This is effing ridiculous.  A class action lawsuit waiting to happen.  If anyone knows an attorney, I’d be willing to talk to them and split the winnings with you.

So I get contacts earlier this spring, and each of the 4 boxes come with a $10 mail in rebate for CooperVision.  So i send in the UPC box tops and after like 3 months, i get this stupid visa debit card in the mail.  WTF is this crap?  Where’s my $40 check??

So here’s the deal with this thing.  It’s like a credit card with a $40 limit.  If I want to buy something that costs more than $40 – I’m screwed because it won’t accept the charge.  I’d have to be able to tell the cashier, “Take $40 from this card, then the rest on this other one.”  That’s hassle.  Coopervision has an anti-marketing campaign here because their name is tied to all of this frustration.

The trap doesn’t stop there.  As if that wasn’t making it hard enough for you to spend, you have 6 months to use the card, or you get assessed a $3 “monthly maintenance fee”.  WTF.  I want to [do very violent things].  This thing has a time limit?  That makes me feel like I’m really just borrowing money from Coopervision, and if I don’t burn it all before they remember they lent it to me, they’re going to take it back.

Keep in mind, since it’s a credit card, If I spend $35.32, I have to do the math in my head to know what is left on the card.  Then I have to remember how much is on the card for the next time I use it.  The closer I get to $40.00 without approaching it EXACTLY, the less likely I am able to actually use the full value of the rebate.

Whatever.  I can use this thing in 6 months.  I’ll just take Kallie out for a nice dinner, split the check, and it’ll be nice.  So here we are, at a swanky restaurant in Chicago, and I explain to the waiter what I need him to do.  He comes back and says, “Sorry, this card was rejected for $40.”  I’m livid.  WTF.  I tell him to try $39.99 maybe???  It dawns on me that perhaps I have had it for 6 months and they pegged me with the maintenance fee.  Anyway, after a second time, and much embarrassment, he says that it accepted $30 and he put the rest on my other card.  I apologize, and thank him for his patience.

So I go home and log into the webpage account for this card to figure out what the crap is going on here.  Here’s my statement.  Can you decypher why it didn’t let $40 through????  WHAT THE EFF is that $36????

I’m so sick of this card, I just gave it to Kallie and said, “Buy something.  NOW.  GET RID OF THIS VICIOUS CARD.”  So she gets on half.com and buys a book for $8.99 shipped….WTF IS GOING ON WITH THIS STATEMENT?!?!?!  DIE, COOPERVISION.  DIE, PREPAID VISA REBATE CARDS.  You’re effing ridiculous, frustrating, and should be banned before water boarding.

This is just disgusting business tactics to not give money.  They say they’ll give you a rebate, but they make it nearly impossible for you to claim that money.  It’s like a carrot dangling on a string, and I’m about ready put that carrot someplace that CEO won’t appreciate.  Or maybe he would.  I’m throwing down some serious hate here.

Had they just cut me a check, I would have enjoyed the experience, and done business with them again.  Now I don’t trust them, and I want to kill anyone will the last name “Cooper”.

BUYER BEWARE

I hate dress socks.  Why do I have to wear them?

Because that’s what society says is normal and acceptable to be considered “dressed up”?  Not good enough.

Because they’re dark?  How about I got a pair of WHITE dress socks in a variety pack.  WTF???  When would I EVER want to wear white dress socks???

With shoes and pants that fit right, there’s like a 0.01% chance that anyone will even ever see your socks.  Why are they so important?  Some people treat their socks with as much attention as they do their ties.  Who cares?

Dress socks are so thin and they provide no cushioning, especially when you’re wearing uncomfortable dress shoes.

One of the biggest problems I have with dress socks is that they are so tight and, when worn correctly, they stretch up on your shin, restricting circulation and airflow so my feet get super sweaty and anxious for freedom.

I walk about 1.2 miles to work and then a big hill back home in the afternoon.  That blows.  When I step in the door, one of the first things I do is rip that crap off my feet.

White, cotton, ankle socks is where the love is.  comfort, air, easy to put on and take off, easy to bleach and keep brilliant white and they last a long time.  Dress socks get worn out in the heels or toes so quickly.

In high school, I had a friend who loved to wear dress socks.  Even played soccer in them.  Chris Tchinsky.  Maybe I need to ask him what the appeal was…

WTF is up with trash bag sizing?  Why can’t we have standards here?  My whole life, I’ve struggled with the trash bag being too small and falling into the can, and then all the grossness builds up as it falls between the bag and wall and to the bottom of the can.  Either that, or the bag is too big and you end up either filling over the capacity of the can which causes garbage to topple to the floor or you end up just wasting potential storage capacity of the bag.  It’s ridiculous.

WTF am i missing here? I went to dictionary.com, typed in “bousy” and it said it wasn’t a word. Then i googled for “bousy” and it came up with a result on dictionary.com

WTF

Companies that charge you for stupid things should never be trusted.  You are only to embark on agreements with them out of necessity.  If they’re not smart enough to think you’re smart enough to call "B.S." on a "convenience fee" or a "franchise fee" then they do not deserve your business.  The very least they could do would be raise their base price and forgo the entire "nickle and dime" experience and labeling.  If they charge you a first time set up fee to even enter into business with them, they do not care about you and you should consider yourself warned.  As a people, we will never see the standards of customer service raised until we demand it.

Political opinions are like butt holes; Everyone has one and they all stink.  To extend the analogy, they should not be revealed in public places.  To extend it even further, possibly into metaphor, If you are so emotional about your political opinion and it’s all you really think about, perhaps your head is a little too close to previously mentioned nether-region.

You know I don’t do the political rant thing often.  I always have my ear against the door, but barely ever do I walk into that chaos on the other side.  The past week has been too much for me, and I’m falling in.  I’m interested from a banking/economy, a current government side, as well as a presidential campaign perspective.  Honestly, and this will probably be the first time I’ve ever said it, you should be too.  There’s a lot going on right now, and it’s hard to keep a check on all the pulses.

Presidential Campaign – This is the easy one.  John McCain is an idiot.  He’s either too old to multi-task, or he’s too stupid to think clearly.  This dude is obviously not fit to be president.  We already have someone that quits to go relax, do we really need another?  He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and it shows.  Last week he says the economy is still strong.  Saturday a 3 page proposal is released to congress to review as a solution for the financial crisis.  Monday, McCain says stuff is going to hit the fan.  Tuesday, Mccain says he hasn’t read the 3 page document yet.  Wednesday, he cancels his appearance on Letterman and says that he wants to postpone the debate and his campaign so he can focus on fixing the crisis.  Ego trip much?   He ends up staying in New York until Thursday anyway, and manages to fit in a stop to Katie Couric.  By the time he’s in DC, an approved solution is already announced.  Worthless.  Even Senator Charles Schumer has said Bush needs to, ""respectfully tell Sen. McCain to get out of town. He is not helping, he is harming. Before Sen. McCain made his announcement, we were making progress."  This dude is a train wreck, and he’s not even in office.  Let alone the circus around Palin.  He obviously picked her for her shock value.  She’s been completely absent since.  Worthless.  Smoke & mirrors.  Sham.

Current Government - We’re starting to see the true colors of what goes on in our nation’s capital.  These people have no accountability, and they slack off their whole careers, and when it comes time to get your crap together and do something, they don’t know how to work together.  Henry Paulson apparently begged on 1 knee to the democrats not to tell the presses how bad the meetings went.  Bush is actually doing something it seems, at least trying to get everyone to work together and encouraging discussion.  What we have though are people from 2 different sides of the fence.  You have people with big business and money backgrounds (who, in my opinion should not be allowed to be in politics) like Henry Paulson, and then you have people that have pure legislative backgrounds who know nothing about the market crisis, or how to appropriately manage it.  You know this $700 billion number that’s been tossed around?  Ask someone where they came up with that number.  A Treasury spokeswoman says:

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

OMG.  Are we serious???  We have no idea what we’re dealing with here.  Enter malfeasance probe.  We’re actually going back to the businesses that are in trouble and looking for fraud.  That won’t take long.

Back on track to progressive thinking though, is this really what we want to do?  These companies knew their loans were risky, but they went in anyway.  Preying on poor people to meet their self-serving pockets.  If the government buys all these loans, it doesn’t just end there either.  Now we’re looking at the government serving a role it’s never had.  It actually has potential to MAKE money in this deal…but is this a good thing?!?!  It’s like a whole form of backdoor taxation that I do not approve of.  If you need me to spell it out for you, the government will pay, we’ll say, 1 trillion, for debts that are worth more than 2.2 trillion fully matured.  Do we really want our government acting for a profit?  That money is coming from home owners and normal people.  That brings a whole new level of shadiness and potential for cover ups that I’m not comfortable with.

Economy/business – Cluster ****.  That’s pretty accurate.  Already in the shadows is the fact that we’re letting Morgan Stanley & Goldman Sachs change their status from investment banks to bank holding companies.  While I don’t disagree with this solution, it’s scary.  By changing their status, they become regulated by the Federal Reserve, but they also have more access to borrow more money.  These are the last and largest investment banks and brings them into the 4th and 6th largest bank holding companies.  I’m worried about their practices, or their problems, becoming contagious and bringing down the bank holding or asset management areas of banking.  By association alone, the market is cracking.  BNY Mellon has very limited exposure to any of the bad debt that is in the news, but our stock, with everyone else, is falling.  We’re even throwing $425 million to help out Lehman’s crash because they’re stock is falling below $1/share.  We’ve got Wamu going under and being bought out so that they don’t deplete FIDC funds.  That’s nuts!  We’re going to be left with a dozen or so big banks.  It’s like a survival of the fittest scenario, only with a global scale economy.  If these companies get the bailout they’re after from the government, no one pays but the American people.  Some heads need to roll for sure, and they better have CEO next to their names.

I’m starting to hear about a new government plan now to insure the debts instead of just buying their out right.  That might be a little better.  This has been something on Barack’s campaign since day one.  I think that about sums everything up. 

I’m not writing a paper here, so i don’t care to cite anything, but I’ll give you a few links and tell you to watch the Colbert Report, the Daily show, and CNN.  I’m curious to see what NPR has to say too.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08270/915335-68.stm?cmpid=generalbusiness.xml

http://video.newsweek.com/#?c=40211&l=1785302026&t=1818133680

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122230704116773989.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Raines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08268/914648-100.stm

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/09/23/bailout-paulson-congress-biz-beltway-cx_jz_bw_0923bailout.html

http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlando/othercities/atlanta/stories/2008/09/22/daily4.html

Every time i look at my $75 a month cable bill, I wonder why I pay it.  I was so happy without cable, and if I lived alone, there would be no cable.  I don’t understand why I have to pay so much money for something that gives me commercials.  This opens another topic about why the television was created and marketed the way it was, which really has some interesting literature and documentaries apropos, but this rant is not about that.  It’s just about my recent encounter with comcast.

So I’ve been a comcast customer for over 6 years now in one form or another.  full blown digital subscriber, just basic tv, then to the standard package where I sit now.  All the time, I’ve been enrolled in automatic bill payments with no paper bills mailed to me.  Bliss.  It’s a never changing bill, so i don’t need to look at it, i just expect that much to taken out each month.  So for years this goes on fine.  Back in december, I logged in to change my credit card information.  Still, all works fine, until May, apparently.  In June, I get a "past due" notice in the mail.  WTF?  So i call the number and try to see what’s up.  The representative was utterly useless.  She kept stating the obvious, "No payment was made in May."  And I say, "umm…I know, otherwise I wouldn’t have received a past due notice.  What I need you to do is fix it so it doesn’t happen again."  It’s absolutely ridiculous how inept this person is, and coming from a helpdesk background, I know how things should go here, and this is terrible.  So I ask her to take off the late fee, and she says she doesn’t have the ability to do that.  She doesn’t seem to have the ability to do anything I need her to do, so I ask to speak to her manager, or at least someone with the access to remove late fees.  She says only supervisors can, and they can call me back within a 24 hour period.  So it’s going to be one of those deals, aye?  Whatever.  I leave instructions to call my cell phone and not my home number.

So I log into comcast’s website, and I see that my credit card information shows a credit card that expired in 2006.  WTF?  That’s not my fault.  To me, sounds like someone had a system crash and reverted to a backup with old information.  The last time I changed my info was in december, and it’s been working since then.  I update the information and wait for my call back to get that late fee removed.

Of course, it never comes.  I’m livid.  I do automatic bill payment so i don’t have to deal with crap, now they’re making me take time out of my day to deal with crap that is their fault.  I call them back today, and get some lady who again has this crazy knack for saying things that are utterly useless.  I say that my information was reverted to old information, and I didn’t do anything, so something changed on their end.  She said she doesn’t even have the access to do that, as if I meant SHE did it.  She’s totally defensive at anything I’m saying, and I can see that I will never get retribution for my time wasted with these people.  She was able to remove the late fee pretty easily.  She says that they did try to call me, but they used my home number even though I had left instructions not to use that number.  She said that she could have someone call me back within 24 hours so that I can ask a supervisor why my payments didn’t go through, but honestly, I don’t feel like investing my time, nay, my VACATION, in finding and fixing the flaws in their system.  This is what helpdesk tickets are for.  I open a problem ticket, you fix it.  Don’t call me back until it’s fixed.

So all to appropriately, I don’t expect any calls from Comcast any time soon.

you’d think I’d have something to say…something to rant about…after a week of nothing notable being posted, surely I’d have some storehouse full of interesting thoughts or ideas…surely something would have happened in a week that I could share with you…but I’m at a loss.  I’ve been too busy with work and life to have time to sit down and think.  I’ve been defaulting to my lack of motivation home life where I veg and stare lifelessly at the television watching america’s next top model walk by.  I think if i took a vacation at this point, that’d be all I’d do anyway.  Vacations need to be timed just right for me or they’re wasted.  I just got to keep my head above the water until my head gets straight enough to see what needs to get done and then I’ll get it done.  weeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

So i already have mentioned on how a color could look like another color to someone else, and we would never really know. but i have just been thinking about all the problems i have with colors recently. first off the difference between pigments and light. the primary colors in light are red, blue, and green, while in pigments, it’s red, blue, and yellow. what the crap is up with that? i thought yellow and blue made green. with light, if you put all the colors together, you get white. with pigments, if you put all the colors together, you get an ugly brown, sometimes black. why are these different? why aren’t colors consistant through medium?

the polar extremes in light is darkness (which is assumed to be the absense of light) and light itself. with pigments, black and white are the polar extremes, and white is assumed as the absense of any other color. that bugs me. white is a color, right? i could argue it both ways. if you want to turn a pair of red socks white, throw in some bleach, and it will take the color out, leaving the the absense of color; namely, white. So perhaps white is not a color at all. That would explain why you can’t buy white dye. you can buy dye of all colors at your local walmart to throw into your laundry machine and dye stuff any array of colors, except white. that would just be too useful to recover mistakes of the misplaced red sock or chapstick in the washer. this argument reminds me of polar bear fur actually being clear, not white. but that really isn’t a problem with colors themselves, just with people misrepresenting the truth over and over without questioning its factuality; another problem altogether.

Ofcourse white is a color though. We have white out, we have snow, we have cocaine. These things are white! not the absense of any other color. there are degrees of white too. Mother of pearl comes to mind.

Which leads me to my other rant on colors. Nomenclature. I don’t trust colors because you never know what color you are talking about. the world was not created with a 12 pack of crayolas. With all the standardization codes out there for everything, you think colors would be something that would be standardized. computer code is the only semblance of order to the multitude of colors. with the hexidecimal representation of colors, 16,777,216 (16x16x16x16x16x16 combination) colors are defined by code, but not by name. Even then, colors can be manipulated and ruined by browsers, monitors, and people’s own eyes. which leads me to believe that color is a matter of personal opinion and biological interpretation. Think about that next time you are at a red light.