January 2007 Archives

There are a bunch of spoofs of the PC vs. Mac commercials over at youtube. Here's one of the ones that is pretty funny. There are a bunch of others over there as well.

Technorati : Mac, PC, Youtube

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Someone from Verizon called me back first thing this morning as I figured they would. Any charges are being taken care of and they apologized. She did make sure to tell me that I should have suspended the phone immediately the same day that it was stolen, and she is right but they should have taken care of me the first time they were asked, and not tried to get my wife to purchase something utterly useless and then blow me off when I complained about it.

At least all that is settled. All that is left to do is for my wife to call the coach at the other school and let them know they have a damn thief on their wrestling team.

I hate dealing with Customer No-Service and once I have dealt with them once with no satisfaction, I feel like it is time to do what I did and email everyone else in the damn company that CAN fix the problem.

Technorati : Customer NoService, Verizon Wireless

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I found the email address for the Georgia/Alabama press contact and sent this email to her, as well as the last one. Persistence pays off and I have gotten myself worked up to where I am pretty pissed off now:

If you have an email address where I may get in touch with someone who will take care of my issue, I would appreciate it. I found all of your addresses via the contact page as there is nowhere else that I seem to be able to get in touch with anyone. Your Consumer Advocacy page only allows for 700 characters in the complaint, which is nowhere near enough.

I am also cross posting any emails that I send or receive via my blog. Thank you for your help,

Richard Miles

Technorati : Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless

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Updated at 9:58pm. I managed to find some contacts. Thanks to the help of Google, I managed to find several media contacts on their news center. I emailed the letter below to Robert.Kelley@VerizonWireless.com; Thomas.Pica@VerizonWireless.com; Sheldon.Jones@VerizonWireless.com; caran.smith@verizonwireless.com; Carolyn.Culbertson@verizonwireless.com and Nancy.Stark@verizonwireless.com. Hopefully someone will respond by tomorrow evening, otherwise I will start hounding the BBB and some of the local news channels with their pain in the ass Consumer Advocacy Alert Teams, or whatever the hell they are called now.

Originally posted on 1-21-2007 at 9:14PM

I have attempted to contact Verizon. I did find one link to email the Customer Advocacy department, but it won't let you send a fucking message over 700 characters. I am looking for email addresses to any of their VP's or Presidents, particularly in the marketing or communications departments if any of you guys know them. Contacting customer non-service is fucking useless, I am tired of dealing with them. Perhaps someone with the company that would not like bad press would be willing to take care of my problem.

Here is the body of the email that I have been trying to send this evening, edited for content that you guys don't need. More in the extended entry.

On Saturday, January 13^th, my son's mobile phone was stolen from him at a wrestling tournament. His mobile number is EDITED and he is on my Family Choice plan. I called it a couple of times, the first time someone answered and then hung up. After that they just let it roll to voice mail. For a couple of days they must have had it turned off as it would roll straight to voice mail without ringing.

We tried several times to call whoever it was, and last night Saturday January 20^th I had a friend who is NOT in my son's contact list call. They answered and hung up after briefly speaking with my friend, and then called back. After getting no information from them they hung up and called back from another number EDITED, also a Verizon number apparently registered in Newnan Georgia. They also hung up on my friend after they figured out what we were after. I called this new number and threatened them with legal action if the phone was not returned to me immediately. They said OK and then hung up. After a few minutes they called me back and gave me a story about a neighbor having the phone, and they didn't want to have anything to do with it. When I told them that they would be considered accessories to theft they agreed to get the phone and return it to me today.

My brother and I drove to Carrollton around noon along with my youngest and my son. I finally managed to get in touch with the guy who had the cell phone, apparently he was in church in Newnan, which is about 40 minutes from there. We agreed to meet at 5PM this evening in Carrollton to get my cell phone back. In the meantime, we decided to stop and eat lunch at the Mellow Mushroom. The owner is a friend of mine and a former regular customer (only former because I am at a new store, not because I ran him off) then we paid a visit to the Verizon Wireless store in Carrollton, which is a corporate store.

I explained what had happened with his phone being stolen. There were a couple hundred text messages which had been sent and then deleted, and a few phone calls, one being long distance. I also explained that the Verizon Reseller in Villa Rica had suggested insurance fraud to get him a new phone cheaper and talked my wife into adding insurance on his phone. This woman's answer was "You can't add insurance, this has to be done within 15 days of purchase". Excuse the fuck out of me, but I have the printout where the reseller removed the "insurance declined" on his phone.

Her answer to the text messages and any charges was that I needed to speak to "customer service" and that she couldn't help me. I guess she must be the highly paid door greeter since obviously she has no customer service.

As far as me telling her that the Villa Rica reseller is not only condoning insurance fraud, but suggesting it to customers, her answer was "They are an authorized Verizon dealer". Now what the fuck does that have to do with anything? Bitch. Thanks for the help. The lack of interest and the fact that she obviously doesn't give a shit about her company makes me want to dump them and find another carrier. If I could do so without incurring a shitload of penalties I would do it tomorrow.

Since that is not an option, I have some research to do. I will do the same thing that I did with Blockbuster a couple of years ago, and email the crap out of all of the division presidents and anyone else in the marketing department that wants to hear it, demand that I not get charged for anything that happened on his phone over the last week, and that they let him re-download the ringers that were deleted, otherwise I will start hammering on the better business bureau and anyone else that will listen on the Internet. Asshats. The more I think about their reaction, the more pissed off that I get. Obviously this is not a company as a whole, or even representative of most of them, but the attitude of "don't give a shit seems to permeate companies as they get bigger and don't have to worry about one customer that pays $180/month in phone bills. That's a drop in the bucket for them I guess.

Technorati : Cell Phones, Customer Service, Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless, WZW
Del.icio.us : Cell Phones, Customer Service, Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless, WZW
Ice Rocket : Cell Phones, Customer Service, Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless, WZW
Buzznet : Cell Phones, Customer Service, Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless, WZW
Riya : Cell Phones, Customer Service, Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless, WZW
43 Things : Cell Phones, Customer Service, Insurance Fraud, Verizon Wireless, WZW

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I saw this over at youtube last night or this morning, and my brother sent me the link as well, so I decided to share. Pretty damned funny

Technorati : apple, conan, iphone, youtube

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I finally got my headphones to work with the music player on my phone. Sweet. It's not an iPhone, but it's a damn site cheaper, and available NOW.

Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue

Zombies - Time of the Season

Pixies - Planet of Sound

...are what I have heard. It's nice because the girls are playing Mario Party and I am trying to block out the sound.

I can't get my damn DV camera to work with Vista now. Creative just released new drivers for the Audigy a couple of days ago, I am installing them now as I think the other ones timed out a few days ago. I think that is all that I need right now.

Technorati : Audigy, LG VX8100, MP3, Music, Soundblaster, Verizon, Windows Vista

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Damn, check out this aquarium. That thing is huge. Now if it connected with my computer and cooled it, that would just kick ass. Plenty more pics at the link.

Update - I posted a link to a pretty cool pic, but I guess they don't want it using their bandwidth (understandable) so just go click the damn link and check out that monster.

Technorati : Aquariums, Fish

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Oh man, this thing is so cool. I found a video of the music interface over at youtube. This is what Christopher wants for his 18th birthday. NOT likely at $499, particularly considering that it's not even available from my provider not to mention the fact that the cool web browsing stuff won't even be available out her in eastbumblefuck Georgia. Here it is anyway.

Technorati : Apple, Cell Phones, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, video, youtube

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Holy CRAP. I think I have changed my mind about wanting to get a Palm Treo. THIS is what I want now. The new Apple iPhone. Too bad they aren't releasing it via Verizon. Only Cingular. I might even be willing to change providers for that.

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Email, Web, Phone, and an iPod. Damn I have a serious case of tech envy right now. Guess it's better than penis envy.

Technorati : Apple, Cell Phones, iPhone, iPod

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I am currently testing Norton Antivirus 2007 beta for Windows Vista. Up until I started running Vista I used Mcafee Viruscan, mainly because it is free as a paid AOL user. Not that I run their software much, but I do keep it for my Grandmother's use as it is her only Internet access. Mcafee, or at least the version that AOL uses, is not compatible with Windows Vista, so I started looking at different AV products awhile back. The main thing for me is that I needed it to be non-intrusive. The only thing I want it to do is catch viruses. I don't need all of that other security crap. Either it is built in to Windows, or I use other products that I like better.

I haven't had any problems with the beta version I am running (it's been installed for about a week now), so as long as it stays that way I will stick with it. I like Norton 2007, and as soon as this trial beta version times out I will most likely purchase it from these guys. I checked the prices against what Norton charges in their online store, and they are comparable.

This is (hopefully) a paid advertisement.

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Damned if someone that has me in their address book must have a virus. I am getting spammed with about 100 emails a day with virus attachments. I haven't bothered to deeply check into it, they are all getting delivered to my domain under different email addresses that don't exist, and of course forwarded to me as administrator. Not that spam is anything new, this just seems to be the trend lately.

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I have updated some of my old posts from 2000. This aren't really going to be of interest to anybody (including myself). I was going through some old backups, and came across some of my net backups. Back in '99 and 2000 I hosted my web site in my living room. Talk about co-locating. Most of the stuff from that point in time was strictly about skinning and desktop customization. This is my "current" desktop screenshot from that time.

It was actually pretty cool. I was trying to find a particular skin that I had ported over to Windows from Enlightenment (Linux X11 window manager). I never did find it, but as usual, found a bunch of other stuff to keep me entertained for a while.

Technorati : Litestep, Skinning, Windowblinds
Del.icio.us : Litestep, Skinning, Windowblinds

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