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.

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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…

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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When I arrived here I was healthy and did not have kids so my contact with the medical system was minimal. Pretty much limited to a general physical now and then.

As I live here longer, I’m starting to grow more and more fearful of the financial repercussions of even a modest illness and find myself hesitant to take advantage of what is arguably one of the best medical systems in the world.

I’ve had a couple of procedures done over the past half decade or so and found myself annoyed that it is very difficult to get a cost for a procedure. They seem easily able to give you a bill before you go into the operating theater but try to get that bill amount when you are setting the appointment and people seem confused. On top of the, rather substantial, bill that you pay up front. The little bills that keep floating in weeks or months later are unexpected and annoying. When you call about them you will find that they are “usual and customary” but that is only for folks in the billing departments of hospitals or in insurance departments.

If I went to a mechanic and had my transmission replaced you can be sure that I am going to get an estimate from him. That estimate better be what I’m charged at the end unless something unusual comes up and, if it’s substantial, I expect a further call to ensure that I want the extra work done (maybe they notice a broken support for the engine while they’ve got the car up on the lift). You can be damn sure I’m not going to be receiving a bill from the “Oil Support Technician” or “Hydraulic Lift Specialist” two months after the fact because they consider it “Usual and Customary”.

In medicine it seems perfectly OK to have essential folks’ services completely omitted from any estimates. I had a hernia operation about 6 years ago and the anesthetist’s (or anesthesiologist’s – can never keep those two straight)  services, something that I consider quite essential when I’m to be rendered unconscious for surgery, were charged for separately at least a month after the fact. I had to call to see if this was legit or some kind of scam because I was so amazed at this boldness.

I need to have an MRI to sort out some issues left over from my bicycle accident a few months back. On Friday my doctor tells me he’ll begin a precertification for this. Today I receive a call from the MRI place to schedule an appointment. I went ahead and set up a date and decided to persue this to see if it’s possible to determine one’s liability and maybe plan for this kind of thing.

The girl on the phone for scheduling, of course, can do nothing for me to help nail down the cost of this thing. So I contact my insurance company. After 15 minutes waiting on the phone I find out that my insurance company contracts out radiology type stuff to a 3rd party precertification company. I’m told I need to call back if I want to find out more about costs because their department also doesn’t handle that.

So I call the insurance company back. We’ll leave the sorry-ass IVR system out of this conversation suffice it to say that it aided me not at all in getting to a customer service rep. All the rep is able to tell me is that I’ll have a $500 deductible and then I’m responsible for 20% of the cost beyond that. OK, that’s in my benefits plan. How much does this kind of procedure cost?  All he is able to tell me is that it will be a negotiated amount and that my liability will be as he’s already said.

So I contact the third party pre-cert group and find that my doctor’s office hasn’t yet initiated the precertification process with them and that my plan is the kind where only a doctor or the MRI folks can initiate the process. But that this process typically takes one business day, so my appointment (scheduled for next week) is not yet in jeopardy.

So I contact my doctors office to see what needs to be done, they acknowledge that they need to initiate this and that they’ll call me back.They call back within the hour and it turns out that this is the normal way that things are done since the pre-cert company likes to know where and when the procedure will occur. So I’ve jumped the gun on this part but they tell me that everything is now in place.

Finally I call the billing department of the MRI folks. It took them 10 minutes to figure out how much this was going to cost me. When I asked if this was an all inclusive price, explicitly mentioning that there’ll be someone administering an IV they did agree that I can expect another, separate bill from them that should only be in the range of “a hundred or so dollars”.

So, an MRI of my head, both with contrast and without will cost me no less than $868. With a little math that puts the “negotiated cost” at $2,340. Then I can expect at least another $100 bill to come floating in sometime after that for the IV person and I have no idea how many other folks it is “usual and customary” to have wander into the room while the procedure is under way and then send me a bill.

The care we have available might be some of the best in the world, but the cost for that care is terrifying – for its magnitude certainly but more so for its quixotic cost. For all its pitfalls, under a socialized medical scheme for all but the most catastrophic of issues my liability is capped so I do not have to put my self or my family at financial risk – heck it’s not even a risk because you cannot even begin to forecast the costs before you begin it’s really more of a game of chance than anything that can be calculated.

So color me leaning back in favor of the socialized medicine side of the debate.  If we can get to a system where I can get off the phone with an appointment and a guaranteed estimate (representing the cost both with and without insurance) and none of those “gotchas” that make this such a risk I will rethink this. Hell I can do it for my car, my cat and my washing machine. Surely we’ve got enough knowledge and experience to estimate simple procedures accurately by now.

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After ignoring them for my subsequent computer purchase I’ve since ordered other Dell products, mostly because they offer IMHO the best combination of customizability and pricing that I’ve been able to find. My Inspiron 530 worked pretty well except for the “missing RAM” problem that a lot of people both with and without Dell products got stung by. It was that missing RAM experience combined with my earlier customer service issue that had driven me to try a boutique online computer shop instead of Dell originally.

Once that was all sorted out I decided to go with an Alienware machine in spite of my concerns. The costs and ability to get pretty much exactly what I wanted won out in the end.

About 3 weeks after I received the new system, the fan on the Video card (ATI Radeon HD 5870) started making noises that told me that it was giving up the ghost. It was especially disappointing given that all the other fans on that computer stay very quiet depending on the load. This one fan was louder than my nearby fridge when it’s in full swing.

So I called Alienware support (still separate from Dell’s support ultimately even though the front end is the same) and all the horror stories I had heard about Dell ruining the Alienware branding proved… unfounded.

The tech was knowledgeable, we quickly came to an agreement as to the issue. They shipped out a new card which arrived a few days later and whose box I used to return the failing card with no hassle or cost.

The new card is working great and I’ve had no other issues. The Alienware machine is pricier than piecing together a machine for yourself, but that also depends on how much you value your time. I much prefer *using* my computer to tweaking it, generally speaking.

I wanted to put this kudo out there for Alienware’s support and say that my experience, at least, was just fine.

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A few days ago one of them stopped working so I started pulling it apart to figure out what the problem was. I ended up on Flushmate’s website and found a wealth of information, most useful were a series of videos showing how to test and replace various components of their system. I was originally a little hesitant to go for the new technology since I *knew* that I could always get parts for conventional toilets at my local hardware store but was not sure what would happen should I have issues with these new units.

After watching the videos I could tell right away what was not obvious from reading the install manual, the actuator shaft of the flush cartridge was sheared through, but the break was smooth enough I did not initially recognize that it was not *supposed* to be in two pieces. I called their 1-800 number and, as it was a Saturday, I ended up leaving them a voicemail with the particulars of my situation.

Come Monday morning, Dawn from flushmate called me back and we determined that the flush cartridge was indeed broken and covered under their 10 year warranty. Even though the toilet had not originally be registered with them they honored the warranty and immediately shipped out a replacement cartridge.

Thursday the part arrived by regular mail and half an hour later the toilet was right as rain.

So I wanted to toss up my story of an easy to work with company that honors its stated commitment to its product without a lot of fuss and bother.

And these are still the best toilets we have ever owned. Three years and I’m sure they can flush anything Consumer Reports can throw at them. Exactly what our sewage system needs!

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