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

I recently had lunch at the Atlanta Bread Company (the one on Old Milton near Northpoint Parkway). The food was good and the experience enjoyable enough. Later in the day, when I was cleaning out my pockets, I happened across my lunch receipt and was about to discard it when I saw that they had overcharged me for both my meal and for my drink. The amount was not great about 40 cents for the meal and 20 for the drink, but it irked me that they should be so cavalier or careless with one of their customers. Admittedly *I* was also careless in not double-checking my receipt but the price was in the right ballpark and I was thinking about other things at the time.

Even though the amount is not great, I do not like dealing with people and businesses on whom I need to keep a watchful eye.

For me, this is not limited to being overcharged. I’m also not at all happy when the error is in my favor. If I look at a price-list and the final receipt is for less than I expect. I am left to wonder if we both are agreeing to what we think we are agreeing to. Certainly if the other person tells me “We’re having a 10% off promotion for these items today.” and then goes on to apply it then I’m satisfied (ok, ok pretty happy that I lucked into their offering) but the mystery is gone and I know with certainty what is going on.

That fast food drive-thrus began using those confirmation screens where you can see your order forming as you place it is great boon. I’d say probably 1 in 4 times using it I end up making corrections since I can see where they have either not heard me correctly or they have made bad assumptions about my order.
Recently, the Wendy’s restaurant that I eat at a couple of times a week for lunch has stopped using their confirmation screen. Now I’m finding that my order is wrong about a third of the time and I need to check it at the window before driving off. Little things like cheese on a hamburger, wrong condiments, etc. But the point is that now it’s something that I need to be alert for.

My expectations have been raised over the years and those expectations are:

• I’ll get what I paid for
• I’ll pay what we agreed (based on price tags or posted prices)
• I’ll get it when we agreed

If I detect a problem, I’ll correct it or have it corrected by speaking up to the person with whom I am dealing.
If I don’t notice the problem until later or if it will be awkward for others with me I’ll often send a message to the business involved to let them know. Where I receive a satisfactory response, and even a “we’re sorry, here’s what happened” can be sufficient, I can be mollified.

But violate my trust or ignore my complaint and I simply vote with my dollars. The Atlanta Bread Company item above is a situation where it’s not worth my time or the hassle of rectification, I simply will not go there again for a long time. Probably 6 months or a year. It’s not a matter of holding a grudge, it’s a matter of not wanting to feel irked and there are plenty of other places with which to do business that there is little loss to me in simply eating somewhere else.

I like to think that others do likewise and that businesses that do not treat their customers respectfully ultimately feel the pinch as other folks likewise elect to patronize places where they do not need to be on their guard and can devote those energies to other, more productive aspects of their lives.

Am I being OCD on this? What do YOU do?

Posted under Opinions, Retail Experiences

I received an email today from DirecTV listing the current pay per view offerings for this week and saw a movie that Michelle said she wanted to see. OK, OK it’s Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru”, call me a wuss but I’m gonna enjoy it too.

So I went to my Tivo to set it up to record and I noticed a new flag on the confirmation screen indicating that the PPV movie will expire at Noon tomorrow. Since I seldom watch a movie I’ve recorded in even the same month I recorded it much less the next day, I was somewhat perturbed.
So I went to the DirecTV website and looked this up and can see that my recording will probably last for a long time provided I don’t view it. Once I begin playing the movie, the clock starts ticking and I will have 24 hours within which to finish viewing.
There are plenty of movies that I will start to watch and then decide to finish days or weeks later. I don’t have an issue waiting to see the ending and I can remember the beginning well enough that I don’t lose anything across that gap.
What I have now is my satellite company (or, more probably, the content provider behind them) dictating how I will view my recording.
One of the reasons I use PPV is for exactly this freedom. Renting a movie from a Blockbusteresque source comes with the explicit contract that I need to return this item in a day or a week depending on popularity. But PPV has always been more ephemeral than that and the added flexibility (plus the lower cost and avoided trip to the store) have always been of great value to me.
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Posted under Movies / TV, On the Home Front, Opinions, Retail Experiences, Tech Stuff, Utils / Tools

I got this letter a couple of days ago based on a comment I made in flickr :

Hello Marc,

My girlfriend found this message you had on a photo message board about

you having your head shaved. I am curious to know, as you said you had

your head shaved, what was it like? I am about to leave for a five week work

project and always wanted to peel off all my long shaggy hair to a total shaved

bald head look (of course then use sunscreen while outside)….but what is

it like to be totally shaved bald…or was your’se just super clipped buzzed or’

actual razor smooth bald like what I want to do next week? And how did you

best get a perfect headshave without cuts, nicks, and razor burn? Couple

friends said to just get a super buzz bootcamp cut, but if I am going to take

all my hair off for this summer, I want to go totally shaved bald. So any tips,

experiences and other info you have from when you did it, that would be great.

Nervous to loose the long hair for shaven scalp, but can’t wait too..!!

[Name withheld as I don't know if he wants me to publish it]

PS–how long did you actually keep the cool look….and ever would do it again?

To which I responded:

Hi [Name removed],

I just posted some pictures on my flickr site so you can see what I ended up doing (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc-bourassa/sets/72157605978167162/). Back in 2003 I had direct access to the Usenet newsgroups and was able to glean a lot of helpful information regarding how to go about shaving one’s head.

My motivation for shaving my head came from the appearance of a thinning patch (that ol’ “male pattern baldness” I suppose) at the back of my head. I wasn’t sure how fast it would spread so I wanted to see what my options would be. Since I am not so clueless as to think that a comb-over fools anyone I figured I’d like to see if the bald look would suit me.

Most surprising to me were the number of products out there dedicated to helping maintain a shaved head, everything from special bladed shavers to recommended products (pretty much all of which I forget now).

For myself, I ended up picking up a Norelco electric shaver. I already had some electric hair clippers that I used for the initial cropping.

I actually had a bit of fun with it before cutting all my hair off. I took the opportunity to see what a bunch of different cuts might look like on the way to baldness. I shaved it very close on the sides and left it long on top, then I went for a Mohawk of varying lengths. Basically I played with it for probably an hour or so (with my wife rolling her eyes at appropriate intervals) before I clipped ALL the hair off and then took out the Norelco and brought it skin-close.

I never did use a razor on my entire head. The most I ever did was up the sides (where I could see fairly well) and up the back, just extending where I was used to shaving my neck for my normal hair style after a couple of weeks.

From the pictures you can see that I was about as close as you can get to “Chrome Dome” without that final razor step. Also, having dark, thick hair makes it much harder for one’s “dome” to remain “chrome”. I had a perpetual 5 O’clock shadow. I did shave it pretty much every day (I almost always shirk shaving on weekends). But with electric shavers, once the hair gets past a certain length it’s a real pain to get the shaver to properly shave it back to the skin.

I had a pretty active childhood (read “whacked my head and gotten stitches a few times”), that plus a formidable number of crowns (which my barber was always complaining about) and a couple of moles made my head look a lot less like, say, Patrick Stewart of ST:TNG fame or Yul Brynner and a lot more like one of Frankenstein’s lesser successes but I would consider doing it again. I just haven’t had the inspiration to do so recently.

Notes:

It was very cool feeling the air on my scalp, if you’re the type of person who gets cold from drafts then I imagine this could be disconcerting. It didn’t bother me at all though.

I also found folks treated me very differently in retail situations. I’m not a particularly menacing looking guy normally, but the shaved head causes folks to have expectations. Of course, once I open my mouth their reaction changed again as I’m a pretty mild-mannered guy. But the more deferential initial attitude from strangers was something I would have liked to retain after growing my hair back!

Time saved not washing your hair is almost exactly equaled by the time spent shaving your head.

I shaved my head in late October so I didn’t really encounter the realities of needing sunblock on my exposed dome.

Your hair wicks a LOT of oil from your head, and sweat too which you will find the first time you work out after shaving. Sweat that you could just run back through your hair while running just pours down some other part of your head. Maybe it was just me, but I kept a towel nearby when I used the stationary bike just to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I still can’t bring myself to wear a sweatband…

It’s a complete myth that your hair will grow back thicker, it only seems that way for the first little while ’cause it’s so short (which makes it seem stiff). Once it’s grown in it’ll be the hair you were used to whether you liked it or not.

My hair grows pretty quickly so it really only took a couple of months before it was back to a “short normal”. You can always grow it towards the Buzz cut if you don’t like the bald look, how long it takes is up to your head. For me that would be about 3-4 weeks.

That’s about all I can think of to offer you for your project. I *love* change so I definitely say you should go through with it.

Good Luck, and take some pictures, even if only for yourself. You won’t regret them!

Marc

Posted under General, Photos, Retail Experiences

Kind of a dry posting but I just wanted to put up a kudos for Roto Router after they repaired my water main.

Normally our water consumption is about 4-6K gallons a month. Probably even lower since I replaced all of our toilets with low flow (1.6 gallon) models while renovating the master bedroom last year.

I received a bill a couple of months ago where the bill had jumped to 13K gallons - not a disaster but definitely a problem. Looking back over my bills I saw that the water consumption had been gradually increasing even before this telltale leap but a shower here, a bath there, who knows what’s *really* normal.

Anyway the first thing I did was to contact the water folks (Cobb County Water) and ask what they could offer and what my options would be. They said they could send somebody out to verify if the issue is theirs or mine and to inspect the place generally.

Basically they just confirmed that there WAS indeed water flowing even with everything turned off in the home and they left behind some blue tablets to use to check the toilets (useless for my new toilets) to check for leaks there.

Insultingly, a few days later I received a note from the water folks informing me that they’d uncovered a water leak and that I needed to repair it and fax (who the heck uses *fax* anymore?) them the receipt or they’d consider cutting off my water… nice.

One bright spot, a few month ago my neighbor had the same kind of problem but it cost him 40K gallons twice. Once on his first surprise bill, and then again on the next months bill. The time lag between when the meter is read and the bill arriving was the cause of a lot of that excess consumption. I’m rather surprised there isn’t *some* mechanism in place to flag certain consumption patterns so that the owner is notified A.S.A.P. when a probable leak is in process. I’d say a 100% or more increase in your water use, especially during a drought, is probably a good red-flag.

Interestingly all our water meters were replaced not so long ago, I guess the shock of ripping out and replacing a meter doesn’t do 30+ year old pipe much good..

Anyway I had both “Rescue Router” and “Roto Router” out to give me estimates and we determined that the issue was probably the portion of the piping supplying water to the faucets at the side of the house under my driveway. The good news is that shutting off the water to this portion of the piping mostly eliminated the leak and didn’t affect service to the inside of the house, so I did this right away and then considered my options.

Both plumbers gave me similar estimates and were within $100 of each other. Rescue Router offered to match any other price that we got, but it was going to be a bit of a hassle just to get them down to what Roto Router was already offering so I elected to just go ahead with Roto Router.

In the end, I needed to have a ditch witch dig a trench through my front yard, had a couple of nice 90 degree ball valves installed, had my poorly-insulated outside faucet in the front yard replaced with a proper hydrant-style faucet and disconnected the other faucets on the leaking line. The plumber, Mike Olah, did a pretty good job of repairing what landscaping could be repaired once the pipe had been laid. The only real sign of work was where the grass was dug up and that will just take some time.

All that for the tidy sum of $2,8785. It’s OK, I was wondering what I should do with all that petty cash lying around

I need to make arrangements now, for an additional $150 (very reasonable actually), to have a new faucet installed on the side of the house fed off of the laundry room. Unfortunately, most of the cost there will be in repairing the drywall that needs to be damaged to route the pipes.

Posted under Retail Experiences

Back in October of 2001 I had a radiator flush done by Jiffy Lube. Problem was, the geniuses there forgot to tighten the hose clamps and a couple of days later one of the radiator hoses just fell off, spewing radiator fluid everywhere!

Fortunately I was near a strip mall where I could get some more radiator fluid and continue on my way.

But it’s always been a concern for me. Too many uninspired people too isolated from the customers to feel any responsibility for their actions. You seldom see or meet the people working on your vehicle anymore. I often think that the risk of the damage they are doing to my car through carelessness might outweigh any good I’m doing by following my car’s maintenance plan.

I’ve had someone forget to tighten my oil pan screw and had the oil literally flowing out of the oil pan onto the garage floor. I always open the hood and inspect the work that’s supposedly been done, but who can tell if the valves have been properly shimmed (I used to be able to tell when I’d adjust my tappets on my motorcycle - apparently car valves make just as much noise after they’ve been shimmed as before). Anything other than newly replaced oil filters, or wiring is pretty hard to spot when you’re anxious to get on your way.

I once brought a car in because there was a strong smell of gasoline in the passenger compartment when I would brake hard. After a full servicing, the mechanic said he could find no cause for the smell. Getting off of my butt I went over the engine and found… the PCV valve was just sitting loosely over its rubber seal. Pushing it properly in place made the smell go away permanently.

I could go on and on, but I *hate* taking my car in for servicing. I have no problem paying the money but I want to feel confident that the car will be somehow improved afterwards.

One of my friends’ folks used to buy their cars and just drive them until they stopped working. The last little while with those cars was simply miserable (I recall when their little car only had 3 cylinders firing). OK if you’re a starving student, but not if you’ve got a family to haul around.

Anyway, here is Jiffy Lube being caught red-handed. I especially liked the chickens#!t district manager who kept pretending he wasn’t himself. Those unethical buggers need to be slapped upside the head and then forced to work for minimum wage for the next 15 years with all proceeds from their work that would let them enjoy life taken from them and passed back to the people they bilked.

Posted under Opinions, Retail Experiences

Lunarpages elected to relocate my site to a new server which promptly messed it up.

I had two tickets open with them neither of which got very quick action.

I originally chose Lunarpages because they are rated VERY highly by sites that rate such things but so far I’ve received no help at all. My response to the original notification indicating that my website was messed up appears to have been logged but no action was taken (my email to them was sent about 15 minutes after they notified me).

I called on Friday and was told that they’d look at it and get back to me in a couple of hours (thanks for efficiently getting me off of the phone James).

I reworked this post a bit because I wanted to place it on my blog while I was still having problems (thought I might be able to find a way to do this) but no go.

But, they eventually switched me back to my original server sometime this morning and apologized for the inconvenience.

So the site was down for 80+ hours.

This is the first real issue I’ve had with them so I’ll assume this is a fluke this time..

Posted under Retail Experiences

It’s too bad that they don’t actually tell you about this when you are, I don’t know, actually purchasing your computer!

I picked up a new Dell Inspiron 530 computer back in early October of 2007 and saw that, in spite of having paid for 4 Gigabytes of RAM, the system reported only 3.2 Gigabytes.

In looking around I saw various folks talking about BIOS issues etc. But I’m pretty sure that this MS article explains the situation the best.

To paraphrase, your chip set is only capable of addressing up to 4 Gigabytes of memory. Addressing for other devices (video card memory is given as an example) must also come out of that. So if you have 2 or 3 Gigabytes of RAM installed, the other pieces can still be addressed by the operating system and you don’t notice anything. But install 4 Gigabytes of RAM and you will see Vista’s need to address those devices limited by your chip set and it will eat into the addressing available for your RAM.

The proposed workaround is to ensure that you use a chip set that supports at least 8 Gigabytes of address space. 

Ah, well, as a consumer I suppose I should have known that. Silly me.

This series of exchanges in “James Hayes’ Blog” indicate that there is still an advantage to going with the 4 Gigabytes of RAM if you want more than 2 Gigabytes (check the comments section and look for the postings by “DellCA”). I can’t vouch for what is being expressed, but I can say that they knew about the issue nearly a year before I bought my system and made no effort to either inform or correct my purchase options.

Of course I cannot see how much the wasted .75 Gigabytes of memory has cost me, Dell’s pretty savvy in how they report the computer options on the receipt - one lump sum price. But I think that one of the posters in the blog comments is right in that what Dell is liable for is 3/8 of the cost of the hefty 2 Gigabyte upgrade price. Not so much because it’s not usable, but because they knew it to be unusable and blithely offer the option anyway. Let’s face it. Were I a *real* computer hardware expert, I would be piecing together my own system, not buying from Dell anyway. We buy from Dell because we know enough to want to customize our systems for a known need (I know my computer habits mean that I need more memory than average) but do not want to spend all of our waking hours troubleshooting those systems. Dell’s biggest value to me is that they will ensure that all the pieces I have chosen will all work together properly and then deliver the result to me so I can just get on with using it.

Dell has fallen down on the job here.

Posted under Opinions, Retail Experiences, Tech Stuff