As an occasional rock vocalist with a horrible singing technique, I often find surrounded by Halls Cough Drops fairly often. I know it's no substitute for proper training, but you can catch more flies with honey than you can with voice lessons, a wise person never said. Here's something I recently discovered on the website of my favorite honey flavored Cough Droppy Drops...
Honey-Berry Sugar Free Halls Active Ingredient: Menthol 2.5 mg Inactive Ingredients: acesulfame potassium, aspartame, beta carotene, FD&C blue 1, FD&C red 40, flavors, isomalt, soy lecithin, water
That's right... the ingredients for Sugar Free Halls don't actually list honey (they also don't list lemon or any berry either, but that's for someone else to complain about). It's not just an oversight on the website because I looked on the packages too. No honey anywhere except in the name and picture on the front. It's possible that a "honey flavor" is contained in the "flavors" listing. I don't know for sure, I haven't written a letter yet.
I am not upset because there are plenty of Halls alternatives that still do contain honey. I tend to choose sugar-free items over regular ones when given the option, but my desire for honey in this case is even greater than my desire to avoid a dozen or so calories. Yes, I know that honey is mostly made of sugars and "sugar-free" is obviously not, but I never put that all together until I flipped the bag over and really looked at the package. I don't believe that I'm the only person on Earth to fall for it though. To minimize future confusion, I think Halls should redesign the package with a picture of sodium carboxymethylcellulose dripping off a wooden stick.
I've been busy losing a war on technology and have had little energy left to actually type anything into this decaying white box.
The most exhausting series of events over the past few weeks have involved Verizon and my "new" LG Dare mobile phone. Since I have told this story seventeen hundred thousand fucking times (and each time the preamble statistics have grown exponentially), I may as well make a digital record of it. Here goes. Let's try to do this chronomotographicogistically.
2002. I become a Verizon customer.
2002-2008. I remain a loyal Verizon customer and never have any service complaints. At some point I stop using Motorola phones because I had too many charging input issues. I switch to LG and never have a single problem with their phones. Nov. 2008. I have had an LG 8300 over two years and it shows no signs of aging, other than some cosmetic wear. As part of Verizon's New Every Twoprogram, I am eligible for a free or discounted new phone with the two year extension of my contract, but opt not to take advantage of it.
Dec. 2008. I thought I lost my phone, but it was just a false alarm. It is still enough of a wake-up call to make me think a little more seriously about getting another phone as a backup, just in case I ever do lose or break the 8300.
After some intense research and a hands-on demo, I finally decide on a touchscreen phone called the LG Dare. I find the phone on Verizon's website, select the discounted rate with two-year activation, and pay the remaining fee with my debit card.
Amazingly, the phone arrives on my desk the next morning. I open it up and charge it. I play with it for a few minutes, but am too busy to give it much attention. It is the holiday season, and I have a lot of end-of-year work to finish, and I'm also in the process of moving to a new apartment. Simply put, I don't have the time to learn how to use a new phone. I put it back in its box and pack it away.
March 26, 2009 - I get a message from Verizon about a past due payment. I open up my paper bill and discover a $330 equipment charge assessed to me a month earlier. I call up customer service and explain the situation. Apparently, if you acquire a phone via the New Every Two program, you are required to activate your new mobile phone within 10 days, or Verizon will charge you full price for it. They assume that you have sold the phone on Ebay, or worse, activated it on a different carrier. My options at this point:
Pay the $330 equipment charge and continue using the 8300 for as long as I want
Return the new phone and pay a $35 "restocking fee"
Activate the Dare in person at a Verizon Wireless Store (because the original activation code has expired). The store may decide to wave the $35 activation fee because of my circumstances.
March 27 - I pay the monthly charges for February and March on my bill, leaving exactly $330 as the remaining balance.
March 28 - I go to the Verizon Wireless Store at Union Square in Manhattan. A salesman quickly swoops in and asks how I can be assisted. I start explaining my situation and he immediately cuts me off and shuffles me over a sign-in kiosk. I enter my name and get into the service queue. The customer service folks call a name and no one responds. They call the several times, then ask me if I am that person. "No," I say. They decide it's now my turn anyway.
I tell my story again and the person behind the counter tells me that I've probably been charged because I did not return my broken phone when I received my replacement phone. She clearly wasn't paying any attention to my storytelling. I tell her she's got it wrong and attempt to explain again. She then picks up the phone and calls Verizon Customer Service. Yes, the Verizon Customer Service Rep I'm speaking to in person is calling Verizon Customer Service on the phone for assistance. She quickly gives up in trying to explain my situation to the rep on the phone (because she never had a grasp of it in the first place) and then hands the phone to me. The rep on the phone tells me that the problem is not so much that I didn't activate the new phone, but that I did not activate the new two-year contract to receive the discounted price. I assumed that simply purchasing the phone at the discounted two-year contract price was enough to take of that, but I guess I was wrong.
At this point, I am now transferred to another on-site service rep who is better equipped to take care of this mess for me. The rep on the phone and myself both shift over to a new booth. They talk on the phone for a few minutes and it seems everything is now honky dory. They hang up. The on-site rep informs me that I don't even need to activate the new phone at this time if I don't want to. I would rather just get everything wrapped up right there and then, so I go through the activation process. I also get my information transferred over from the old phone to the new phone (another reason I had been holding off putting the new phone to work for so long). They offer to transfer over my pictures and videos as well, but that will require an SD card. Fine, I was probably going to buy one anyway. All done. The LG Dare is in my hand, active, and ready to rock.
March 31 - The Verizon Customer Service rep I had spoken to on the phone while at the store follows up and leaves me a message. The equipment charge still not does appear to have been removed.
April 2 - I call up and explain the story to yet another Customer Service rep. They see that the store has activated my phone, but did not process the renewal of the two-year contract. They are going to send me a copy of my contract so I can manually sign it and return to them for processing. I confirm my correct address.
April 6 - The Verizon Billing Department calls me. My phone is scheduled for shut off because of non-payment. I tell her that I'm still waiting for my contract to arrive so that I can sign it and get the equipment charge removed, and I've in fact already paid the entire bill, except for that charge. She confirms the balance (technically, the balance is less than $330 because I've paid the March monthly charge several weeks in advance of its due date) and will "make a note of this."
April 9 - The phone is shut off. I call Verizon Customer Service, furious due to the lack of communication between the Service and Billing Departments and the constant mishandling of my account. As of the 9th, I still had not received the copy of the contract to sign and resend. It turns out it wasn't mailed until the 5th. The 5th was a Sunday, so really it went out on the 6th. The charge will be removed immediately once the contract is signed, but not until then. She explains my options:
Pay the $330 now and get a credit once the contract is straightened out. I refuse this on principle.
Go to a store and sign in person. Unfortunately, I'm at work, and obviously the store thing didn't work the first time.
Sign the contract when it arrives in the mail. Mail it back. Sit with my useless phone up my ass for a week or more.
What about just getting the phone turned back on until the mess is straightened out? That will have to be worked out with the Billing Department. Then bring on the fucking Billing Department. Again.
I'm transferred over to Billing. A woman with a thick Irish accent answers. I tell her that the only reason my account is being held up is due to a equipment charge that is in the process of being removed and that I've already paid all of my regular monthly usage charges.
"There's no equipment charge here," she says.
"Yes, there's a $330 equipment charge because my two year contract needs to be reactivated. I'm still waiting for that contract to arrive by mail."
"There's no record of any equipment charge. I'm looking here in my records and they don't show anything you're talking about."
"How far do your records go back?"
"All the way back to your first bill," she boasts.
"WHY DON'T YOU TRY GOING BACK ONE MONTH THEN?"
She's still being extremely arrogant with me, mumbling while going over the bill, "Usage... Additional Services... Taxes.. Equipment Charge... $330..."
BINGO, YOU D.F.C.!
"I've already explained all of this to the Billing Department a week ago. She said she would make a note of this."
"It says here she escalated this to a supervisor and your exception was denied."
"It was denied?"
"Yes, it was denied."
"Un-fucking-believable. I've had it. Transfer me back to Customer Service."
............
"Customer service, this is SomeDude, and how are you doing today?"
"Not so great, actually."
"Aw, I'm sorry to hear that. Is there something I can do to help?"
"Yes." And then the eight words that I had no reason to ever say in seven years of being a Verizon customer, came out of my mouth. "I want to cancel my Verizon Wireless service." Little did I realize that those are the magic words to make the Customer Service team go into fucking overdrive.
It was like a switch. I felt like a different person. I felt like a truck. Suddenly, this guy was going to try things to figure out the problem. He would see what he could do with the Billing Department. While on hold, I was already dreaming about what I would do with a Google Phone on T-Mobile, or dare I say it, an iPhone on AT&T. I was fully prepared to dump Verizon if this shit was not fixed by the end of the phone call.
Amazingly, in less than ten minutes, he was able to freeze my account while we wait for the contract to arrive. And in a half-hour, he promised my phone would be turned on again. Quite a turn of events. Sure enough, my phone was reactivated. The contract arrived in the mail on the 11th, and I've since signed and returned it. I'm still getting the hang of the touchscreen technology, and the odd power of having the internet in my pocket at all times, but I'm glad I finally did activate the Dare. I have to be honest, the Verizon's Customer Service people were extremely friendly and understanding to me on the phone, despite my varying degrees of pissedoffedness. The people in Billing and at the store though, not the brightest, and certainly not the most helpful. Motherfuckers were this close || to losing me. We'll see what happens in two years (or sooner).
Sorry I've been MIA. I had every intention to post more frequently after last week's flurry, but then I got all tied up with my hotsaucing and even more stress inducing, my apartment situation. Neither war is over yet. I will soldier on.
Speaking of the url www.urbandictionary.com, I got a personal email from the founder of Urban Dictionary after my latest bitchfest. It came just a few hours after the post and was, to my surprise, very calm. I usually take things very personal on the internet (insert cliche Special Olympics jpg) and probably would've flipped out if I read somewhere that "Beauty and the RoBeast is really going downhill." In fact, I'm getting fired up just seeing that sentence typed out.
Instead, he simply apologized for how long my submission took to be processed by editors (apparently there really is a backlog), and then asked me why I thought the site was going downhill. I wrote a long response email issuing my constructive criticism and thanked him for his diligence.
And then... he made "bagside" the Urban Dictionary Word of the Day on November 15th. I had complained about the quality of the Word of the Day in the letter, so I don't know if he did this to appease me, or just to stick me out there with the wolves (aka whiners like me). Either way, I'm pleased to say that I've got more Thumbs Up than Thumbs Down. So far.
Dr. Pepper sent me a response too. First an automated one saying they'd respond to my email in 72 hours, then a more human, but still 99% automated (much like Darth Vader) email stating this:
Thank you for contacting us about Dr Pepper. We do apologize for the problem you experienced with our packaging.
We take great pride in producing high quality products and any experience to the contrary is cause for concern. Please be assured that high quality control standards and precautionary procedures are observed throughout the production of our products.
To ensure that appropriate action is taken to prevent future incidents such as yours, we have forwarded your comments to our quality assurance team for investigation.
We hope you continue to purchase and enjoy Dr Pepper products.
Sincerely, Consumer Relations
I think it's amazing that Dr. Pepper has someone named Consumer Relations working in their Consumer Relations department. It's truly a match made in heaven. I doubt the quality assurance team will take my letter seriously, unfortunately, because there really is a problem with Dr. Pepper's plastic six-pack rings.
Now onto the most important company in the world, one that I constantly bitch about but refuses to make amends. I've complained a million times about Google's Blogger but they have yet to stumble upon my blog and respond to my constructive criticism, like Urban Dictionary. I did formally submit issues I discovered while using the beta version of Google Chrome (is it out of beta yet?) but received no response addressing my issues. I switched back to Mozilla's Firefox as a result.
I may finally need to compose a letter to the Google Blogger folks in order to get their attention, since I've been disinvited from their holiday party this year. I know, I know, it's a free service and I shouldn't cry about it. I hear it used to be worse. And what I mean by that is, when you Google "Blogger Sucks," a number of the complaints are from 2005.
Here, I used Google's search engine to rat out on itself:
(search term, using quotes) -- (number of results) "Blogger Sucks" -- 43,500 "Wordpress Sucks" -- 8,310 "Myspace Blogs Suck" + "Myspace Blog Sucks" + "Myspace's Blog Sucks" + "Myspace's Blog Blows Dog Shit" -- 1,352 "Livejournal Sucks" - 1,160
Highly scientific, I know. In fact, just by typing these search terms and publishing this blog, I've already skewed the results. Yeah, yeah, it's possible that the number of people using Blogger is 5 times as many people using Wordpress, so the resulting complaints may be accurately proportional. I don't care. These are statistics, and I'm manipulate them anyway I want.
What is my disorder? This is why I don't read anymore. I see letters and I automatically want to rearrange them. Is it some sort of dyslexia? Scrabblerackitis? Granted, I'm not really transposing any letters here, I'm just respacing them, but still. I can't be the only person that thinks it was a bad idea for these folks to start a food business with the word SHIT in the middle of their name.
I also refuse to pronounce PETSMART as "Pet Smart."
I prefer "Pets' Mart," like it's a market for pets. Which it is.
Your dog could be dumb, after all.
And now, two technical notes.
1. Blogger took it upon itself to underline the first sentence in this blog entry. Underline, as far as I can see, is not even an option in this text editor. There is bold, and italicize, but that's it. This means Blogger's underlining prank can't even be undone without going into the html editor and deleting the /u tag. Which I could do. But I'm not going to. I'm just going to bitch instead.
2. I'm also blocking all anonymous comments from now on. I received one the other day about a PETA bumper sticker post I made several months ago. It's not that I can't take the heat, it's just that I want to know who's in my kitchen. If you want to argue about abortion or animal rights, go right ahead. If you want to just call me names, please do. Just sign your fucking name, coward, so I can direct a brilliant retort back to you.
After yesterday's Jersey City Olympic Kickball Tournament, I needed to buy a few bandages and a new tube of topical antibacterial ointment. With a rare stroke of luck and efficiency, I found a Neosporin/Band-Aid hybrid for sale at Duane Reade. It came with just 3 Band-Aids (awesome), but also a giant plastic Neosporin carrying case on a key ring (unnecessary) which caused the box to be twice as large as your average Neosporin package. It seemed that the Johnson & Johnson folks had to grasp at straws to fill in all the extra white space on the oversized box:
"Great for Kitchen, Office, Travel, Anywhere"? I think "Great for Anywhere" would have sufficed. Or even just "Great." Or put the Neosporin inside the case like it was supposedly created for, and have a smaller box, saving money on packaging, space for shipping, and reducing waste. But what do I know? I'm just the consumer.
While Johnson & Johnson seems to overexplaining on their packages, other companies are omitting valuable articles. According to this tube, Colgate-Palmolive seems to be selling me an "Extra Clean & Healthy Mouth," and not toothpaste "For An Extra Clean & Healthy Mouth."
And everybody knows about NyQuil--I mean NQuil. Vicks loves their big fucking Q, but gives no love to the lowercase y.
I think they might have designed this to fuck with me after taking the nightime, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so I can hallucinate at 4 AM medicine. All right, I know nobody's perfect, but the people creating and selling these products are getting paid the big bucks. If I'm going to get barraged by advertising all day long, these things should at least make sense. I want what I pay for. And that includes the little "y" on my pills.
See that symbol? It means I posted this blog using new Picasa 3 software. That will explain why the formatting is all fucked up, and now that I'm attempting to fix it in Blogger, I am finding my efforts fruitless. Sure, I can just go to the "Edit Html" tab, and comb through the container tags and erase a couple of the "center" ones, but I shouldn't have to do that. Wah, wah, poor me.
Honey-Lemon Sugar Free Halls
Mmmmm.....
