Another Day, Another Piece Of Crap

Today was a day of noticing how quality is a dead art. MJ started crunching some numbers to see if we could save some money on our technology platform: land line, cellular, interweb, and cable. What she found was that we’ve been getting charged for more than a year by a scam on my cell phone. Nobody downloaded or authorized anything. Some company just started billing us ten dollars a month for the hell of it. MJ called Bellsouth and spent forty-five minutes trying to get them to refund the unauthorized purchases. I googled the company that was stealing from us, and the very first thing that comes up is that they’re fraudulent. Why would Bellsouth allow purchases from this company when they don’t even see any money from the transactions? All it does is create customer service issues. Since MJ was persistent, Bellsouth is basically going to have to front us $120 while they try to sort it out with the thieves. They’ll probably write it off because they can’t be bothered to chase $120, but all that means is that’s money out of their pocket. The other option would have been to lose us as customers, which they’re on the verge of anyway. I would think that the wireless phone market was highly competitive. They all use the same technology and satellites, so the only ways to differentiate are price and/or customer service, but I guess that’s not the case. The other crappy product I had to deal with today is our new ceiling fan. The weather is cooling off and we won’t be needing the fan as much. The problem is that we can’t change the speed of the fan without taking off the light shade/chandelier/cover. Our options are to hang the light cover properly and securely, which traps the fan chain against part of the motor case so it can’t be pulled or we can leave the shade loose and hope it doesn’t fall and shatter, filling our bed with shards of broken glass. It’s a design flaw and the fan company decided it was cheaper not to give a f**k, but I’m the bad guy for going on a rampage and murdering everyone involved.