Category Archives: Rant - Page 2

Bastards and Liars

Posted by on April 14, 2020 No comments

Guess who stopped at my house again?  Spectrum.  This is the third time they have done this.  And boy did I let them hear it.

But the guy didn’t back down.  He stood his ground and as a good salesperson should do, he tried to get me to say something positive, because when you say positive things, your mood becomes more positive.  And additionally, the more you can keep the person talking to you, even if they’re bitching at you, it’s still engagement and there’s still a chance to turn it around.  Smart guy.

But he’s a fucking liar.  I told him the first reason I wasn’t going to switch, as I’ve said here before.  I’m with a company that has caused me no problems and he wants me to switch to a company that I’ve never dealt with.  Then I gave him #2, which is that Spectrum doesn’t offer the speeds that FIOS does.  That’s when he shut me up.

You see, while Spectrum doesn’t offer synchronous upload/download speeds, they do offer speeds that exceed what I currently have.  The one he pitched me was the 400/200 plan.  He said there was another plan, the gigabit option that was, I think 1gig up/500 down.  Well, that’s curious, I’d never heard of those plans before.  But to get that much upload speed must be super expensive, judging by how much the normal lopsided plans were.

He said he would be quick and just give me the numbers and be gone, which I appreciated.  He sidetracked a bit on a cable package, which I wasn’t interested in, but he didn’t care.  So it was about $55/mo for the 400/200 package and $88 for that, plus the cable package.  Huh…

As he was finishing up, I asked him if it was possible to put my house on a do-not-visit list.  He said maybe.  He would put a note in the system, which I doubt has had any effect the previous two times.  He also gave me their customer service number that might be able to do it.  And he left.

After cooling down a little bit, I took his card with the illegible writing on the back and went in search of these internet plans I’d never heard of.  Guess what?  They don’t exist.  The 400/200 plan he was telling me?  It’s 400/20, and it’s priced at $70/mo on their website.  The gigabit plan?  It’s 940/35 and costs $110/mo.  You fucking liar.

Can you imagine if I wasn’t adamant about telling Spectrum to get the fuck off my property?  That he could have convinced me to switch to a 400/200 plan that would be over twice as fast as what I had now?  How, after discovering this lie, what kind of bullshit I’d have to go through to reinstate Frontier?  You fucking bastard.

Banks Still Gonna Bank

Posted by on February 8, 2020 No comments

I’m personally sitting pretty well when it comes to my financial house.  I’ve mentioned changes I’ve made here and there and for quite some time, I’ve been satisfied with what I’ve got.  In summary, where I’m at right now is: Ally handles all my savings accounts needs.  They pay 1.6% interest (right now.  It’s been slowly dropping again.)  T-Mobile (through Customers Bank) handles my checking.  They pay 4% interest on up to $3k in my account and 1% on the rest.  That’s a pretty nice deal, especially as rates keep dropping elsewhere.  Looking at the interest rate history, we’re back where we were two years ago, after peaking in December, 2018.

So, it’s always good to be vigilant and keep an eye open for what may be better for you in your current situation.  Although this hasn’t affected me, it’s still an irrational issue for me that I don’t have a presence at a physical bank.  To repeat, I haven’t needed the services of a physical bank in many, many, years, but I still feel like I should have an account at one.  So every once in a while, I give it consideration.

An offer came in the mail from TD Bank, which opened a branch nearby me recently.  Recently – in bank years – is like in the last decade.  I’ve always been intrigued by them, and I do have a IRA account with TD Ameritrade (although I’m not sure they’re actually related), so when I saw the offer, I figured I’d investigate.  After all, they’re offering a signing bonus of $150 or $300, and who doesn’t want free money?

Let’s start with their top-tier account and see if I can get in.  No minimum deposit to open an account (I don’t even know what that means – how do you open an account with no funds?).  Monthly maintenance fee: $25.  in the old days,  that actually meant something, but now it just means you need to see if you can meet the criteria to get it waived.  It’s almost a pointless charge.  If you don’t meet the waiver criteria, you don’t get that account.  Duh.

So, to waive the fee, I need either: $5k in direct deposits a month.  Oh.  Well, that’s quite a number.  What else you got?  Keep a $2,500 daily balance.  Well, you know I had that at my last bank and it is doable, but are you going to pay me 4% interest on it like T-Mobile is?  Not likely.  Finally, I can have $25k in accounts with TD.  They didn’t mention TD Ameritrade, only loans and deposit accounts, so that could be my ticket in, if that’s the case.

I visited their "Contact" section and their immediate response options were limited to social media or calling.  I wasn’t going to call for a 5 second question, so I sucked it up and used Facebook Messenger to ping them for an answer.

While I wait, let’s see what benefits I get for my account.  No ATM fees, free money orders, cashiers checks, blah, blah.  It looks like I could have a free account…  And now "Marie" has messaged me back, with essentially a copy/paste of the text I already read.  So I have to be more specific in my question.  Is a brokerage account with TD Ameritrade considered a "deposit account"?  And the answer is: no.  TD Bank and TD Ameritrade are separate and their accounts don’t count towards each other.  So TD Bank is not for me.  And it didn’t offer anything compelling anyway.

But, let me jump back just a little bit.  When the TD Bank first opened in my area, I remember being impressed with their choice to have banking independent from investment.  I thought it was the proper thing to do, unlike what, say, Wells Fargo does (as if WF does anything properly).  I still do think that.  But, after looking into their service offerings, I’m just not their target audience.  There are better deals from online banks and the benefits of being physical just aren’t there.  And maybe, maybe… I could be convinced that having my banking under the same umbrella as my retirement investment account is a good thing, then maybe things would be different.  But right now, I think keeping things apart is best, especially in the growing swell of deregulation and financial insanity.

Class Action Pennies

Posted by on February 5, 2020 No comments

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a class action lawsuit in which I was a participant.  The end result of that was me dropping out because I had to provide proof of my involvement, which I could have, but it was more effort than I wanted to expend for my "up to $900", but realistically more like $5 award.

And now today, I get an email about the Yahoo security breach class action lawsuit.  Oh boy, this should be expensive.  Scanning the email quickly for numbers, I find that the settlement is for $117 million.  Nice.  Now, how many potential claimants?  Oh… 3 billion.

Quick, what’s the math on this?  About four cents per claimant.  Well, I guess that’s something.  And what, perchance, are the lawyers fees for the case?  $30 million, plus an extra $2.5 million for expenses (postage for 3 billion $.04 cent checks=$900 million, FYI).  Oh, and the expenses.  Some people endured a greater hardship to prove the culpability of Yahoo, and those people will get awards of $2,500, $5,000, or $7.500.  I did not see in a quick scan of the online documents how many people this award pertains to, but there are six plaintiffs.  When talking in millions of dollars, 4-figure awards are a rounding error.

So, let’s round down to the nearest million for the post-lawyer-payday settlement pool, which is now $84 million.  And now, each claimant is due at least 2.8 cents.  I would round that up to 3 cents, but that’s $6 million of rounding that we just don’t have the funds for.  Sorry about that.

Well, well, well.

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

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A big fuck you to Pizza Hut’s web developers.  I’ve watched the PizzaHut website change on what seems like a weekly basis.  I  applaud their efforts, despite those efforts being in PHP and somewhat overbearing on the JQuery effects.

However, I get a little peeved when the Opera browser is intentionally excluded.  I mean, it’s not like you’re doing anything different to code for Opera, you just do it right and it works.  Code to the standards and things just work.

Security Through Absurdity

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

HSBC has always seemed to be the weirdest when it comes to logging in to their banking site.  To log in, you have a username, a password, and a security key – essentially, two passwords.  I’ve had an HSBC account for some time, and their little Java applet where you would enter your security key using the mouse was lame as hell.  If someone is watching over your shoulder, you can type your password pretty quickly and people probably won’t get it.  But if you’re clicking the mouse letter-to-letter, that’s as obvious as hunting and pecking your password with a single finger.

I have to assume it’s to prevent password capture from keyloggers, which is noble in its intent, just lame in its execution.  So HSBC changed up their login to something even more ridiculous. You still have your security key, but now, you enter random characters from it.

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Can this be any more insane?  The first time, I couldn’t even log in.  I was stepping through my key letter by letter, counting the boxes and to be honest, I was using the wrong letters anyway.  I wouldn’t have made that mistake on the old login, because it was a keyboard pattern I was familiar with.

I think I understand the reasoning.  They want to inject some humanized processing of the security word.  What will be their next version of the login?  “Enter your security key… backwards.”  “Enter your security key… replacing all the letter A’s with underscores.” “Enter your security key… using capitals for lowercase and vice versa.”

Upgrade Your Misery Today!

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Here’s the banner for an email I recently got:

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Quicken and WillMaker.  Two products that go so well together.  One makes you want to die and the other helps you be prepared for that moment.  It all works together: Customer Service (I want to kill myself), “put your life on hold”, 2012, Quicken.

You couldn’t ask for a more cohesive piece of marketing.

And this is pretty good as well.  The point of the email is “Improved Customer Service is Now FREE2”, with the footnote “Valid for 2012 Quicken customers only and available for a limited time; subject to change without notice.”  So, what I gather from this is: Quicken used to charge for good customer service, but now they are doing what they should always have been doing. They won’t do it forever, though.  They won’t tell you when they’re going to go back to the same old crappy customer service (it’ll just kinda start happening), and you still have to pay for it by buying the 2012 version.  In other words, business has dropped off and no one is calling our support lines because they either have left us or have learned to deal with the existing bugs in Quicken.  That means our support staff can help you better until enough people buy the 2012 version and swamp us with new bug reports.

And they are still pretty much the only game in town.

One More Reason To Hate People

Posted by on December 25, 2019 No comments

This is a problem I’ve been reading about with increased frequency.  A person will buy some thing, then fill the box with something else and return it, getting a refund and keeping the original thing.  In the cases I’ve been reading about, it’s hard drives.  A person will buy an external hard drive, open the case, switch out the large hard drive with a small hard drive (working or even not working) and return it to the store.

What happens is the store looks inside the box (maybe), sees everything is there and puts it back on the shelf for someone else to buy it and discover they got a tiny hard drive instead of what they thought they were getting.  That customer brings it back to the store and the cycle repeats.

This is very lucrative for some people, for people that lack morals, anyway.  But this happened to me on a less lucrative item, although no less infuriating.  I purchased an outdoor LED security light.  It wasn’t super cheap, in the $30 range.  I got it home and when I opened the box, inside was your typical two-light incandescent light mount, probably under $15.

Now, I am faced with a bunch of bullshit.  First is the wasted time and travel to return and replace this item.  Second is the thought that the store doesn’t really know that I wasn’t the one that made the switch and am trying to pull the scam off myself.  Third is the thought that the store may not actually take any action on this and put it back on the floor to repeat the cycle.  Clearly, something must be done here.

It’s easy to put the blame on the store, and I’m mostly in agreement.  I can understand the customer service part of no-hassle returns and wanting to make the customer happy, but they still need to verify the item being returned is the same as what was purchased.  And I think anything returned should be flagged with a label indicating it is not "new stock".

And while this sounds great, reality says there’s actually very little stopping thieves from doing whatever they want to do.  How about the stories of people using self checkout to buy expensive things and ringing them up as bananas?  How about the rule that "loss prevention" is actually not allowed to engage with a suspected shoplifter?  Just keep on walking, they can’t stop you.  They literally can’t stop you.  And when shitty people learn this stuff, they just do it.

I had the thought that night that if I had used self-checkout, the mismatched product would probably have been caught because it would have a different weight.  The register would have said something like incorrect item in bagging area.  That’s great, but you know what really would have happened?  The clerk would have just overridden the register and I’d be on my way with the wrong item anyway.  Again, it comes back to the store, but they’re just doing whatever it takes to make the customer happy, because self-checkout problems are a sure-fire way to piss people off.  If you’re making the customer do the work, you had better make it easy for them.

But let’s just make it clear, customer service is a poor term when the customer is not even a customer, but only a thief.

FML

Posted by on December 13, 2019 No comments

Fuck MyLife.

If you’ve ever taken a moment to search for your name on the Internet, then you know what I’m talking about.  There are plenty of websites that collect public data about people and aggregate it all together, then conveniently make it available to anyone that wants to search for your name.  MyLife is one of them.

A couple of days ago, I figured I would try and take control of my public information in 2020.  The first step I figured would be locking down these public profiles of me.  Should be easy, right?  Create an account, verify your identity, then set the account to private.  That’s how I thought it should work, anyway.

So the first site I went to was MyLife.  I searched myself, and on my profile page, I click the link that said something like “this is me”.  It brought me to the fake “searching for data” page, which I cancelled out of.  On a form that was displayed next, I provided my email address (as is my policy, a unique email address just for them) and clicked “Show background report”, which is a strange way of saying “create account”.

Immediately, at my “dashboard” (please note I never verified any of my info.  you can seemingly create an account for any name you want), I was shown a popup to enable or disable sections of my profile, with a button to “save changes”.  After clicking the button, I was taken to a screen showing different subscription options.  Yeah, no thanks, a free account is all I need.  But no, a free account is not what you need at all.  The “save changes” button does nothing.  Nothing unless you have a paid account, that is.  Fucking seriously?  So fine, these motherfuckers won’t let you lock down your account unless you pay them.  Fine.  You’re assholes, goddamn assholes.  But you are not getting my money.

But, ohhhhh, they have my email address now.  And now the emails have started.  Day 1: the welcome email, which reminds me if I upgrade to Premium, I can lock sections of my profile.  And in big type it says “Keep Your Info Private”.  Assholes.  Day 2: an email trying to warn me about how bad people are and how I need to be able to find out everything I can on everyone otherwise I or my family might get hurt.  Assholes.  Day 3: an email warning me that my online reputation affects my life.  Everyone is going to see my information online (after encouraging me to find everyone I know in the previous email).  ASSHOLES!  (post-publish update: 2 more emails came in on Day 3, one an ad for Experian Boost and another reminding me that there are other sites exposing my info.  I can’t stop them, but I can see who they are – for $$, of course.)

I have enough experience in web site development to have conversed with people who would create a website like MyLife.  They are scum.  There is absolutely nothing positive about the “service” they are offering.  It’s simple blackmail.  Just like those websites that supposedly list “cheaters” and make you pay to have your name taken off. 

Now, fortunately, my “reputation” on MyLife is just fine, but I know how they work.  If you have any entries on a municipalities Clerk Of Court website, you get whacked.  And it’s all the same.  Traffic ticket? Same as a DUI.  Do you want to know the difference?  Well, you’ll have to pay MyLife to see the details.  Unless you’re smart and go to the county Clerk of Court website and do the search yourself, then it’s free.

So MyLife ruins lives by making minor infractions seems like major red flags, then they won’t explain whether it’s a real problem unless you pay them.  And I guess that alone wasn’t scaring people enough, so what they started doing was listing your relatives in your profile and putting warnings if any of them had issues.  And I guess that wasn’t enough either, so they started listing neighbors in there and flagging them, too.

And while I’m definitely of the mindset that you will be known by the company you keep, this is completely ridiculous.  And it’s all in the goal of getting you into a subscription so you can hide that damaging information.  Fucking ASSHOLES.

Teamviewer Farewell

Posted by on August 6, 2019 No comments

This isn’t really a “biggest and bloatedest” post, but it is in the same kind of vein, since it involves leaving behind a company that I once really enjoyed.  This time it’s the great remote-access utility, Teamviewer.  I was first introduced to TV long ago when I was doing remote computer assistance (an Uber of computer helpdesks – way before its time).

As time went on, TV got more and more advanced.  They added many new features specifically for providing helpdesk services, none of which were really useful to me.  All I needed was remote desktop access and sometimes file transfer.  I didn’t need chat, or ticket logging, or video capture, or lots of other things.  So I guess in a way, TV did become big and bloated.

But the software itself was impeccable.  Very well-written code and always in touch with current Microsoft security and coding practices.  It’s software that I would buy, but unfortunately, it wasn’t really for sale.  TV’s business was business users and consumers were trusted to use the software for free for personal use.  That sounds really good and fair, right?  It is, but I did feel a little guilty about it.  Not because I was using it for business use, but just that I used it SO much.  I would love to buy a license, but the cheapest you could get was a $50/mo subscription.  Ohhh, I hate subscriptions.  And $50/mo is not really reasonable (to me) for personal use.

So I kept using it for free, until one day I started getting notices that TV detected I was using their software for business use.  I don’t know exactly what they noticed that seemed suspicious.  I have a couple ideas, but I don’t know for sure.  If I choose to really think about it, it’s worrisome that the software is actively watching what I do to catch me doing business operations.  Anyway, I ignored the warnings, because they weren’t applicable.  When I rebuilt my computer and connected to it remotely, I got a much more severe warning.  It declared that I was using the software for commercial use and my connection would be terminated within minutes.  Subsequent connections also got cut off as well. 

I filled out an online form to appeal their judgement, which they said would be responded to in about a week.  But I pretty much knew that my time with Teamviewer was over.  It was time to find another remote access utility.  And the one I eventually chose was the free one built into Windows – Terminal Services or Remote Desktop Connection.  I was a little hesitant to implement it because of the reputation RDC has for being vulnerable to attack.  However, taking my time and considering the risks made me more comfortable in the choice.

For most RDC breaches, attacks are made using common account names and weak passwords.  Neither could be true in my case.  In fact, my configuration is more secure than Teamviewer.  With TV, an attacker needs two pieces of data: the computer ID and a password.  To attack me, you need an IP address, a custom port number, my username and my password.  That’s twice as many elements needed, and the potential values are vast.

So, that’s how I now waste the day away when I’m at work.  I’ve disabled Teamviewer, so that’s one less attack vector for my computer, which to be honest, always spooked me.  TV has not had any account breaches that I know of, but their user database would be a goldmine for hackers.

Holding My Ground

Posted by on June 27, 2019 No comments

I got another friendly visit from a Spectrum salesperson.  Wonderful.  This time, when I got the inevitable question about how much I’m paying for what services, I got a response of, “Wow.  You are paying WAYY too much!”  Well, thanks.  It’s always smart to suggest your potential customer is stupid.  When I was asked how long I’ve had Frontier, I said since they arrived in the neighborhood.  She replied, “Well, I guess you’re just really loyal.”  Uh huh. Don’t think I didn’t detect only the tiniest pause before “loyal”, as if she wanted to say something else.  Ok, then.  Let’s play.

Obviously, I’m not going to change my service.  I didn’t last time they came by and this time is no different.  But this rep was motivated.  Unfortunately, when you fail at establishing rapport and you just start to go off the rails, motivation can be a bad thing.

This time, I was prepared, because last time, I didn’t get the opportunity to explain that I wasn’t going to switch from a company that has been good to me for 15 years to a company I have no history with.  I told her so.  Her response was that Charter (Spectrum’s owner) had the highest customer satisfaction ratings.  Let’s check that.  According to BroadbandNow, yes, Charter has higher customer satisfaction than Frontier.

Next she made the claim that you can tell the strength of a company is through their stock price.  Let’s check that, too.  And yes, comparing the stock charts between the two is no contest.  Frontier is sinking like a stone and Charter is shooting upward.  So far, her information is accurate, even if I couldn’t verify it at the time.  But then, things started to turn dark.

Along with the claim that Frontier is fading, she said that Frontier is trying to sell FIOS, because they’re losing money on it.  Checking the news, this is true as well, although maybe overblown.  I was told that Charter had the chance to buy Frontier but they turned it down.  Why?  They’re just going to wait for Frontier to go out of business, then they’ll take the customers for free.  Then I was strangely lectured on the greatness of monopolies and how Charter had complete control over certain nearby towns.  It sounded mildly threatening, and I made the comment, “well, I guess I’m just delaying the inevitable, aren’t I?”

I reiterated that I wasn’t interested in switching until I was given a reason to.  Again, she went back to price.  She brought up that new customers are getting the same thing I’m getting for $30/mo and I’m paying $75/mo.  Well, yeah, it’s an introductory offer.  I know about that.  Obviously, a company can’t afford to always offer their service at that price. 

And as we closed our conversation, I got one last threat.  When Frontier goes out of business and Spectrum is the only service provider, there’s not going to be any special offers or introductory prices, because there won’t be any other options.  Yes, that’s right.  She did say that.  I did get to fire back, “Well, that’s just what a good company would do” and we parted ways.

There’s no shortage of words spent on the evils of monopolies, but I have always imagined that the evil was concentrated at the top of the organization.  I’ve never had the thought that the domination and control mindset extended right down into the culture of the company and reached the front lines where it became a threatening sales tactic.