planet snewpy rant

How Is AT&T Still In Business?

2011-06-18 17:21:57 -

I just had another horrible experience with AT&T customer support, and I know I'm not alone. They have to be one of the most hated companies on earth for this reason. I just tried logging into their website to make changes to an account and since I do this so seldom, I could not remember my password. Against my better judgment, I attempted to reset my password online -- to avoid having to call them, which is an even more painful experience. Twenty-five minutes later, after struggling with the user interface of their site, I get to the point where I click a button to have a temporary password sent to me so I can login. Upon clicking said button, I get a message informing me that the "My AT&T" site is down temporarily for maintenance. It's tragically comic. Or comically tragic. I can't decide which. But I do know that if I had another option available to me for DSL service, I would no longer be an AT&T customer. But since they are a monopoly, I'm stuck complaining about their crappy service to you, my dear reader. Thank you for listening.

I Am The Lorax

2011-06-11 20:38:10 -

I am not a fan of Ameren. Ever since I spent seven days without electricity in the throes of a St. Louis summer, there is very little that company can do to find favor with me. I'm sure I'm not alone. That incident in July 2006, where a half million residents lost power for days following some severe storms, actually gave Ameren enough of a black eye that they started to at least pretend that they cared about their customers. In response to the public outcry, Ameren launched an initiative to make their service more reliable. What they actually launched was a War on Trees.

I Speak For The Trees

2011-06-12 20:48:23 -

After meeting with the contractor that Ameren dispatched to walk my property line and mark trees, he invited me to walk the line with him. I was glad I did. Not only did this give me an opportunity to recalibrate his understanding of easements, but it gave him a chance to come clean and admit that he had already marked a half dozen of my trees with orange spray paint -- designating them for removal! These trees were nowhere near the easement, but he said that they look for trees that will become a problem in the next few years and remove them as a preventative measure. He was very reasonable, and agreed to cover up the paint so that Nelson Tree Service would not touch them. (If it were only that easy!)

Hey Airline Industry!

2010-08-19 06:09:48 -

Recent surveys have indicated that the airlines are getting worse instead of better when it comes to customer satisfaction, one of the key areas being on-time arrivals. Now it doesn't take a genius to realize that arriving on time is heavily dependent on departing on time, so it follows that anything an airline can do to reduce the amount of time a plane sits at the gate will serve to improve this valuable metric. And yet, the airlines continue to make decisions that will most likely have the opposite effect.

Bye Bye DirecTV!

2010-06-03 17:05:45 -

Earlier this year, I documented my Home Theater PC project. My primary motivation for this endeavor was to find a viable alternative, preferably less expensive, to my subscription to DirecTV. I had been a customer of theirs for over 10 years, and in that time I watched my monthly fee creep from $29.95 all the way up to $59 -- almost double! And what did I get for my money? Not a damn thing. I still had the same satellite decoder (circa 1999), with no DVR, and no High Definition content. Their latest rate increase that took effect at the beginning of the year was the proverbial last straw.

Missourah

2010-06-15 16:22:20 -

This is addressed to those who routinely mispronounce the name of my home state. Some of you, inexplicably, are from this state and you still don't know how to pronounce it. Since you somehow managed to escape any proper instruction in its pronunciation, allow me to enlighten you. It is pronounced Mizz-oo-ree. Please note that the word ends in the letter 'i' and not 'ah.' Would you care to explain why Missouri gets special treatment? I've never once heard anyone say "Miss-iss-ipp-ah." Or talk about how they had spaghett-ah for dinner. So what exactly is your problem, anyway?

The Big Box Office Bamboozle

2010-01-08 17:00:15 -

It looks like my prediction about Avatar is on track to come true, but the box office reports today reminded me just how pointless box office reports are. I already know the answer to this question, but why do these reports still use dollars instead of gross tickets sold? Hey James Cameron! Since you're trying to revolutionize the movie industry with your work, how about doing something really revolutionary -- how about you demand that your box office receipts be reported in numbers that actually mean something? Because, if you look at Titanic's box office take, it's based on the cost of tickets in 1997 (about $4.50). Tickets on average today are about twice that much, so when Avatar's take exceeds that, it'll be on half as many tickets. On the other hand, Titanic sold about 95 million tickets in 1997. That number still has meaning today. For example, the original Star Wars in 1977 sold over 160 million tickets in total. So if bragging rights are going to mean anything at all, everyone needs to be using the same standard of measure. Otherwise, just stop bombarding us with meaningless numbers!