Sweet Catastrophe

Not Always Right

These are little bits of retail genius. Lots of *headdesk* moments. Here’s one from this week:

Not Thinking Outside The Box, Part 3

(A customer places an unopened box on the counter.)

Customer: “Can you please check to make sure this isn’t broken?”

Me: “Sure thing!”

(I open box, remove Styrofoam, check product, replace in Styrofoam, close box.)

Customer: “Excellent. I’ll take that. Actually, can I please have one that hasn’t been opened?”

An oldie but goodie:

Please See The “Time Travel” Section

Customer: “Do you have a picture book of dinosaurs?”

Me: “Sure.”

(We walk to the dinosaur books and I show him many books with various sketches and paintings of dinosaurs)

Customer: “No, not pictures…PHOTOGRAPHS. Photos of dinosaurs, please. Where are those?”

I haven’t kept it a secret that I sort of love Buy.com, but I had another experience with them this week that cemented my love even further.

I’ve been shopping around for a new FM Transmitter for the Jeep. Despite being almost 5 years old, my Belkin still works great, but the position of my cigarette outlet puts it in an awkward spot. It sits right behind the shifter so when I’m in park, it’s touching the screen. I didn’t even have any minor scratches on the face of my dear Ripper until I moved to the Jeep, and now I have three. =( I can’t see the screen when it’s in park either so I can’t watch The Office in my Jeep during breaks at work, and that’s super disappointing. And the positioning is awkward enough that I can’t comfortably reach the “Next” button when Shuffle isn’t being friendly.

So two weeks ago I found one of the transmitters I’ve been looking at on the Weekly Sale page for a really great price. It was regularly around the $50 range, but it was on sale for cheap enough that I didn’t even have to think twice about buying it. I could skip fast food one night and justify buying it.

I couldn’t tell exactly how the hookup was set up, but it came with a remote, so I knew it was guaranteed to be better than what I already had.

I was sorely disappointed when it arrived. I immediately hooked it up and found that the remote just wouldn’t work for me. It had to be pointed directly at the unit, and needed to be within 3 inches. Pointless? Yup. And at times, the buttons would change functions– I’d be pressing “Next” for the next song and it would just start fast forwarding. I thought maybe I had pressed it a certain way to make that happen (no instruction booklet since it was mostly a self-explanatory unit) but then it started changing the FM station, which was supposed to be controlled by a completely separate section of the remote! I was annoyed, but the unit itself sat much closer to the dash and thus pulled my iPod away from the shifter so I decided I’d keep it and just chalk the remote up as a loss. I didn’t pay that much anyway, ya know?

And then the next day I got nothing out of it. I got so frustrated flipping through stations and when they’d sync up the station would go clear like it normally does but it wouldn’t transmit the iPod through. When I parked I just started trying random things with the remote and eventually I turned it off. The screen on the unit even read, “Off” and lo and behold, my iPod started coming through the speakers.

At that point I packaged it back up and jumped on Buy.com to start the refund process. When I pulled my order up, I read that since my item was purchased through a Marketplace Seller that I needed to contact them directly. I don’t know why, but this automatically put me in defense mode because I expected them to hassle me. I’ve never had a problem with Buy.com providing assistance so I don’t know why I was worried, but I was. I emailed them and kept it factual until the end when I told them I thought it was a, “glitchy piece of crap from China.” Oops.

Anyway, I was prepared to argue with someone about paying for the defective item to be returned and waiting two weeks for a refund, but I was shocked to find that within 24 hours I received an email from Buy.com letting me know that a refund request had been issued. I was confused because I hadn’t spoken with anyone about sending the item back! But moments later I got an email letting me know that they’d issued a request for a refund to me, they apologized for the (maybe) defective item, and told me I didn’t need to send it back.

I was pleasantly surprised by that! My email was pretty clear that the unit’s basic functions were working, just that it was being awfully quirky, so I’m surprised they told me to keep it! I’m leaving it in my kit in the Jeep to have as a backup if/when mine gives out.

So of course Buy.com and their Marketplace Sellers have solidified my love for them. I just wasn’t sure how picky they were about who they allowed to sell on the site, but now I see their sellers offer just as great customer service as Buy.com does.

So now I’m looking at this transmitter so I can raise the iPod above the shifter and turn it towards me. It also charges the iPod, which is an absolute must for me in a transmitter. I already know the shape will hold Ripper in place safely, I’m just not sure if I’m ready to try my luck with another remote control. I also can’t shake that, “you get what you pay for” vibe so the low prices are scaring me a little. lol I mean, I paid almost $100 for my current transmitter and it’s still going strong– I really want to find something like that again with an updated style to fit my new needs. What do you think?

^^^^ That was slipped into two email forwards I read today.

It took me 11 seconds to open a new tab, type snopes.com, type a keyword from the forward and see the results that list it as false. Does that sound hard?

Just as I thought people I know were finally starting to check the validity of an email before they passed it on, I started seeing phrases stating that the email has been confirmed by Snopes… Well it’s written in this email that sounds completely bogus, so that must be true!

Really, it probably takes you more time to filter through your contacts and decide which 10 people you’re sending the email to than it would take to open Snopes and check for yourself.

I mean, if there was a colon cleanse review going around in a forward that said if you use this product, the company will send you $18,000, would you believe it? No? So how’s that any different than believing that forwarding an email is going to donate money, win you money, or get you a free laptop?

Just check this stuff out before you send it on!

Someone actually came in recently and passed out an email with South Georgia Medical Center’s header on it– it was one of those Warning forwards that just freaks people out. It was also complete bull and has been circulating inboxes for 9 years now. Makes me feel very comfortable about going to SGMC, ya know?

Speaking of older family on Facebook, this is pretty accurate when it comes to helping my family with their computers. Yes, I’m pretty good with a computer, but I certainly don’t know every program, nor have I encountered every possible problem.

Found at xkcd.

Wait for the massive eyeroll….. okay now, I’ve had a huge influx of relatives adding me on Facebook in the last few weeks. I don’t so much mind having aunts and uncles, or other people I grew up seeing regularly adding me there, it doesn’t make me dance with joy or anything, but it doesn’t get an eyeroll. But I’ve had people add me that, if pressed, I could still count the number of times I’ve seen them in my 24 years of existence… why are you adding me on Facebook!?

And of course, they don’t stop at the friend requests, they’ve each got an apparent quota to meet on the number of mindless applications they can join and invite me into.

It reminds me SO much of when older generations first got into email. (And by older, I do not mean old, I simply mean older than me.) Every single forwarded email they ever got had to be sent to their entire contact list, no matter how ridiculous it may be.

I’m not even gonna lie. It’s driving me a little nuts. After the last layout change to Facebook, I started spending significantly less time on. So now, every few days I log on and I don’t even want to look at all my requests. It would take me 20 minutes just to click ‘no’ on all of them!

I keep forgetting to tell you guys about a nifty little site I found called Crap, I missed it! Primarily it’s for television shows– you go through and click on shows you want to set reminders for and it sends you one lump email first thing in the morning for any of your chosen shows that are supposed to have new episodes that night! (You can also choose to be alerted the day before, or after instead)

It’s really, really helpful for me since I rarely get to watch a show as it airs and therefore don’t normally see if there’s a preview for the next week (which is the quickest way to know if there’s a new ep coming.)

They also offer alerts for new albums, books, or you can choose categories and get periodic alerts on the top 10 or 50 corresponding items on digg or youtube.

It’s not on the main page yet, but in the sidebar you’ll find a place to subscribe for movies and video games as well.

I haven’t looked through those lists yet, but I know the list of TV shows seemed fairly comprehensive to me. Someone mentioned it on a forum I frequent and I’ve been using the subscription for almost two months now and it’s been really helpful =)

I wish I could innocently say that I have no idea where all my free time has gone this week, but I do.

I know exactly what I’ve spent literally hours upon hours doing, looking at the clock only to realize it’s 3 or 4 hours later than I genuinely thought it was.

I’ve been absolutely consumed by fan fiction! It gets such a bad name for the sheer volume of completely random stories out there written by any and everyone with opposable thumbs, and the ones that read worse than I imagine a script for cheap late-night cinemax films do…why these people bother, I have no idea.

But this week I fell into all these fics with simply incredible stories! I’ve been so pleasantly surprised, but at the same time, I’ve gone through every light setting on my monitor to save my eyes! I honestly can’t count up the hours I’ve spent here reading this week.

Of course, I’ve been toying with the idea of purchasing an e-reader of some sort, but I’ve put it off, wondering if I’d really miss my normal books. I love having them fill my shelves.

This new fic love is starting to sway me though…I can upload these stories online to my e-reader as well and not be confined to this computer screen, or sinking to reading them on my phone! By now I’ve sort of promised myself to keep checking up for one on sale so I can more easily justify buying one. I think both my computer chair and my eyes could use the break… I just wish I could really try one out for a few days, just to get a feel for whether or not it’d be something I’d really want. Could I give up endlessly filling my shelves?

I’ve been wanting to change my livejournal name for ages. faded_faerie just hasn’t felt right for a long time, but I’d never thought about it enough to settle on something I’d like that I would be much less likely to outgrow. In an act of semi-spontaneity today I bought a name change token and changed my account to jadeinbetween to match my twitter name. I wish lj would allow uppercase letters in their account names, but they don’t, oh well! Since I paid for it (guess I’ll skip buying Chinese food tonight like I had planned…), there shouldn’t be any changes necessary. It’s supposed to just automatically change everything for me and I didn’t clear my friends list or anything like that. Any old links should forward properly, not that it really matters since my lj has been private for a long time.

It all looks okay on my end, but if any of you lj pals of mine notice anything wonky, let me know!

Oh wow I’m so happy to have everything back up and running! I did everything at once so there were a variety of things keeping my blogs down and it got extended due to some confusion and me getting assigned to probably the single unreliable customer service rep at my new host. I’ve been involved with a total of 12 different reps since I first started asking questions to get prepared for the move and make my final decisions and 11 of them have gone above and beyond in answering my questions and getting things settled for me! Those 11 have also been very, very quick about responding to me as well. If I hadn’t just sat back and pretended to be patient when I first became concerned, I’d have had things back up probably two days ago, but since I’ve seen other people have so much down-time while moving hosts and registrars I just assumed that was the cause for my wait. Oh well! All straight now!

It’s been a little stressful though. I’ve been frantically checking everything repeatedly and worrying that there’d be some reason they couldn’t get everything working for me….trying to figure out how I’d use my backups if I needed to, but luckily it appears everything has settled quite nicely!

In some of my not-so-relaxing time sitting here, I started hearing a crunching noise. At first I thought there was something settling in my trash can….or my chair was creaking or something, but after about 20 minutes I realized it was coming from the WALL! A little research told me it could possibly be carpenter ants, which matches up with our unexpected ant invasion in the bathroom two weeks ago….I heard them on and off for three hours, but I guess maybe they’ve gotten into some weight loss pills and sworn off eating my apartment ’cause I haven’t heard them since then! Of course, they stopped about 20 minutes before Ryan got home so I have no other witnesses. I don’t know if I want to hear them again just to validate myself or just be happy that they (or whatever it really was) are gone!

Anyway, all’s well! My hosting is officially up-to-date and paid for and so is my registration! So relieved.

Alrighty, well I’m getting ready to switch hosts this week and I’m a little terrified. I know new hosting is a good idea, that’s not what I’m worried about, but the process of moving everything over has me worried about some things going wonky. Fortunately, the new host will move everything for me so I don’t have to stress that much, but I’m still concerned about something going wrong or running into more expenses to get everything settled. I asked a ton of questions last month so I think I covered it all, but we’ll see! The change should be within the next day or two so if mine or Kristi’s blogs disappear for a bit, that’s why!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve never had any problems with my current host and the price was absolutely right, but the setup is a little confusing and I need something as dumbed down and Jade-friendly as I can get if I’m going to continue blogging and taking small business opportunities to make extra money. It’s a small price increase, but it’s little enough that it’s worth feeling more comfortable with my cpanel.

So here goes nothing!