Marc's Musings Reality from Marc's point of view!

*Updated 2011.10.22*

A couple of days ago I received a package from Knetgolf with a dozen replacement balls. They arrived unannounced (except for the note from UPS regarding the impending shipment). So I had no idea what, if anything Knetgolf was going to do regarding my order.  I’m a little surprised they didn’t shoot me a quick email to tell me their intentions but I do give them kudos for making things right.

*End Update*

For myself, I’m fine with plain old white golf balls. Now that I’m a bit older I usually buy my balls new as I do see a difference between those and balls that have been sitting at the bottom of a lake for a month.

Michelle has concerns other than performance in mind for her golf balls and so I was tasked with getting her a some PURPLE golf balls.

I eventually found a place that sold reconditioned purple balls (don’t tell her they’re not new) for a reasonable price from knetgolf.com and ordered two dozen.

The balls were delayed in getting to us by a day, UPS noted that this was because the label was unreadable.

When we received the balls the following day, I could see the issue. The label had been destroyed and the box obviously ripped open and taped shut again.

Inside, one dozen of the balls were fine. The other dozen had their little mesh bag ripped open and was actually missing one of the balls. Of those remaining 5 of them look like they had been dragged across some surface hard enough to scrape the shell down so they are smooth in a patch on one side.

Sending a note to Knetgolf’s order confirmation address with a couple of pictures had them respond by asking me to resend the pictures to their help desk. I never heard back.

About a week later they sent me an automated survey email asking how they did. To this I relayed the same story as above and never heard anything back either.

The value of the balls is not enough for me to get worked up about. But the pretense at customer service with absolutely no follow through was irksome.

So I post this warning. I’m sure the fault for this lies in UPS’ court, but it’s up to the vendor to deal with any issues with their carrier. Of course I won’t be patronizing knetgolf again and, if you are thinking of doing so, you should consider this anecdote with respect to their customer service.

Posted under Retail Experiences

Hmmm…  Apparently the $99 I paid for my DVR back in 2005 wasn’t to actually *buy* the unit but rather is a lease price and they want it back. No doubt there were too many people who were continuing to watch all of their recorded content long after they had cancelled service and they needed a way to quell that.

Since mine is about as useful as a brick I have no objections to returning it. Looking at my bill I can see that I’ve had a $6 charge for a “leased receiver” (and a corresponding $6 credit) forever so I can’t really say they weren’t telling me that.

Who really pays attention to those line items anyway?

Now, what will life be like using Netflix, Hulu and other Internet resources for entertainment?  We’ll have to see. The adventure begins…

Posted under Retail Experiences

When people speak about “corporate culture” it often seems like such an esoteric term.

But there is a certain reality to the way some companies deal with you that appears to be the manifestation of that esotery.

For instance, when I deal with Amazon.com or Sears or Wendy’s I get the sense that I’m getting something of a fair value for what I am paying and that the retailer is legitimately concerned that my experience is a satisfying one. They certainly clear a profit, but their focus seems to be much more on the transaction, satisfaction and their reputation than it is on the “making a buck” aspect of it. Hence, pretty much every time I deal with these businesses I come away satisfied that I have most likely received very good value for my money – at least as far as legitimate retail sales go.
Other business I favor include:
Applebees
Affordable Electric
Roto Router
Flushmate
Vonage
…There are many others that don’t come to mind immediately

On the other hand, there are some institutions out there who seem solely focused on separating you from as much money as possible for whatever product or service they provide. Every single transaction with them leaves me feeling … well … a little dirty if not abused. These are the companies that will send you marketing fliers advertising great promotional savings and nowhere can you find what the post-promotional price will be. Their rate increases manage to deftly outpace inflation and you can be sure are driven much more by what the market will bear than value for service. Every mailing I receive from these companies I scrutinize because I know I will find some new charge or limitation on my services that I need to be wary of.

Hence I try to avoid doing business with them as much as possible. If I’m forced to work with them I keep my eyes open for the first opportunity that I can move away to someone I trust more or someone I don’t even know at all since there is a chance they may be better.

The bad boys in this list for me include:
Ticketmaster – Not only can I never get the seats I want, but the final price I pay is always well above the actual seat price.
Comcast – They will eke every red cent they possibly can out of you for any service you have with them.
Bank of America – I briefly held a bank account and credit card with them until I realized that they LIVE to charge service fees for every possible interaction.
AT&T – Caps on internet service. Plus the fact that my worth to them as a customer dissolved when uverse was introduced.
Hooters – Seemed to pioneer the overpriced soft drink. I pay full price for a plate of tenders and fries cost extra? Really?
SprintPCS – I’m paying $10/month/phone for this mythical 4G service that I’ve seen maybe 5 times since I started with them. I have no choice due to the phone I’ve selected.
All Pizza delivery companies that charge “Delivery Fee” yet don’t give it to their delivery people – if any of the ones I deal with would drop that stupid fee, I’d use them excusively.
DirecTV – Have to keep calling them to get the price down to something reasonable, if you sign up for automatic payment, they draft the money immediately upon producing the bill and then tell you that the bill is for zero dollars. Weird.

There are, of course many, many others that hover somewhere in between which is to be expected. They walk that line between being inoffensive and just meeting expectations. I would say it’s a good thing that so many are in this middle ground. Of course there will always be exceptions where folks have bad interactions with a retailer on occasion. Maybe there was a computer glitch or maybe some manager was having a bad day, but if your day in and day out interactions are uneventful, I still score that as a win.

But there is true pleasure to be gained from dealing with a company or even an individual between whom an exchange will happen where both parties feel that they have received real value from their interaction.

Who are the good boys and the bad boys on your list? Who do you deal with where you just feel good and confident that you will get what you paid for?

Conversely, who do you deal with that always leaves you feeling kinda gross?

Posted under Opinions, Retail Experiences

Yesterday morning I awoke to the sound of my CO2 detector letting out a brief but piercing chirp that tells me that the power has gone out.

As we have a guest staying with us this week I figured it must be something where everybody was using hair driers and toasters and the like at the same time.

Mysteriously, none of the circuit breakers in the fuse panel were thrown but all the items associated with circuit #6 (Yes, I’m geeky enough to have mapped out everything in my fuse box) were without power.

Figuring that perhaps the circuit breaker had gone bad, I zipped over to Home Depot to pick up a replacement, popped open the fuse panel, swapped out the circuit breaker and… nothing.

At that point I knew I’d need to get an electrician to take a look-see. I checked out electricians in my neighborhood via Google and then cross referenced them with the Better Business Bureau.

Gritting my teeth I contacted what I thought was the strongest candidate, Affordable Electric.

Mike answered the phone and, after a few questions to narrow down the problem, he quoted me a flat rate of $199 to come and resolve the issue, all labor, time and parts included.

The price sounded reasonable for what I was sure he was in for and 30 minutes later he was at my front door.

After a bit of discussion, he walked over to the electrical panel and flipped the circuit breaker (I had left it off after the new breaker had failed to resolve the issue) and everything came back on. Uh oh.. it’s never good to have an intermittent issue.

We went through the house and he was quickly able to determine that the cause of the issue was an outlet that our guest had been using to recharge some batteries. The wiring for the receptacle had somehow come loose and, if you shook the outlet everything else on that circuit would flash like it was part of a disco tech.

So he corrected that issue, then went back to the fuse panel and he wasn’t happy with how some of the other circuit breakers were not sitting flush as they should be in there and adjusted those. We then had a discussion regarding some new trim options that can make some of my can lights look a bit more attractive (not to sell me, but just so that I was aware of the options).  He then asked if there was anything else that I wanted him to check out while I was there which I’m sure he would have addressed on the spot.

Total for the quick service and resolving that mysterious (and not very safe) issue: $199. Exactly as quoted. No muss, no fuss. He was on his way and I was confident that I didn’t have a mysterious electrical problem lurking and waiting to inconvenience me (or worse!).

This may not be the cheapest that I could have paid for this service now that I have the benefit of hindsight and knowing exactly what the issue is, but that price would have been the same had he also had to go up into the attic and work his way through the junction boxes and all the circuit wiring to resolve the problem.

Having a flat rate for service rather than an open ended per hour charge plus whatever other unknowns is very comforting to me and leaves me as a very satisfied customer.

So I heartily recommend Mike and Affordable Electric, Inc. (404-509-1799) if you are having issues in or around the Marietta, GA area.

Posted under Retail Experiences

About a week ago I wrote a post detailing my family transition from a company subsidized health care plan to bearing the full cost of the plan under COBRA.

I’m astonished to report that the bureaucratic ineptness and bungling continues. As of yesterday, having invested just under $3,000 of my own money I find myself… still without any kind of coverage whatsoever. Effectively, we have been without any medical coverage since the beginning of November and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon. Were I to visit a physician’s office, the pharmacy, the dentist or the Emergency room all will tell me that, according to Aetna I have no medical coverage at all.

Of course some day all this will likely be reconciled but that does not eliminate the possibility of financial ruin and rejection of medical care due to lack of insurance. My credit card limits are sizable but it is doubtful that even they could handle more than a couple of days in any hospital.

The added twist comes with the new year when my new insurance company is introduced (my former company is switching from Aetna to Cigna). Who knows how it will play out when one of us visits a pharmacy or medical clinic in the next month or so?

Sadly, it appears that your best bet is… well… there doesn’t appear to be one.

The COBRA system was likely conceived in good faith by beltway individuals who may understand theories of economics but have assistants and enough notoriety that they remain effectively shielded from the “normal” experience of dealing with the systems that evolve to administer such legislation. It’s long been my opinion that things only get fixed when those responsible for them must endure them directly. This does not happen with health care and legislators, doctors or anybody with a say in how such things run.

Posted under Medicine, Opinions, Retail Experiences

By now most of you who know me know that I changed jobs at the beginning of November. As of this posting I still don’t *have* medical coverage although I apparently *am* covered.

COBRA is an option that exists for folks who wish to protect themselves from America’s disastrous health costs by maintaining their former employer’s insurance for up to 18 months. Supposedly the only catch is that you must also shoulder your employer’s share of the premiums in addition to your own plus a 1% administration fee. Of course that doesn’t include poor implementation and incompetence on a massive scale.

For my situation probably my biggest avoidable error is that my last day of work was on the 29th of  October. For my company at least, your health care coverage ends at the end of the month in which you terminate your employment. Knowing this, I would have set that last day as November 1st. Not only would I have saved myself an entire month of premiums but some of the delays I’m seeing would have been mitigated.

So, according to COBRA, your medical coverage is guaranteed to continue – in theory at least – for some time after you end your employment to allow you to get through the paperwork and get everybody on the same page. That’s supposedly where Ceridian comes in. Part of their mandate appears to be to not only muddy the waters but also to ensure that it takes as long as possible for your payments to reach your insurer.

A wrinkle in my situation is that, come January, my company will have a new health care provider – Cigna – and so, therefore, will I.

A few days after I left my job I received a packet in the mail indicating that I can expect a package to arrive from Ceridian two or three weeks after my last day at work. I was VERY busy with the new position so I did not chomp at that bit, assuming that this sort of thing goes on for thousands of people every day, companies that specialize in it would have a clue.

So the package *did* arrive about 3 weeks later. It told me that my insurance rates would go up from about $300 a month to about $977 per month – which was actually somewhat better than I was expecting. I just needed to make my elections on the Ceridian web site.

In the process of making those elections (health care for me only or for the family? dental coverage too? etc.). They then indicated that I needed to set up bill pay between my bank and Ceridian and wait for my first bill. Apparently paying right away is a bad thing.

So I waited for a few days for the first bill until Michelle told me that her doctor’s office had called to indicate that Aetna had declined coverage for her recent office visit. OK, I guess that means they *really* want the money in their hands before they’ll agree that you’re covered. So I went onto Ceridian’s site to see if there was a contact number I could use to help sort this out. After logging in I see, *surprise* there’s a bill waiting there for me. Apparently this is not the sort of thing they’d think to send out some kind of notification about.

Good enough, let’s pay that bill and get our ducks back in a row. But hang on a minute. *now* the web site is telling me that not only do they not do the bill pay thing, they don’t even do credit cards or any other form of convenient payment. It’s got to be some kind of check or money order. hmmmm…

So, I send off a check which apparently takes about 7 days to arrive and get cashed. Allowing a few days for them to get the payment and notifications to Aetna, Michelle contacts her doctor’s office who inform her that it’s still a no go insurance-wise. They are sympathetic, apparently this is not unusual.

So Michelle calls Ceridian, Aetna and my old comany’s HR department in turn to find out that:

1) Ceridian is aboslutely certain that the money should go to and did go to Cigna, what is this calendar thing you speak of?

2) Aetna may be sympathetic, but no info from Ceridian (and especially no cash) equals no insurance benefits.

3) Huh?

So, after Michelle has presumably clarified the situation with the people whose job it is to do this efficiently every day, we’re told to give it 2-4 more days.

I’ve been delaying picking up some allergy medication while all this is going on just to avoid tossing more fuel in the dying fire of American health care insurance, but today I called up my pharmacy to renew the prescription and *surprise* Aetna is still refusing to pay.

This is now December 23rd. My check for 2 months worth of alleged health coverage, to the tune of $1,954 has yielded me exactly … nothing. Well… maybe I may eventually be able to claim contiguous coverage, but if I fell down a flight of stairs at this moment, it would no doubt cripple me financially while this fiasco works itself out.

One tiny bright spot in all this. I contacted Aetna regarding my FSA (Flexible Spending Account) and, the way mine is configured it remains valid for the amount that I specified until the end of the year regardless of my contributions.

This means that, having specified an FSA of $2,000 this year and contributing about $1,630 they will still cover the remaining $370 for me. Just a generous perk from my company for which I will offer them kudos. I actually called about it because I was inspecting my balance and saw the mismatch between the money I’d paid so far and the $1,890 in charges they’d covered so far.

So the lesson here (for me at least) is:

a) quit as near to the beginning of the month as possible,

b) quit as early in the year as possible,

c) Contact HR constantly after you’ve given your notice until they can tell you that they’ve notified Ceridian,

d) get registered on Ceridian’s web site a.s.a.p. (all the info was there, I didn’t need the paper package) and register,

e) visit the site daily after that to pick up the bill and send your check a.s.a.p.

f) start contacting Ceridian about a week after you’ve sent them the check (or sooner if you can see they’ve cashed it via your online banking system) and verify that they know who should be getting the money and when they’ll get it

g) about two days after that start contacting BOTH Ceridian and your insurance provider to verify that payment has been received.

I really don’t know if I’m going to have to keep on Ceridian for every month’s payment – I tend to pay my bills as soon as I get them so I *shouldn’t* risk any lapses. But I’m not the only player here.

Why I can’t simply pay my insurance company myself I don’t know. This is equivalent to those crazy escrow accounts for your property taxes. The bank has your money and has to pay the bill, but *you’re* the one on the hook for it and have to chase everybody around to ensure they do their job. I got out of that racket as quickly as I could after buying my house.

I’ve said it before and, tragically, I’m sure I’ll be saying it for many years to come. I *love* living in America – but the thing I am absolutely most terrified of is getting sick or injured here. I’m sure the quality of care will be excellent but I am scared witless that it would come at the price of every last penny of savings and every ounce of credit I would be able to acquire.

That ain’t right.

So, is this a common story? I imagine it only affects folks who have moved into a contracting position such as myself or those who have been laid off work and are not moving into a position where their benefits will be provided again.

Posted under Medicine, Opinions, Retail Experiences

About a year ago I decided to splurge and get myself some Oakley glasses. I’m much more of a Sams Club fanboy for my glasses but I was looking for something that could provide good dust and wind protection while bicycling and most of my options seemed to involve glasses that could be best described as “goggles you’d find in grade 10 science class”.

Enter the Oakley Tightrope. Originally sold as sunglasses they are RXable and after MANY tries we managed to get the lenses ground correctly by sending the glasses to Oakley themselves. Throughout the process I was dealing with Pearle Vision (MERCHANTS FESTIVAL SHOPPING CENTER) and, as far as I could tell at the time, they did their utmost to get me situated. One thing that I noted while watching them pop the lenses in and out of my frame (something done quite often as they tried different lense curvatures) is that they did not even loosen the screws that supposedly secured the lenses therein. This gives me pause now as I deal with my current issue.

Fast forward to about a year later and I come to find the paint is actually flaking off of the glasses. Given that I’d blown $400 on these I was naturally miffed. I had checked beforehand on the web and could see that Oakley generally seems to be pretty good in the customer service arena concerning issues like this. So I brought the glasses back to Pearle Vision (dealt with Elena) and was told that it is unlikely that paint chips would be dealt with under warranty but they would check with Oakley to verify this.

A couple of days later Elena called and said they could ship the frames in to Oakley so they could be evaluated. A week after I dropped them off she called back to let me know that Oakley considers such chips to be “normal wear and tear” and would not repair or replace the frames. So now I have nice brown frames with the bonus that you can see silver (titanium?) shining through in places. I suppose I should be happy that my primary use for them is sports although I do enjoy wearing them to social events when I’ll be out in the sun as they have transition lenses in them.

Lessons learned:

1) My opinion of warranties is validated. They exist as a sales tool and do not serve any significant function after the sale except to make you feel cheated when you get repair work done on your own dime while the warranty is still in effect. I do not let a warranty factor into my buying decision, ever.

2) It is MUCH better to purchase inexpensive glasses frames and simply replace them if they have issues rather than investing in what should be “quality” frames. I’ve worn glasses from budget shops for 3 and 5 years at a time with no issues.

3) Not being an overly emotional person doesn’t help me at all when I’m working to sway someone to live up to their obligation. Next time I need to bring an excitable friend with me who can explode and yell and cause mahem until my need has been satisfied. The retail world caters to emotional wrecks.

Color me not impressed. My lesson has been learned. No more Oakleys for me.

Posted under Opinions, Retail Experiences