do is frustrate their existing customer base.  Imagine going to the neighborhood grocery this week only to discover that all the aisles have been shifted around and rearranged.  That’s exactly what most web site redesigns amount to.  When everything appears the same you shouldn’t have to spend time learning the new location of the information that you are accustomed to accessing.  Among the sites I frequent on a regular basis Verizon Wireless is the king of this methodology.

The next type of corporate site re-design appears to be for the sole purpose of obfuscating pertinent data.  Take the previous example and layer on new graphics and navigation along with the data shuffle.  For some reason there is a school of thought that says you must roll out a new website on a regular schedule in order to maintain shareholder value.  I’ve got an IBM ThinkPad that I purchased in late 2004 that is reliable and still covered by an extended warranty.  A few months after I purchased it the “red pixel disease” infected it – no problem, a couple of clicks on the website and I had an RMA number and a call tag was issued.  A few weeks ago the DVD drive went south.  “No Problem” says I – a few clicks and all will be taken care of – NOT!  After following multiple circular links I FINALLY discover a phone number.  When I convince the person on the other end of the line (thankfully a language barrier was not involved) that my degree in Computer Science makes me a reasonably qualified troubleshooter he manages to click here and there a few times and get a replacement on the way.  Note that a repair valued at hundreds of dollars was easier to handle than a repair valued at less than one hundred dollars, and the customer was frustrated in the process.

Freshen products, don’t frustrate customers – that should be the new mantra for all corporate sites.  People like comfort, and if your site changes on a regular basis just because your web team needs to look like they’re doing something then you have a dysfunction within your organization that demands attention.   Web teams should strive to perfect the web site they have – not strive to constantly reinvent and introduce a new set of problems that need fixing.

Dear NetZero

Why do you suck so bad?  Two years ago I received multiple welcome kits in the mail – all from fraudulent activity.  Today I received a collection notice from your pathetic Collections Division (that can’t be contacted via phone, despite the toll-free number listed on the top of the page – who was the Einstein who came up with that?)   So I call your billing department (in Bangalore or some other similarly unhelpful location where English is somewhat close to intelligible, but just far enough off that it’s just annoying when you deal with the compression introduced by the echo-cancellation hardware on the phone lines) Lo and behold, my phone number isn’t in your system and I don’t have a clue which maiden name you have on file since Gomer from Sheboygan was the one who set up the fraudulent account.  The unhelpful billing disservice representative tells me I can send a letter to your collections goons and all will be right with the world.  Well, I’m not inclined to do that.  Instead, I think I’ll just post this little diatribe on every venue I can so that the world can see what a pathetic shell of a company you are.  Pass this along to your pretty boy CEO so he can think about this the next time he’s prancing in front of the cameras shooting a television commercial.  Obviously whatever you have in place for “security” during your online subscription process isn’t working.  Pull your heads out, get some oxygen, fix the problems and quit abusing innocent bystanders who get caught between you and your fraudulent customer base.

Exceptional Customer Service (NOT!)

So, for my wife’s birthday I gave her a gift certificate to a local spa for a massage and facial.  We’ve been going to this spa off-and-on for almost ten years, the frequency fluctuating with where we happened to be living and our travel schedules.  However, any way you slice it, we’re fairly established customers.

She went in a few weeks ago to redeem part of her gift and while she was there she scheduled a massage to consume the remainder of her certificate.  Since we were driving from Oklahoma City to Wilmington (1300+ miles) she thought it would be a good idea to have a massage the day after our return.

Much to her surprise, the day she was scheduled to fly to Oklahoma City to meet me, she recieved a call from the spa to reconfirm her appointment that afternoon.  Obviously the person making the appointment made a simple mistake – why on earth would she schedule a massage for 2:00 when she had to be at the airport at 3:00?  The spa nazi was insistent that the computer was never wrong and informed my wife that if she cancelled there would be a penalty fee of 50% of the service.  After much debate (spa nazi was sorry my wife was upset…) she offered to only charge half of the normal penalty.  When my wife requested to speak to the manager or owner she was rebuffed; spa nazi insisted that this was her job and she could take care of it.

I haven’t called them yet; rest assured that when I do the spa nazi will regret not handling things properly with my wife in the first place.  Regardless of the outcome we will never spend another penny at Ki Spa & Salon (Wilmington, NC) and I suggest that you do the same – unless you happen to derive pleasure from abusive customer service policies.

It Makes You Wonder

In a truck stop on the way home from Oklahoma City the other day I noticed a sign over the beverage station.

Coffees from Around the World – grown in East Asia

You’re kidding, right?  You would expect “Coffees from Around the World” to include a variety such as Kenyan, Columbian, Kona, Blue Mountain, etc.   You know, from places “around the world” – not just a single place (Sumatra) from the other side of the world.