Take back the beep!

This guy got it right! I've been thinking this exact same thought for a long while, and I'm SOOO glad somebody's finally doing something about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/technology/personaltech/30pogue-email.html?_r=1&em

To Whom It May Concern:

For those who are interested, I thought I'd share some of the letters exchanged between me and my former insurance company.

First, the response from them to my first letter:

Dear Mrs. Zoolander:
We received your letter dated December 22, 2008 addressed to Mr. _____, CEO of [insurance company]. Your inquiry was forwarded to my office for further review. I appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns. The inquiry received was in reference to the cancellation of you (sic) group coverage under the ____.
Mrs. Zoolander, we are aware of the need of creditable coverage. Therefore, it is always with great sadness when a group advises coverage is no longer to be provided for a member.
Our records indicate that the group submitted a termination request electronically on May 5, 2008 to terminate your coverage with a May 31, 2008 termination date. Then on June 25, 2008, the group faxed a written request to cancel the policy as of May 1, 2008.
We apologize for the confusion regarding your cancellation date. However, you will need to contact your group regarding the cancellation date change.
Sincerely,
_____

And here was my letter back to them. I was feeling a little sassy.

Dear _____:
I received your letter dated January 15, 2009 apologizing for any confusion regarding my termination of coverage with [insurance company].
However, your letter did not acknowledge my detrimental reliance on the written and oral verification I received from [insurance company] that my coverage was effective through May 31, 2008. Additionally, your letter failed to offer acceptable resolution to the situation by fully covering my appointment on May 20, 2008 with [the foot doctor].
I apologize for any confusion there may have been between you and the group regarding my termination date. However, the letter I received from [insurance company] dated May 12, 2008 signed by _____ is not confusing. Nor was the conversation I had with one of your representatives verifying my termination date. I relied on the information provided to me by [insurance company], and I expect [insurance company] to fully cover my May 20, 2008 appointment with [the foot doctor].
Sincerely,
Peanut Zoolander
cc: General Counsel, [insurance company]

Now, the good news is that my letter seems to have worked. I got another letter telling me they've decided that my new termination of coverage date is May 21, 2008. Of course, that apparently doesn't mean they would automatically re-process the claim in question. But I spoke with someone today who said she'd send the claim back through the system.

They're not forgiven. But I'm not as mad at them anymore--for now at least. They still need to pay the doctor, and I need my money back.

Have grudge, will hold

The posts around here have become disturbingly positive lately. I don't want to give any of my loyal readers the wrong impression. We here at My List are still (frequently) disgruntled. The trouble is, we're also (always) lazy. So, to express my lazy disgruntlement, I now provide the following list of currently-being-boycotted-until-it-becomes-personally-inconvenient vendors:

Rite Aid Pharmacy
Whirlpool Appliances
Peanut's Insurance Company

Feel free to add your own. I promise to be lazily disgruntled in your behalf.

Slick deals

I doubt if anyone still reads this blog, but just in case....

I like the site slickdeals.net.  It's kind of heavy on the electronics, but it does have some pretty great tips with some regularity.  For example, I just found a tip for cashback from microsoft on puchases made after doing a search on live.com.  The results page looks something like this:

The results that have the little gold coin give you varying chances for cashback (30% for ebay and 7% for live.com in this shot).  You go there and have 60 minutes to buy something with paypal to get the rebate.  Anything in that session gets the discount according to the terms.  It just saved me $90.  At least, in theory.  I still have to wait the obligatory period before I can cash in, but it seems like a great chance to save money.

Singing Her Praises

OK, so I haven't been able to find many negative experiences to put on My List lately (believe me, I have tried!). So I have to put another GREAT product up here! It is Leslie Sansone's Walk Away the Pounds walking programs. Buffalo Wings (aka Super Mario) was in the market for some workout vidoes around Christmastime. He went to Best Buy and picked up a Leslie Sansone DVD with a one-mile and a two-mile walk on it. We'd never heard of her, but he said that the DVD caught his eye and that it looked easy. He started using it right away and told me that it was easy and really good. He worked his way up to the two-mile portion of the DVD pretty quickly. It took me awhile to warm up to wanting to use the DVD, but after spring break I gave it a try, and absolutely enjoyed doing the program. It is easy, low impact, no difficult moves, something that I think everyone can do, and truly a great calorie burn. I'm watching the pounds drop as I've been using the DVD consistently. I've put a bunch of Leslie Sansone DVDs on Netflix and am awaiting for the first one to arrive.

So, in my opinion, Leslie Sansone is one to put on your good list!!!!

Yummy Stuff

Scott and I have discovered many yummy, lo-cal treats lately. A couple of my favorites are:

The 100 Calorie Packs. Specifically, the Hershey's, Chips Ahoy, and Oreo Cookie bar ones.

Life Chocolate Oat Crunch cereal.

Special K Red Berries.

Fat free, sugar free chocolate pudding with fat free, sugar free Cool Whip.

Dark chocolate M-n-M's - not specifically lo-cal, but healthier for you than milk chocolate
M-n-M's.

Quaker rice cakes - caramel and chocolate peanut butter flavors. Scott likes the apple cinnamon flavor.

Kashi bars - the GoLean Crunch bars to be exact. The chocolate peanut crunch and the caramel ones are my favorites. YUM YUM YUM!!!!!!!!!!!!

All of the above treats are worth a gander.

Got any suggestions for this consumer?

Taxes again

As a follow up to my rant in Feb about taxes, I just wanted to point out that you can use online tax preparation software for free at irs.gov. Most of them make you pay to file your state return, so the state price is a factor to consider when choosing a vendor. Many states have their own online return system, which just means that you can do both federal and state for free if you don't mind entering in all the data twice. Could be worth it, depending on how complicated your info is.

Microsoft: hate hate hate

There are plenty of ways to disparage Microsoft. The most recent things they've done to annoy me include such things as paying corporations to force their employees to use Windows Live Search rather than their personal preference, bribing influential bloggers with free laptops, and most egregiously: wasting a generous amount of my time.

This latter offence was in the form of xbox 360 support. When our xbox broke and we sent it in to be repaired, we weren't in any frantic need of getting it back immediately. Microsoft thought that it would be better to send us a replacement machine than to make us wait for them to fix ours. Nice thought, but completely ridiculous in execution. Their security for online accounts restricts the games you play to the xbox you initially downloaded them to, which means none of the games worked on the new machine--the games we had paid cold hard cash for. What's worse, they knew all about this issue but waited for me to figure it out on my own and make a phone call to technical support, wait through the cheery automated menu diabolically hellbent on obstructing my access to anyone who could help me, speak to a tech who took all my details through an extended and painfully slow interview, and be escalated to the highest ranking technician available only to find that the billing people (the only ones who can help) are at a different calling center, use a different customer support database, and are completely inaccessible to me, the customer. All I could do is wait for these mysterious higher support beings to get around to reviewing my case. When I called back, I got to wait, wait, and wait again talking respectively to the machine, the tech, and the escalation tech only to be told the people who can really accomplish what I needed are inaccessible even to them... perhaps magically in Oz. The icing on the cake was when I had to fax them my packing slip to prove that THEY had shipped this xbox back to me and that the previous week's service issue had even happened. This company designs the world's databases? We are in serious trouble, folks.

Okay, the real reason for this anti-Microsoft rant is "automatic updates". I didn't hesitate to enable my Windows computers to go ahead and download critical updates and install them automatically. Unfortunately, the people who designed this system are seriously lacking in common sense. Recently my computer interrupted me repeatedly with an urgent message that my computer had to be immediately restarted so that a CRITICAL update could be installed. My work--my reason for a having a computer--is so completely inconsequential to my operating system. It doesn't care, apparently, whether restarting automatically in my absence will lose my saved work. It doesn't care, apparently, whether I'm actively working on my computer--it needs to save me from myself by pestering me with nagging messages that come up every 5 minutes and can't be dismissed indefinitely. You must restart NOW NOW NOW--it's for your own good!!!

When I finally opened the dialog to see what was being installed so urgently, it was none other than the Microsoft authentication tool--one designed to verify that my copy of Windows is legitimate and not ripped off.

WHAT?

They have repeatedly interrupted me, rebooted me, pestered me so that THEY can know that I'm not ripping off their product? ...Their product that I have legitimately and legally acquired? And that I have been forced to prove is authentic on multiple prior occasions?

It's just too much. I'm buying an Apple next, even if it costs twice as much. End of story.