• Simple means to energy conservation

    After repairing my refrigerator and then seeing the movie An Inconvenient Truth, it dawned on me that people probably have several appliances in their house that aren't running efficiently and simple solutions might exist. In the case of my refrigerator, the blocked up grill probably caused the refrigerator to run twice as often as needed. If other people did the same thing, it could be a real energy saver.

  • Fixing a refrigerator

    Lately I've noticed that that the freezer part of our refrigerator wasn't keeping stuff completely frozen despite cranking down the temperature. What do I know about refrigerators? Turns out, I know enough about mechanical/chemical engineering to be able to understand a diagram of a heat exchanger. I took off the top panel of the refrigerator (a lot of the mechanical stuff is on the top of this unit), looked around, looked at the little diagram showing how it worked, and saw tons of dirt. I figured that before I called an appliance repair person, I'd take a look to see what I could do. I vacuumed out the grill to the condenser and as I did, I felt a blast of air coming from the other side of it.

  • MCI doesn't know how to listen

    After my phone call with the barely English speaking MCI representative yesterday where I hung up on him out of frustration (not being able to understand him and the representative not being able to think on his own were the causes of my frustration), I received an email from Rajmohan at MCI:

  • MCI Customer Service sucks

    So after writing my last post, I got a phone call from MCI customer service trying to explain to me that they pay the Federal Excise Tax directly to the government. The guy with a heavy, heavy accent was reading directly from some piece of paper and didn't really understand what he was talking about. I could barely understand him and it is a good thing that I don't have to deal with MCI all that often otherwise I'd pull my hair out. I tried to explain to him that the tax had been repealed (OK, not repealed, but no longer collected). He didn't seem to get this and I just hung up out of frustration. It is completely unacceptable to have customer service representatives that you can't understand. They need to get a clue and realize that if people can't effectively communicate with their customers, they're going to lose their customers.