Tag: Misc

Today my wife and I were driving home from dinner and had just gotten on I-5 south to get to 163 North when she saw a San Diego County Sheriff’s Deputy driving with a cell phone to his ear. Yes, this is illegal in the state of California! If he had been seen by a highway patrol officer, he should have been given a ticket (the city of San Diego has a 30 day grace period, but he was on the freeway). However, it is completely unlikely that he would have been pulled over. What is this behavior teaching others? Are law enforcement officers exempt from the laws? I’d hope not, but sometimes they act like they are. While on the topic, yesterday I saw a San Diego Police motorcycle officer make a right turn on red without even stopping. Now if I had done that, I would have been pulled over, but this officer (who didn’t have his lights and sirens on) decided to break the law. Could I or should I file a complaint about either of these incidents? I have the identification number of the Sheriff’s car, so I could file a complaint, but it would take too much of an effort to do so. (If someone from the Sheriff’s department wants to contact me, I’d be more than happy to supply the information about this.

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.

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.

Here in San Diego we have free trash pickup (for single family residences) due to the People’s Ordinance of 1919 which I believe came out of the city selling refuse to pig farmers and making money on it (hmmm, it would appear that the city leaders back then had some of the same issues of public trust as the current ones). With free trash pickup, what incentive do we have to recycle? We recycle as much as possible and just started a compost bin last week to reduce the amount we send to the dump. If the city wants to encourage more recycling, they should offer a financial incentive (don’t take away the free trash pickup) to say lower property taxes or something like that. The city is already in hot water as state law requires it to recycle more, but it isn’t meeting that. While people should just feel good about “going green”, let’s be realistic. Unless it positively or negatively affects people’s wallets, it just isn’t going to be adopted by everyone.

(I’m not new to “going green”; back in 1990, I started a paper recycling program for my Eagle Scout project. Times have changed, but I’ve tried to do my part to help.)

I got my bill from MCI (The Neighborhood plan) the other day for our home phone service and saw that it jumped! After some research (viewing my invoice online was a nightmare because the server kept dropping my connection even when I tried from Windows), they raised my rate $10 per month. I’ve been a customer for a long time and wasn’t notified of this change; they swore that they notified me in my online bill (I still can’t find a record of that). The increase is ridiculous. This comes at a time when people are dropping landline phones to go only cellular. I still like the call quality of a landline and knowing that 911 is available. So MCI charges me $56.99 per month. If I’m a new subscriber, it would be $59.99 per month, but each year I’d get a free month of service. So basically as a long time customer, I get screwed out of $24 per year. I’ve looked into switching to AT&T, but their online help is kind of useless. They can’t even tell me exactly how much voicemail costs. The base cost for unlimited local and long distance is $40 per month and somewhere between $6.95 and $9.00 per month for voicemail. So would it be cheaper than MCI? Possibly, but I can’t quite tell. The signup page lists all the fees and stuff which seems to indicate that the total, including voicemail would be a little more than $10 per month cheaper than MCI. If I go through with the signup, there isn’t an option to add voicemail, so I’d have to talk to a rep and deal with that.

After my call with MCI, I got a recorded call back to fill out a survey. I rated them poorly and at the end, it offered to connect me back to a rep to straighten things out. After being on hold for awhile, I gave up.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll call AT&T and see if I can get more information. At this point, it looks like MCI will lose me as a customer because of a small rate increase. $10 is $10 and I’d rather have it in my pocket. (Also it is interesting to note that MCI’s fees are about $6 per month higher than AT&T’s probably because MCI has to pay AT&T to use the lines.)

Yesterday we went to our niece’s birthday party at a local park. When we pulled up, I found a perfect parking spot, but our only concern was that it was too close to the corner. I parked, we took a look and saw that it was fine. When I returned to the car later to get something, I saw that someone had parked behind us so close that his bumper was touching ours. I was furious. I moved our car and saw that there was no damage, but before doing so, I took a few photos. So not only did this yutz hit our car, he also illegally parked (he was within 3 feet of a sidewalk ramp for disabled persons).

I would have loved to have seen a police officer around as I would have reported him so he would have gotten a ticket. There usually is never a police officer around when you need one; however, when we were driving there, we saw a man cross a busy intersection (on foot) against a red light. There is a cop right in front of us that saw this and then stopped the man after he crossed the intersection. Wow, I never see cops do stuff like that!

It is probably in bad taste for me to publish pictures of the person’s license plate that hit our car, but I’ll do it anyway. The driver was from Florida (likely military judging by the DOD sticker on his windshield). In addition, there was a carseat in the car; what does this teach your children if you do something illegally (parking) and something wrong (hitting our car without leaving a note).

Today I saw an ad for a 1/4 ton folding chair. My take on this is that the chair holds up to 1/4 ton; the chair also looked a bit wider. Frankly, a chair that holds 500 pounds (presumably 1 person) is just gross. I understand that there is a market for it, but do I have to see it?

Several months ago, a friend told me that a little known fact is that most residential faucets come with a lifetime warranty (OK, maybe not little known, but until I started ReceiptWallet, I could never find manuals/warranties). I put in our kitchen faucet when we moved in about 4 years ago. I noticed that it was chipping and it annoyed me. So I took pictures (my friend said that Delta faucet would accept digital pictures instead of sending the whole thing back) and Delta sent me replacement parts. Yeah! I probably would have eventually bought a new faucet as I would have expected them to want it back, so I saved myself a bunch of money.

While it was great that they sent me the parts (not a new faucet), taking apart the old faucet and putting in the new parts took me almost 2 hours and a lot of effort. I don’t expect that most people would take advantage of the warranty for this reason alone. With a lifetime warranty, I’d expect the faucet’s finish to last more than 4 years. I’m sure I’ll be asking for more replacement parts in the future. Now that I know how to disassemble it, it shouldn’t be all that difficult.

I like listening to music as silence is sometimes unnerving; I listen to music in the car and most of the time when I work. However, I’m not a music connoisseur and haven’t been to many concerts in my life. The few concerts I have been to, I really haven’t enjoyed because the music is usually too loud and distorted and the artists are just not as polished as when in the studio. Last night, Apple surprised us by having the Barenaked Ladies at the WWDC bash. I have one of their CDs and we recently bought their kid’s CD. I must say that the concert was excellent; I was able to understand the words, the music was good, and they were pretty funny when telling some jokes. It was a very welcome surprise. All I had with my was an iPhone, so my pictures aren’t very good, but here is one anyway.

I sat down in a session today and the person next to me was eating raw carrots. She (yes there are a handful of women here) kept crunching and crunching. I moved seats, but it was still annoying. Do people lack common courtesy or do they not realize the are disturbing my peace?

In another session, the guy next to me started cracking his knuckles. If I smacked him, would he have stopped? Why should I have to tell people to be kind? I can handle typing at the conference because there is enough other noise to mask it; however, the knuckle cracking and the carrots are just plain annoying. I guess many of these people don’t get out much and don’t need to be courteous to others.

In my last session of the day, the lady next to me took off her shoe and started cracking her toes. To top it off, she banged on her keyboard at 100 miles per hour; the keyboards on the MacBooks are really annoying when people type fast. I could live with that (sort of), but cracking her toes almost put me over the edge.