Welcome Back to the Blog Tim Horton's!

So I have been doing a really good job of boycotting Tim Horton's, however yesterday I cracked because I needed a light snack to hold me over until supper time and it was the closest thing to me. Actually there were two bad experiences with Tim Horton's yesterday, so my boycott is still standing and probably even more cemented than ever.

The first bad experience came when I was bringing Burns and Kara to the Santa Claus parade. I stopped into the Esso/Tim Horton's on Topsail Rd and attempted to order Burns a bagel and Kara an original glaze donut. Not only did they not have the type of bagel Burns wanted, they didn't have any bagels at all! And then to make it worse they didn't have the donut Kara wanted either, so they created two more dissatisfied customers on that trip.

After dropping Kara and Burns off I headed towards Mark's but decided to stop at the Kilbride Tim's to get myself a bagel. When I went in, there was a man there audibly freaking out at the staff because of their super slow service, so that was probably a sign that I should have left. When it came my turn to order I went to the counter only to see 4 or 5 employees just standing around talking to each other. I didn't say anything, just stood there when one girl finally turns around and sees me, leans on the counter and looks at me and says "yes?". I was kind of blown away. What terrible service. I'm sorry that it is an inconvenience for you to have to serve me at a place that you are voluntarily working. Nobody is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to work at Tim Horton's. If it's that terrible than quit and find another minimum wage job that better suits your bitchy attitude. I was totally blown away by the lack of customer service. Almost as blown away as the $4.45 I paid for a bagel and a tea!

So Tim Horton's you're lucky you put crack in your coffee to make people oddly addicted to it because your service is still beyond terrible!

Download:

Back From Cali - Slash and Myles Kennedy

Did You Really Think You Could Get Away With It?

In light of the recent arrest of the Corner Brook Gynecologist for uttering threats and being racist on a voice mail to Dr. Ganguly, I figured I would rant about how dumb this guy is.

Think about how hard it is to become a doctor. You have to toil in your undergrad, kick ass on the MCAT and smoke the interview just to get accepted into the school and even then there are no guarantees. If you do manage to get accepted, then the next 5-10 years of your life are pretty much consumed with text books and cadavers, and despite this you still think its a good idea to risk all of that hard work to send a death threat to someone? Perhaps he was dumb or drunk enough to think that he would get away with it, but did he really think that the police wouldn't check the phone logs with Bell Aliant and be able to trace it back to him? DUMBASS.

Finally, the guy uttered DEATH THREATS and RACIST comments, and guess what his name just happens to be....ADOLF Hamann! That's right, a guy with the name Adolf is doing nazi-esque things...that really doesn't help your cause. Plus the guy is 53, meaning he was born well after World War II, why did his parents name him Adolf? That is some harsh punishment no matter where you are growing up, and speaking of harsh punishment I hope the guy gets some for his Hitlerish acts. At the very least he should be stripped of his medical license because I wouldn't want this obviously unstable dude around anyone's vagina anymore!

Download:
Found Out About You - Gin Blossoms

Racism at it's Finest

If you're ever heading westbound on the TCH from St. John's towards Whitbourne you should take note of a sign on the side of the road for a little craft shop in Dildo. The shop is called: Kountry Kravins & Krafts. Why is this blog worthy? It's because all three of the above words are supposed to be spelled with the letter C, which still provides you with the alliteration that the alternate spelling does, so why switch to the K's? I have to assume that it's racism - putting three K's in a row...seems a little shady to me.

So Kountry Kravins & Krafts I shall boycott your business for fear that I would secretly be funding your cross burning activities. I suggest everyone do the same.

Download:
Being Here - The Stills

The Threat to Leave

Based on a few customer service experiences I've had over the past few months, I realize that you are eligible for much better deals or incentives to stay with a company if you threaten to stop being a customer with them, which in my mind doesn't seem right. If you can offer incentives to a person who is leaving, why can't you just offer these to all your customers, then maybe they will stay anyway. I have a few examples here:

This wasn't a threat to leave, but basically sometime last year there were some problems with the quality of the cable service here in Grand Falls-Windsor. A co-worker of mine had a friend who called in and complained, and as a result got a 10% discount for a 12 month period on her bill. Realizing this, my co-worker decided to call in with the same complaint and was offered a 5% discount due to the inconvenience she was facing. Realizing her friend got double, she had the call escalated to a supervisor and ended up with the 10% discount herself. This is an example of word getting out and discounts not always being the best way to deal with situations. Word could have easily spread throughout the community, and probably did, and a lot of 10% discounts were probably handed out. (Note: I was not having cable difficulties, and have too many principles to call in and lie to get the discount).



When I purchased my car last year it came with a free subscription of OnStar for one year. When that free year was up, the cost became $24.99 per month to keep it. I did want to keep it because it has a lot of cool features and offers a security blanket in emergency situations, and with me driving a lot that isn't a bad thing, however apparently I don't value my life at $24.99 per month because that seemed way too steep for me, so I called in to cancel it. I didn't call in to negotiate a new price, but as soon as I said I was going to cancel it, they offered me a discounted price of $14.99 per month. So just $10.00 off per month because I was going to unsubscribe. I guess it makes sense because $14.99 per month is better than $0 per month, but once again if word spreads about this, OnStar is going to be out of $120 per year from a lot of customers, or they are going to piss a lot of them off if they don't offer them the same discount.



Just a few minutes ago I called VISA and decided to cancel my Aerogold card. Basically I am not getting enough benefit from it to justify the $120 annual fee. I'm more likely to get a flight out of the $120 I save annually vs. the amount of aeroplan miles I get and the amount it takes to fly anywhere decent. As soon as I say I'm cancelling, the customer service agent offers me more bonus reward miles as an incentive to stay. I didn't take them, but all I had to do was say I was going and BOOM I get a better deal.

In summary, it is good customer service to offer people incentives when they are having difficulties, and good job to all the above companies for being decentralized enough to allow a front line employee try to resolve my problem rather than just let me leave, but really in the end you're making things harder for yourself. Word of mouth is a powerful thing and if word leaks and you're not willing to offer these deals to everybody then you're going to have a lot of pissed off customers on your hands rather than just the one with the complaint. Sure $14.99 seems better that $0 to OnStar, but potentially losing that extra $10 of revenue from all your other clients who get a hold of the news doesn't seem worth it.

So my advice to everyone who reads this, call all your companies and threaten to leave and see if you can get some sort of reward or incentive to stay. Who knows you might get a great discount or a free gift out of it!

Download:
Get Free - The Vines

Not Meant to Be

To the replies in my previous post:

I thank you for sharing your opinions with me, however as one responder put it, it was an observation. While most of the blog entries I write are frustration fueled rants, I am not always mad about something, so sometimes I will write a "Seinfeld like" entry that is inspired simply by my outlook on something, but will not necessarily be created out of anger or resentment towards that topic.

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It is very rarely that I venture to the flea market at the Avalon Mall on Sunday evenings. For me, there isn't much point as I never buy anything and it is always the same old crap there (with the exception of this time of year because the place is packed with people selling Christmas items). I don't understand how people make any sort of profit from this as they provide the same goods week in and week out, and I have never really seen anybody purchase anything there. I guess the mark up is enormous so that if they sell 2-3 things then they have at least broke even, but I digress.

I actually went there last night with the full intent of making a purchase. You see on the few occasions I have gone I have noticed that someone has "Turtles in Time" for Super Nintendo for sale, and this is pretty much my favorite game of all time, however the cost was also near $40 for a game made in 1992, so it was hard to justify purchasing it. However I have been on a recent old school Nintendo kick lately and I decided that I was going to go ahead and dish out the cash to pay for it, only when I get to the table it had finally been sold earlier in the day. What a kick in the junk. I finally decide to go purchase it and it is no longer there. Ouch.

I've come to the conclusion that maybe I am not meant to have this game as I have ordered it on eBay before only to have it not show up in the mail  and now this latest debacle. However I will keep trying as this game can provide me with unlimited hours of entertainment as no matter how many times I play it, I do not seem to get bored with it (yes this is a wide open place for a masturbation joke). No Mercy for N64 has the same effect on me. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed to come across Turtles in Time in the near future before I talk myself out of buying it again.

Download:
Not Meant to Be - Theory of a Deadman

EDIT: Alley just purchased me the game on eBay so I should have it relatively soon. Hopefully it actually arrives this time.

Exact Change

On the rare occasion when I go to a store and I have cash, I always try to make a habit of paying with the exact change, but after doing this a couple of times lately I noticed it makes things very awkward.

A typical shopping experience involves placing the object to be scanned, handing something to the cashier, whether it be money or a card, and the cashier handing something back to you, whether it be change or a receipt. Either way there is always an exchange at the end where the cashier gives something to you. When you pay with the exact change, this does not take place and it really leaves an awkward void in the entire process. You're sort of left just standing there and questioning yourself on if you actually did count out the right change, and you can't just give them your money and walk away, because if you didn't get it right then you owe them more. Basically there is no closure to the whole process. You don't have a defined exit point which makes the situation very uneasy. From now on, when paying with cash, no more exact change for me.

Also while talking about money, for some reason I think pennies carry the most germs, but maybe that's just the stigma because they are worth less and therefore seem dirtier.

Download:
America's Suitehearts - Fall Out Boy

Skeet vs. Skeet

The increase in violent crime in Newfoundland has been kind of alarming lately. I mean you have people getting shot over land disputes on the West Coast, women getting punched in the face by men, at least one armed robbery every night in St. John's, and most recently a shitload of stabbings.

Here's why I don't worry about the last one on the list. I'm not a skeet. All these stabbings are not random, not for the intent of robbing someone, but skeets resolving their skeety arguments in skeety ways. What happened to the days of a beer bottle in the side of the head when you couldn't pay your drug dealer, or the days of throwing down with just your fists when two skeets were arguing over which one was gonna get to have unprotected sex with the fat chick? Now all of a sudden these guys are carrying knives and they are deciding it's a good idea to stab each other. I don't want to see anyone die, but it looks like the skeet population is trying to take each other out. It's a skeet civil war if you will. So my advice, don't mess with the skeets cause they have knives. If you avoid them, you should be able to still go outside at night and steer clear of all these stabbings.  But boy this province has certainly gone downhill in a lot of ways. The times I wish I were Clark Kent...

Download:
All Hail the Heartbreaker - Spill Canvas

Welcome to the list Dell

I just experienced the worst customer service ever from Dell.

Basically my new laptop has a mind of its own. It starts sometimes when it randomly wants to and most times it will not start at all, so I call them before my 30 return warranty expires, but attempt technical support first. I go online and type in my service tag, which for some reason directs me to the United States support. The online guy chats for about 3 minutes then says he can't help cause I'm in Canada and gives me a number to call. I call the number and its an American technical line, so I talk to a dude for 3 or 4 minutes, then he realizes he can't help me either and transfers me. Where does he transfer me? To another American line where I talk to a chick for 3 or 4 minutes before she realizes she can't help me either. Finally she transfers me to Canada, where I find out they put me in the wrong department so this guy needed to transfer me to another technical support person. Although before he did he mentioned my best option would be returning the thing and getting a new one. So in mid transfer I hang up on that and call Canadian Customer Service myself.

So I get the representative on the phone, and I tell her all the info she needs, but for some reason my service tag number is not registered in their system yet even though I ordered the computer 16 days ago. So basically I have to wait 24-48 hrs and call back AGAIN, and then start the process of getting it returned. I have 14 days left to get it returned and I'm kind of afraid I'm gonna get screwed here.

Either way, this was brutal customer service Dell. Worst I have had in a while. This almost makes me want to by a friggin' Mac, and I HATE macs!

Download:
This is Your Life - Switchfoot