I have needed a bookcase and a desk/shelves/enertainment center since I moved in a few months ago. This week, my sister helped me find the second piece of furniture online. She also payed roughly 70%. The unassembled furniture arrived today. Despite having big champagne glass symbols marking them as fragile, the boxes have clearly seen rough treatment. There are large tears. There are stains on the boxes pushed or dragged against something dark. There are big ‘this side up arrows’. The delivery people ignored them.
Still, it is much better than at my last apartment. There, packages were far more likely to be stolen than to arrive at the proper apartment. Here, the boxes are safe in the entrance hallway behind a locked door you need a code to open.
I cannot say whether anything in the boxes is broken. They are much too big and heavy for me to carry them down long hallways and up two flights of stairs. So they sit in the entry hall, while I try to recruit help.
I’ve been called that once. It was by a Black woman at a crowded train station when I accidentally bumped into her. I am so White that I practically glow in the dark.
Found out today that the company Christmas lunch is being catered by a place that got shut down for a Salmonella outbreak in 2019, was busted for catering a wedding out of the owner’s home kitchen soon after, and doesn’t appear to have had a sanitation score higher than a B since they reopened. According to the poorly formatted spreadsheet available on the state’s website, as of last month this place has an 84.5, and is operating under “intent to suspend” status. I’m planning to call the county health department on Monday to see if they’ll share any details, but I’ve suddenly remembered that I need to take care of some personal business that day, so gosh, I’ll just have to miss the lunch.
At least where I live, restaurant inspection results are public info, so the county health department should be willing to provide the info.
Yeah, I’d be skipping that lunch myself. I’d feel safer eating at Chipotle, even after recently Googling their sorry track record for poisoning customers.
Here’s a fun new twist on spam: I’m now getting spam intended for SOMEONE ELSE.
See, a few years back, I suddenly got a bunch of emails from strangers, expressing sympathy for someone who was apparently dying. I deleted the first few, then realized that this must be a case of a mis-reported email address, and I started replying to them with “I’m sorry, I don’t think you’ve got the right email”.
One of them responded, basically “so sorry! The correct address is…”. It was off from mine by one letter. Think something like “HELO_KITTY” versus “HELLO_KITTY”. One person likes childish cartoons, someone else likes aviation and felines. I’d really gotten worried when reading some of the emails, as they referenced the dying person by name… and I have a brother with that same first name.
Once I got the correct address, of course I replied to everyone with “sorry, here’s the right one” and forwarded them to the intended recipient as well.
A couple of years later, I got a few travel-insurance confirmation emails… turns out my alter ego had mistyped her own email address!
Anyway, I happened to check my spam folder today, and there are a TON of messages from the same name (and a few from others), all from something like “im_a_medicare_scammer dot com”. Exhorting me to sort out my Medicare coverage for next year… and referring to me by (same first name as from those condolence emails).
Sorry, you’ve got the wrong person! I don’t live in Florida. I’m not a dude. I’m not on Medicare. And he’s been dead for quite some time. which suggests he’s unlikely to need their “services”.
I think it would be far more fun to post that spreadsheet on your company internal website, print a few copies and leave them around the break areas, reception desks, whatever you have.
After my pancreas recovers from the two I’ve got coming now, their sampler 6-pack may be needed. All in the interest of science you know.
I do find it slightly scammy they don’t list the weights of the cakes on the 6-pack. All of their other items do list the weights. Visually they seem smaller than the 1.5# cakes in the 2-pack & 3-pack. Then again, 6 x 1.5# = 1 hell of a lot of fruitcake and calories. Better in fact that they be smaller loaves. I’d just like to know how much smaller.
I rent my water heater - a common thing around here. The rental company is Enercare, which has a dubious ethical reputation. A few months ago, they changed from billing as an add-on to my natural gas bill (different company, but used to own Enercare at one point), to billing separately. Following the changeover, they screwed up the billing in a minor way, and in the course of dealing with their call center to get that fixed I was offered a special deal - 1 year of their furnace/AC maintenance plan for free, as well as 1 month free water heater rental.
I accepted, even though I had no need of their maintenance plan, because free month! They began nagging me to schedule their free furnace inspection, which I did not need - my going-on-32-years regular guy had done his regular furnace & AC check a couple of months earlier - but eventually figured I had nothing to lose, and made an appointment.
The technician duly came and spent some time digging around in the guts of the furnace (and even vacuumed it) then told me with some concern that the “second stage ignition” wasn’t working, that this would cause problems as the temperature got colder, and I would need to get it repaired - which, unfortunately, would be an extra charge. I was extremely dubious since it was only a couple of years old and had clearly been working just fine earlier.
Almost immediately I started getting emails (Contact us to make your follow-up service appointment, Confirmation that your parts have been ordered, etc.) followed by phone calls to set up this urgent appointment.
I called my regular service guy, who laughed and said that if the “second stage ignition” wasn’t working, it was because my furnace wouldn’t fire up at all, so total BS. He’s drop by next time he’s in the area to double check, but doesn’t expect to find anything wrong. If there is, it’s still under warranty, so little or no charge.
I hate those fuckers. It’s the crappy culture of Enbridge carried over into what is now an independent company. I’m stuck with a rental water heater (the only business I do with them, and originally not my choice). I constantly get harassed for service agreements on the water heater or furnace and I just ignore them. Your mistake was accepting the “free” offer.
The only thing that spinning them off as a separate entity has accomplished is that I now have more more bill to pay, one more bill to potentially forget, and one more opportunity for someone to screw up my credit rating.
If you look carefully at the picture for the sampler you can see the individual cakes are listed at 16 ozs (1 lb) each. So $90 is getting you 6 lbs of fruitcake. Which given it runs $54 for a normal 3.5 lb fruitcake, is pretty on point.
IMHO the traditional fruit cake is the best of the bunch, but they’re all good quality. I originally found them because I wanted to try Jamaican black cake and they came up in a search.
Dammit, I tried zooming those pix before and had no luck. But now, with your advice, they zoom fine. Or more accurately, if you try to pinch/spread the pic nothing happens (on my browser at least; Win10 w Edge). That’s what I did this morning.
But now I learned that pinch/spread the page works. When the page zooms it takes the pic with it. The second pic on the details page for the 6-pack is especially sharp. The others … not so much.
I was reminded today while out getting liquor and groceries of why I hate going to Walmart so much and avoid them like the plague, aside from the generally low quality of a lot of their merchandise.
Since I was out anyway, I dropped in to pick up a couple of commodity items, a few hand towels and that sort of thing, since they’re conveniently located near some other shopping areas. The total time of my outing from leaving the house until returning was two and a half hours. Which included a visit to a liquor store, two grocery stores, and Walmart. Of that two and a half hours, almost a full hour was spent in Walmart – to find just two small things.
Why? Because the place is huge and poorly organized, to begin with. Signage is terrible, and mostly only indicates broad general areas. When you do stumble into the section you want, the selection is often oddly limited and sometimes haphazardly mixed up on the shelves because customers have been meddling with them and there’s not enough staff to keep things orderly. Which also means that if you have a question, staff are almost as scarce as Elmo’s colonizers on Mars. And, always, off in the distance, is the shrill background of shrieking brats just to complete the idyllic experience. And then at the end of it all I had to self-checkout because I couldn’t even see where the normal cashier lanes were, if indeed there even were any.
Of course some of this is not Walmart’s fault – shopping at any large brick-and-mortar store has inherent inconveniences. But Walmart manages to dial the miserableness of the experience up to 11. When I shop at The Bay, for instance (the Hudson’s Bay Company department store) I’m treated to designer lighting glinting on marble floors, well-organized displays of quality goods, and lots of helpful staff. As with the model of traditional department stores, individual checkout desks are located in all major departments. It’s really quite a pleasant place to shop.
I understand that Walmart cannot possibly be like that. I just wish them to understand why I generally avoid going there, and that they could be a lot better if the relentless emphasis on profits was tempered with a little more concern about real customer service, not just slogans and surveys.
Good! Like I said my favorite was the traditional fruit cake, but the black cake was pretty decent. Out of all of them I’d probably eat the least of it in a sitting, because of the combination of richness and strong flavor. But that’s not a huge detriment - these are all soaked in booze and wrapped in cheese cloth. They’ll last forever and a day.
I guess the abbey cake might be my least favorite of the six, as it is the most one note IMHO. But it’s still good, objectively speaking.
How much money did you save buying these goods at Wal*Mart vs. what you’d likely have spent at The Bay? And for better quality goods most likely.
It’s a decent bet you ripped yourself off by saving $X of money but absorbing $2x worth of vexation.
I often comment that shopping smart and saving money is a fine idea. But like any other effort, there’s diminishing marginal returns that eventually become negative. Getting the cheapest possible is usually not really the cheapest after quality, longevity, and vexation are taken into account.
I’m planning to call the county health department on Monday to see if they’ll share any details, but I’ve suddenly remembered that I need to take care of some personal business that day, so gosh, I’ll just have to miss the lunch.