Wrongs Made Right

A year or so ago I was traveling by van to a conference with some of my colleagues. On the way home we stopped for lunch at Perkins. It was busy. Sunday brunchers filled the restaurant. We understood that we would have to wait a bit. We waited. And waited. Still waiting. Finally when the place was completely empty we were shown to a table. We waited. And waited. More waiting. In all, we spent nearly 2 hours there—only 30 minutes of which were we eating. We were all pretty disappointed.

I was the only one disappointed enough to call their national customer service number. But I emphasized that my feelings were shared by the other 5 people in my party. The person I spoke to took my information and apologized profusely.

A few days later I got a message from the manager of the restaurant we’d been to. She apologized for our treatment and asked me to call her back. I didn’t return her call immediately, but she wanted to make sure things were made right, so she persisted in calling until she got a hold of me. She sent 6 vouchers for free meals. Unfortunately, although she had said they’d be good at any Perkins, they did say they were only good at hers.

So I called the local Perkins restaurant and spoke to the manager. I explained the situation and asked if he would accept the vouchers we had—acknowledging that he had nothing to do with our complaint. He told me to come in and he would give me vouchers for the local restaurants in exchange for the ones I had. After all, he said, Perkins is a brand name, and he didn’t want us not eating at any Perkins because of a bad experience at one.

As I passed out the vouchers to my colleagues, they were all quite impressed with what my complaining had accomplished.

Next story: For the ward Christmas party I was in charge of the hot apple cider. So I went to Food Lion and bought a lot of cider. Turns out, it was too much. I returned to said grocery store with the receipt and 4 unopened gallons of cider. The woman at customer service had no problem accepting the return. She just didn’t want to give me my original receipt back. “I need that receipt so I can be reimbursed for everything else I bought but didn’t return.” She kept trying to tell me that there was no way she could give me the receipt back. Finally she logged a record of the transaction into the computer and that apparently fixed it all. (Why didn’t she do that in the first place? Who knows?!) But then I did the unthinkable—I asked for a receipt or record of the return for me to keep as well. Again, she believed that this was out of the question and would require the alignment of the planets and world peace and an end to world hunger in order to accomplish. I argued back that I NEEDED it. Couldn’t she just make me a little copy of that transaction she’d just recorded in the computer. Nope. And then she decided that she’d have to ignore me and help the next 4 people, who had gotten in line during the time she’d been telling me that I was asking her to turn water into wine, before she could possibly attend to what I needed.

Thirty minutes after entering the store with 4 gallons of cider I was able to leave with a refund and 2 receipts.

Again, I called the national customer service number. They listened to my complaint. The next day the store manager called. He apologized for my treatment and confirmed that everything I had asked for should have been no problem. To show that Food Lion still wanted my business, he had a $10 gift card waiting for me at the store.

No boycott needed for Perkins or Food Lion. They addressed the problems and did what they could to make it right by me.

Would you like fries with that?

Coach just had that post about covering the uninsured, and I attest once again to my lack of knowledge regarding that subject. But let me pose another question: How about properly covering the insured?

A friend of ours just had a partial masectomy. The surgery was at 3pm yesterday. She got home from the hospital around 8pm. She also had some lymph nodes removed. Here's your surgery, ma'am. Would you like fries and a shake to go with that?

What is up? Perhaps someone like Coach and others in the medical field can explain it to me. Is it not rather invasive surgery? And she didn't even get to spend the night? Is this typical, or a hospital by hospital, or worse yet, insurance by insurance case? I would hope that drive-through surgery is not protocol.

Again, this is my ignorant-regarding-subject .02! Oh, and I hope I spelled all the words right. I haven't figured out spell check on blogger.

Free Favorites

I can get really excited about certain products: free ones of high quality. I like free. That's all I ask. ;-) It's an amazing thing when a company can provide services funded on advertising alone--and that advertising is unobtrusive and actually HELPFUL when you want to find particular products or services. It's a win-win. This is how capitalism should work.

Google, specifically is on my favorites list.

I recognize the company has a few sticky points, but in general they make me very happy. And since many people probably don't even know how cool they are, I'm going to tell you.

First of all, Picasa is their photo organizing software. In a completely accessible fun way, you can navigate through your photos, back them up, print them, and touch them up to give special effects like this:

All our contributor photos on our family blog were created in Picasa.

Second, Google Earth and Google Maps are very fun for mapping. If you search for an address on Google it gives you the option to map it in several different mapping websites. Its own mapping site allows you to drag the map, overlay satellite images, and search for particular establishments on the map. Very, very cool. Google earth adds to this the ability to zoom in and out on 3D topographies like the Grand Canyon or Manhatten. There's no good way to describe this but as exceptionally cool. You can look at Manhatten, for example, and then put overlays on for roads, lodging, dining, etc. You should probably have a high speed connection for maximum coolness.

And if you want to add your own buildings to Google Earth, you can. You first create 3D models in their free software called SketchUp. It's pretty easy and fun by itself. If you upload your creation, anyone can see it in Google Earth when they enable the Google Earth Community.

Gmail is a slightly unconventional e-mail client, but it's the best free webmail out there, in my opinion. It doesn't look particularly flashy, but it does what it does better than anyone. It organizes conversations, makes finding relevant messages instantaneous, gives plenty of storage space, and allows free pop forwarding and client usage. If you want an address and need an invitation, let me know.

But my favorite use for Google is just the pure search. I like their Toolbar and Desktop Search software to make it more powerful, but they aren't even necessary. Desktop search indexes the files on your computer so the Windows dog doesn't have to dig for 15 minutes to do a single search. You just type the term and all your docs with that term are listed instantly. My loyalties have just been dramatically shifted away from Microsoft to Google forever.

Plus, you can just type "define: synectoche" in a Google search and it gives you dozens of definitions from around the web. I type "weather: iowa city" and it tells me. I type "5 kg in pounds" and it calculates it for me. Look at all the cool stuff it does.

Google is my hero. You can download most of these programs for free from here.

Do You Want Some Money?????

I try to watch the second hour of Good Morning America each day, from 8-9AM. A series they are doing this month is "$100 a Day in May." One morning, it was about finding unclaimed money you may have floating around out there somewhere. It may be a security deposit you never remembered to pick up, or some such thing. I looked in every state that I live (though if there was ever money for me to be had, I pretty much scraped it up before I left whichever state it was), but found nothing for myself. However, I found some funds for my aunt and uncle and some for Scott's mom - a pretty substantial chunk of change, in fact!

To find out if you have any unclaimed funds, just go to
unclaimed.org
and click on the state where your funds might be. Since you only have to put in names, you can search for family members or even friends and neighbors! One lady on GMA had found unclaimed funds for most of the people in her neighborhood! I suggest charging a commission if you do find other people's money!

Anyway, just something fun to do, and since I really DID find some unclaimed money, I wanted to pass this along!

Just something to think about

If you married folks are anything like Marty and I, you have some household accounts in one persons name and others in the other. And really that's just because one or the other of us set up the account (whether water, cell phone, electricity, etc). In general this has worked fine for us. I take care of paying the bills, so I write the checks or know the account passwords to work with them all online. If for some reason I've needed to call customer service on an account in Marty's name, he's taken care of doing it.

But recently I've run into some problems with this.

These days Marty is unable to make those calls regarding accounts in his name. So I need to take care of them.

A few months ago we signed up for automatic bill pay for Marty's cell phone (Verizon) because they dangled the carrot of a free $2o. Last month Marty called to find out when we were going to see that $20 credit they'd promised. He was told it would be applied to the next month's statement. So this month when there was no credit, I knew we needed to call back.

I called them and gave them the account information and Marty's name. "Are you Martin?" I answered honestly. "Hmmm. I don't see your name listed anywhere on this account."

"I know. It's not. My husband is in the hospital in critical care. He can't do this himself."

"I can't give you any information about the account if your name's not on it."

"I'm not asking for information. I just want you to apply the $20 credit that he should have."

And on it went. She got meaner and I got more frustrated. Finally, I hung up saying I'd be canceling the account the next day. She snidely told me that I wouldn't be able to do that either.

I hung up and cried. Dad called to complain about the treatment I had received. He was also able to get that $20 credit taken care of and find out how to go about canceling an account when the account holder is incapable of doing it him or herself. Here's what they want: 1) I need to have legal power of attorney and 2) to break the contract without penalty I need a doctor's letter saying essentially that Marty is unable to speak on the phone.

I've got the doctor's letter. Still working on the power of attorney. I've been talking to one of the hospital's social workers to help with this part. But the problem that I'm running into is that the doctor in charge is being extra cautious and wants to be sure that Marty is fully aware of what giving me power of attorney means (which I'm fine with), but he doesn't think Marty has gotten there yet (which is where I disagree with him). Here's the thing, Marty and I have talked about it. He's fine with it. But the doctor keeps saying wait. And now today he's post-surgery and more drugged up and less interactive and aware than he was on Friday when I last talked to the social worker!

I'm not sure how this would work if Marty were incapable of authorizing me to have power of attorney for him.

Cover the uninsured

Folks that know me understand that I'm a fan of health policy. And we have a big problem with people not receiving adequate healthcare in this country because they don't have insurance (or have bad or incomplete insurance). Last week was "Cover the Uninsured Week" and we had some speakers at the med school.

But considering my personal experience, I wonder whether the folks who steer clear of insurance companies don't have the right idea after all. This last week the Boss tried to get our insurance company to reimburse for some covered prescriptions that we paid full price for (because they hadn't yet given us our number). I wasn't actually on the phone, but it seemed that the lady was calling the Boss a liar when she said she had already received a check from the company for the wrong amount. Her screen told her that they had denied both claims and the fact that Boss claimed to be holding the stub of a check complete with account number and claim number was moot. Why an account number and claim number is not sufficient to access the relevant records in a database is anyone's guess. My theory is that the company is trying to increase the number of insured Americans by decreasing premiums after doing away with all business records.

Behold, The Trash Man Cometh . . .

OK, so this really only has to do with my neck of the woods, but since I'm supposed to use this blog to share my grudge . . . I'm gonna.
We recenlty changed garbage pick-up companies, and here's why:
Our last garbage company would hardly ever come to pick up our trash! Some weeks they'd come on both scheduled days, others they might come on one of them, still others, not at all! The last straw occured last week. We had our trash out on our scheduled day and prayed for the trash man to come. He didn't. We left it out for the next scheduled day and figured the trash would be taken away. It wasn't. The next week, the same thing happened. There was no sign of our garbage pick-up, and we have no idea why. I suppose we could have called, but we'd heard other people on our street complain about the service, so we just did the next best thing and dropped them.
I want to tell you that we are so much happier with our new service! They show up before the sun is up on the scheduled pickup days, without fail. You just never realize how nice that is until you go for about three weeks with NONE AT ALL!!!!!

Internet Freedom

I don't know if anyone has heard of this yet. My friend Sara e-mailed it to me (she works in the senate). I was going to send it around as an e-mail, but I thought this would be better. I did sign the list. I feel that this is important:

www.civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet