Posts tagged as:

customer service

Look, I love Men’s Health magazine, and not just because at least once each issue for the last five years — I’ve been keeping track! — an article has mentioned the University of Florida. I had my subscription set to automatically renew every year. But when I switched banks from Washington Mutual to Bank of [...]

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Bally’s Total Fitness Account Update

Thursday February 12, 2009

Dealing with my hacked checking account has been a major pain in the ass. I have had to update dozens of companies who were automatically debiting my checkcard. The fine people at Bally’s Total Fitness allow you to pay your bill online, but for some reason it is near impossible to determine how to update [...]

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The Seam and the Hole

Monday April 28, 2008

When the barista at Starbucks handed me my coffee this morning, the hole in the lid was directly over the seam in the cup. This, I have come to learn, is a recipe for disaster. If the hole is within a centimeter of the seam you are almost guaranteed to experience “coffee drip” on your [...]

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Dell Laptop Hard Drive Failure

Tuesday March 18, 2008

Last week my wife called me to say that her laptop — my old Dell Latitude D610 — wouldn’t boot. Of course her whole life is on this machine and she had a paper due that evening and, no, she didn’t have any backups. So I left the office around 3pm to try to save [...]

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Disappointing Food

Tuesday February 12, 2008

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

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The new member registration form at the Blue Cross of California website has what I consider to be several major bugs. A user’s username must contain a number and a letter. Because this is not exactly a ‘net “standard”, they need to do a better job of bringing this to your attention. When you submit [...]

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Rock, Paper, Scissors at Work

Friday June 22, 2007

Rochambeau the front line. Seth is brilliant.

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The Secret Superpower of Starbucks

Friday March 9, 2007

When I have the opportunity I am apt to choose the underdog. Aside from the sinfully delicious Cinnamon Dolce Latte, for example, I dislike Starbucks and will generally go to the mom-and-pop coffee shops scattered around Los Angeles. More often than not lately, though, I am finding that Starbucks’ secret superpower is consistency. Mussolini kept [...]

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At some point about fifteen years ago I subscribed to Sports Illustrated. With the exception of a tragic few months during which most of my mail was trapped shuffling between coasts, I haven’t missed an issue. Generally I ignore all the commemorative editions and t-shirt and sweatshirt offers; I have enough t-shirts and sweatshirts to [...]

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Why Not Just Make Me Happy?

Thursday November 9, 2006

Dear IHOP, At the end of September I visited your brand new Marina Del Rey location with several of my co-workers. Everyone in my office had been excited for months while we waited for you to open. When you decided last year to demolish the friendly, inexpensive, personal, small-town bagel shop that we all knew [...]

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