Cycle of fuel costs

The price of oil took a nice nose dive today. The news says that this is in part to expected higher inflation which is attributed to higher fuel costs thus lowering demand. If the price of fuel decreases because of this, will people use more fuel and therefore drive the price of oil up again? While I hope not, thinking about that kind of cycle makes my head spin.

More AT&T Fun

So now that my voicemail is turned off on AT&T, I decided to look at call forwarding to forward my calls when I don't answer the phone. In AT&T's online phone manager, it clearly says that it will forward calls when I don't answer the phone (see picture below).

Unfortunately this isn't true; it immediately forwards the calls and only rings my number after the other number has picked up (I tried forwarding to my JConnect number) which makes call forwarding useless to me. I could get the call forwarding on busy service, but that's another $5 per month. It looks like I'm going back to Costco to look at new phones or just find a cheap answering machine. Did I make a mistake switching from MCI? I sure hope not.

Battling the phone company

So I switched us to AT&T to save a few bucks. I received the first bill and saw a charge of $8.95 for voicemail + $19.95 activation. Hmmm...I didn't want to pay this and called them. They turned off voicemail, but won't credit me for the activation. I argued that adding voicemail wasn't an option online and got no where. A manager is supposed to call me back and discuss this. I'm not sure why it is so hard to credit me $20 when it is a failure of their system. The only thing I had written on the order is a comment that I'd like to be able to add voicemail; it wasn't an option when I signed up and the cost was never revealed to me. As you can clearly see by the online confirmation that I saved, the extra charge is never listed.

Why is it so hard to deal with phone companies? First MCI didn't attempt to keep me as a customer, now AT&T doesn't seem to care about customers, either.

Congress caused the gas price problem

In the president's radio address this past weekend, he blamed Congress for high gas prices. He thinks that drilling everywhere is going to bring the prices down. Boy, and people actually elected this guy president? The high prices couldn't be caused by supply and demand (lots of demand around the world), the war in Iraq (takes a lot of gas to fuel those military vehicles), or the world hating us (I'm sure Venezuela and other countries would pump out more oil if they didn't hate us or more specifically the president so much)? Drilling everywhere isn't the solution to anything; it may help in the medium term (starting to drill today won't lower prices next week), but there is only a limited supply of oil in the world. If you want to blame Congress, blame the Congress that rolled over 20-30 years ago by not pushing for higher fuel economy for cars and trucks. The auto makers just didn't want to spend the money back then to produce more efficient cars and congress didn't act to force them to do it.

How many days do we have until this guy is out of office?