Gripes

Karen and I have been doing a little traveling lately.  We'll go out for a day trip or for a couple of days and explore.  Right now she is accompanying me on a business trip through Tennessee and Alabama.

When you're out for this length of time, you will eventually need to use a public rest room.  Just about every time, I'll think the restroom is in pretty good shape but Karen will describe some kind of a disaster in the ladies room.  Unflushed toilets, empty toilet paper rolls and seat cover dispensers, unclean conditions, etc.

Are the ladies rooms really that much worse than the mens rooms?  Are ladies bigger slobs than men, at least away from home?  Or do men just not care as much how clean the restroom is?

If you buy something on a plan that says you can avoid finance charges if you pay off the bill in a limited amount of time, make sure you are aware of exactly what that date is and make sure you're paid up on time. In my experience, large banks are generally unwilling to bend their policies. The bigger the bank the more inhuman and inflexible they are. The company you're buying from will probably not support you at all if there are any issues with the bank.

We just got hit with an $80 bill for deferred finances from HSBC for a purchase at Musician's Friend. My wife thought she could pay up until March 26 (the payment due date on the bill) but the actual expiration of the offer was on March 14 (noted in a different place on the statement). She arranged for the electronic transfer to take place on the March 17. HSBC will not forgive the mistake and Musician's Friend refuses to get involved. One more bank I'll be avoiding and time to start looking for other discount music outlets.

The letter I just sent off to Musician's Friend is after the break.

Update April 10, 1:35pm: Well, it seems that some companies do care about customer relations.  My wife just called to tell me that someone from Musician's Friend called to say that the customer support rep I dealt with should have escalated the call.  They will be dealing with the finance charge from HSBC on my three day overdue payment.  Thanks, Musician's Friend, and I look forward to doing business with you again.

Doesn't anyone care about customer satisfaction anymore? Just a couple of weeks ago, we had an issue with Dish TV customer service. Now it's Cingular's turn.

We recently had some problems with our Dish TV setup. Several channels refused to come in claiming satellite signal loss. Some were totally out and some would come back at certain times of the day. I called Dish TV's customer service number and someone talked me through running some diagnostics on the system. They couldn't figure out what was failing so they said a technician would have to come to the house.

They checked for an available technician but said it would take them 12 days to get someone out to the house. This put it just before my wife and I were going away for a week to Maine.

One of my daughters is apparently addicted to text messaging. It's about all she does on the computer. When she got a cell phone, it had IM capabilities so she took advantage of it. It costs her quite a bit of money. Her plan includes several hundred messages and she still goes over each month at a cost of $.10/message sent. In many cases, she ends up having what appear to be long conversations by text messaging. It would have been cheaper to have just called the other person and spoken with them.

Her older sister also goes over her plan's limits on text messaging occassionally and it looks like the same thing in a lot of cases. Instead of calling and talking, she sends text messages back and forth with one of her friends. I wish I had some of the money they're wasting on this. I'd get a few lunches out of it each month.

In any case, it looks like this problem may be as old as electronic communications itself.

I was rewiring some speaker cabinets today. These are large speakers that we use with 9 Feet Tall and at the Joy Underground. Some of the internal connections were made with crimp-on connectors and they were constantly cutting out so I figured I'd replace the cheap wire inside with some decent wire and solder the connections.

Each cabinet has two jacks on the back. One goes to the woofer and the other goes to the horn and tweeters. Since we don't have an external crossover, we normally jumper them together outside the cabinet so that one feed will drive all of the speakers. On occassion, we can't locate the connectors we use for this purpose and end up jury-rigging something to get the cabinet to work. I figured while I was rewiring everything, I'd take care of this problem internally instead. If I put a switched jack in place of the horn/tweeter jack, we could drive the whole cabinet off one jack or use separate feeds if we buy a crossover.

I set out for Radio Shack to get a couple of switched 1/4" mono jack. I don't see them. One of the salesmen comes by and offers to help. I describe what I need. He can't find them either. He walks off to a PC and accesses their online catalog. He can't find them there either. There are plenty of 1/4" jacks listed but none are switched.

What is Radio Shack's reason for existence if not to carry such basic parts? I can remember going to Radio Shack to buy resistors, TTL chips, and other electronic components. It seems like they no longer want to sell this kind of stuff. They'd rather sell remote control cars, PC accessories, and cell phones. The closest place I know of to buy this kind of stuff is about 15 miles away.