Home Depot executives have abandoned a seven-year quest to open a hardware store at the borders of the Bayview and Bernal Heights neighborhoods, blaming a slow approval process, falling nationwide sales and the poor economy.
Good. I don’t want those racist fuckers two blocks from my house.
Filed under: sucky companies |
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Tagged: homedepot
This year’s Burnal Equinox event (called Whispered Dream) is going to be held at the Whisper Ultralounge, which sounds like one of the worst venues in SF for a burning man event.
Their webpage lists the “upscale dress code” as follows:
NO; Athletic/Sports Attire of any kind including expensive designer court shoes, Timberland and/or similar style Boots, Excessively Baggy Jeans, Dark Sunglasses, T-shirts, Athletic Apparel, and Most Hats (Fedora style top hats are acceptable). You’ll have to step it up if you wana step in.
Bwahahahaha… BM keeps getting less and less interesting to me.
Filed under: san francisco, sucky companies, upcoming |
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On Sunday, the government of Pakistan ordered ISPs to block access to YouTube in the country, for containing content that was offensive to Islam. (This occurred soon after videos exposing vote-rigging in the recent Pakistani election appeared on YouTube.)
In response to this order, Pakistan Telecom began advertising a hijacked route for YouTube, which caused all internet traffic to YouTube from around the world to be blocked for several hours. Here is a full writeup of how this happened.
I found this great Slashdot comment that explains how to use BGPlay to see an animation of Pakistan Telecom re-routed YouTube for the world.
Here is how the net looked during the hijack. The red dot on the left is YouTube, and the red dot on the right is Pakistan Telecom:
After YouTube announced new routes, traffic returned to normal for those outside Pakistan:
The animation is pretty neat! Also, Wikipedia has a good summary of the Border Gateway Protocol, which is the protocol that routers use to talk to each other.
Filed under: sucky companies, tronix |
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Tagged: BGP , hijack , Pakistan , voterigging , youtube
Wow, I wish I knew this before I cancelled my account with Sprint last month. According to this article, they recently terminated service for over 1,000 customers who called customer support too much and sent them this letter.
While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.
Although….now that I think about how much angst their customer support put me through, the $200 early cancellation fee was probably well worth it to never have to speak to them again.
Life is short. (oh and i should have listened to rajbot re: Sprint. Lesson learned! :)
Filed under: sucky companies |
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to their cell phone company eventually. (i’m on sprint and right now they’re driving me nuts. or to be more accurate, my crazy phone is driving me nuts. if you’ve tried calling me in the last few months, sorry if i haven’t picked up or called you back. my phone doesn’t tell me when i have missed calls. it also shuts down everyday for no good reason so i can’t get incoming calls. you’re better off sending me an email. sigh)
Filed under: sucky companies |
1 Comment
Tagged: rants
Viacom hates children. That is just sick.
Filed under: sucky companies |
1 Comment
Captial One is a crazy-ass bank. They send me a new credit card offer every few days. Mail from Capital One is more than half of all the junk mail I receive! I am always scared of identity theft, and the sheer volume means that every once in a while I have to set aside a few *hours* to deal with the pre-approved credit card offers they send me!
5 steps for dealing with Capital One Junk Mail
Filed under: sucky companies |
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Tagged: lists
My life is saga of bad customer service/customer experiences. This morning, the latest culprit was Time-Warner Cable. Assholes. My plan to decompress from the stress of the day was to pop in a netflix movie and chill out before going to sleep. I had just rented Rang De Basanti, which I had been looking forward to watching for a while. However, when I put it in my playstation, it turned out to be an audio CD!!! They gave me the soundtrack!!! Now, you may say, “Bobslobster, this soundtrack looks pretty good, maybe you should make some lemonade out of this lemon and give it a listen?
Well, Mr. Smart Guy, it just so happens that I just went to India, a country of 1 billion people, and came back with exactly 3 cds. One of which was the SOUNDTRACK TO RANG DE BASANTI!!!!!!!
ARRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! NETFLIX. IS. SCREWING. ME.
Filed under: beats, bobslobster, sucky companies, video |
2 Comments
During a massive layover at Heathrow, I tried to check Boing Boing and found that a filter installed on their public access internet terminals was blocking the site. I guess this is interesting for a couple reasons:
- Boing Boing posted about it, resulting in more than 3000 views of the screencap on flickr, which is more views than all the rest of my flickr photostream combined.
- BB was blocked for exceeding a ‘weighted phrase limit’. I’m not sure how blocking sites with high use of the words ‘DRM’, ‘Disney’, and ‘Ukulele’ is going to protect me from anything harmful.. Also, I’m not sure there are any words out there than can hurt me.. OMG SCARY WEIGHTED PHRASES!
Filed under: sucky companies |
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This is the last post I’m going to write about my MacBook Pro. I had a bad hard drive, and I still don’t have a working machine after several months. In fact, I don’t have a machine at all. It is at AppleCare, and has been there since 12/19. The repair status is ‘on hold’, and I have called 3 times and spend several house on the phone to get the hold removed. It is still ‘on hold’, despite many promises to the contrary.
Filed under: sucky companies, support |
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Tagged: applecare , flowchart
My head spins when I read what peliom has to say about AppleCare:
It’s very frustrating but still, I would *much* rather be dealing with Apple Support than Dell or HP.
As I write this, my MacBook Pro is in a DHL box, on it’s way to Apple’s repair facility for the third time. I’ve had five different problems with this machine (very early MBP, serial number starts with 860) and come to realize that AppleCare is fundementally broken. When they encounter a hardware problem, they do two things:
The first time I sent my MacBook Pro in for repair, I had a bad hard drive that was quite obviously bad. I explained, in great detail, what was wrong, and after the usual AppleCare run-around they finally sent me ‘the box’, and I sent it in. They sent it back with same hard drive installed, the machine was still crashing in the exact same way, but the machine booted, and that’s what’s important. If they can get the OS to boot, then they can tell you that you have a software problem.
So I have this machine that has been to Apple for a new HD, and come back with the same 100GB HD that has only 30GB total free space after reformat, and the console is filling up with read errors. I called AppleCare again, and got connected to a ’specialist’, who attempted to convince me that this was a software problem:
him: OK, your machine is booted? Now in the Application menu…
me (wondering what app has an Application menu): Um, which app..
him: …choose the Utilities menu
me: ..um.. wait…
him: … now select Disk Utility
me: Oh, you mean the Utilities folder…
him: Yeah, also known as the Utilities MENU.
him: So does the S.M.A.R.T. Status say Verified?
me: Let me explain what’s going on.. I sent this machine in for a new HD, and it came back with the same HD. After a format-and-install, the HD has only 30GB total space. It also read errors when trying to access a lot of the system files.
him: Well, I don’t know how you found those read errors. I’m going to ask you to run Verify Disk Permissions..
To the engineer who put ‘Verify Disk Permissions’ into Disk Utility, congratulations. You’ve probably saved Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. AppleCare thanks you for giving them an easy way to hang up on customers suffering from hard drive problems.
My friend Shag only buys laptops from companies that sell on-site support. Watching him interact with Toshiba support is eye-opening. When he has a problem, he calls them up, and the next day they send a repair guy to whereever shag happens to be. And they come with the part they need to fix the laptop. And they don’t try to talk him out of the repair by blaming it on some bogus disk permission voodoo. I am through with trying to deal with AppleCare, and I doubt my next laptop purchase will be a mac.
Filed under: sucky companies, support |
3 Comments
A followup to this post, here is a BoingBoing thread where you can see people finding out about the story and closing their accounts in real time.
Filed under: sucky companies |
1 Comment
Peliom just posted about Wells Fargo being such a craptacular bank. Today I read how far Bank of America will go to fuck it’s customers over. Here is what happened to a dude who stopped by a SF Bank of America branch to see if a check he got for a craigslist sale was a fake:
Matthew Shinnick dropped by a Bank of America branch in San Francisco to make sure a check he was about to deposit wasn’t fraudulent. The teller found that the check was fraudulent and told the manager, who then had Shinnick thrown in jail.
Are you getting this right? The customer who wanted to make sure he wasn’t about to draw on a fraudulent check, got thrown in jail by Bank of America.
[...]
All told Shinnick spent $14,000 to clear his record. Bank of America refused to reimburse him.
Filed under: bay area, sucky companies |
2 Comments
Over at epigone (does anybody know what the means?) kmarks opines Don’t use Wells Fargo as your bank. While can’t vouch for Wells Fargo’s suckitude being worse than, for example, the torture of CitiBank, I have a funny tech story about this.
According to an engineer I work with, a friend of his who worked at Wells Fargo came up with the following clever hack to make more money flow from you pocket into theirs. Say you have three bounced checks with values of $21, $34, and $152. Now let’s say you, for whatever reason, only have $82 in your account at the time those checks are cashed (and I believe there is a minimum 4 business days for clearing a check). Well the hack is that they cash the checks starting with the highest value first. So first they process the $152 check which takes your account to $-70. Boom, that’s a $33 penalty fee *and* your account is now negative even though you had enough money in your account to cover those smaller checks. So guess what, $99 in penalties when only $33 is mathmatically necessary.
Link to Vanguard, the only financial institution that doesn’t suck
Filed under: all talk, lifehacking, sucky companies |
2 Comments
Skype is poorly-designed software, but I use it to chat with people who refuse to use anything else. I’ve already written how Skype is the worst software installed on my Mac, but now I have two new frustrations:
1. Skype doesn’t gracefully deal with my laptop going to and waking up from sleep. When my laptop wakes up from sleep, Skype should change my status back to online, but it doesn’t.
2. The control to change the Skype status message, which they called the mood message, is so hidden away that it’s difficult to change, and since you don’t see your own status in your buddy list, it is frequently out of date.
These are two things that iChat has no problem with. We could easily sync our iChat status with Skype if both applications supported AppleScript. We know that iChat supports AppleScript, but does Skype?
It turns out that Skype’s AppleScript support is limited to just one command that you can use to call Skype’s public API. That’s good enough for us, and an interesting solution to dealing with how frustrating it is for app developers to support AppleScript.
Here is a script that syncs iChat’s online status and status message with Skype. You can run it periodically via launchd, as described here.
Filed under: code code, osx, sucky companies |
1 Comment
At E*TRADE opening an account is easy but closing an account is hard. It may take several days. And it definitely involves calling customer support and being placed on hold, sometimes for up to an hour.
Don’t make the same mistake I did, stay away from E*TRADE….buy banking products based on customer service rather than price (i.e. interest rate). It’s just not worth it.
I’m moving all my accounts to Vanguard. They’ve got the best phone service I’ve heard since the 80s.
Filed under: sucky companies, support |
3 Comments
