Standard Mischief

Here’s something interesting in an email I got from Palm Support:

No written advice or information sent to you by Palm may be resent, distributed or posted on any media accessible to the public (including, but not limited to, any Internet site or bulletin board) without Palm’s prior written consent.

If that’s the case, I hereby declare that every time a corporation sends me a canned email response, they are also obligated to send me $10,000 via certified check.

In other words, I think Palm here is trying to secure privileged communications after the fact. I suppose this is to keep unhappy PDA customers from venting publicly on how shoddy customer service really is. In my case, I’m having problems replacing a CD that was shipped defective from the factory. I’d be happy being pointed to an ISO image that I could burn a copy for myself, and they would be happy if I purchased it again for $19.99.

I’m also further cautioned that I can’t order the CD via email, and instead must call in the order. I’m informed that there’s a technical support fee of $25 per incident after 90 days from the date of purchase, but this fee does not apply in this case because “This fee is only applicable for real-time troubleshooting assistance for handhelds that are out of the warranty coverage?.

I have fond memories of calling in my (under warranty) broken PDA and having the tech on call send me a replacement PDA overnight by express courier at no charge. Once I had synchronized all my files on the new PDA and got it up and working, I was provided with labels and free shipping to return my broken one. Nowadays, you need to budget for two PDAs to ensure a piece of hardware you have come to rely on is always available.

I’m on somewhat friendly terms with my ex-SO. Which I suppose means that we exchange a few emails or call when something important happens. Anyway, she forwards every single email chain letter or inspirational saying that lands in her inbox. Five seconds of googling usually lands me on snopes.com, and I usually debunk whatever crap she sent and send her back the link. Being shown that verse 9:11 in the Quran has nothing to do with eagles usually gets most people to check facts before perpetuating hoaxes and chain emails, but not her. I suppose she just wants to stay in touch.

The chain emails go right in the dumpster. And because I broke the chain, I’ve been struck by lighting, robbed, run over by a cement truck, and sued by the courts in numerous frivolous lawsuits. Not.

Anyway, today she sent me one of my already favorites. Of course the way she set it, it was falsely attributed to State Representative Mitchell Kaye, and it was sent as plain text, as an attachment, with a zillion other peoples email addresses attached. This email vector as a Whispering Campaign, is so 1998. Let it die, please. Go create buzz via fake cats swinging from the celing fans or something. The title was literally this: Re: Fwd: Fw: Fw: New preamble to the USA

Since it’s so good, here it is as a link, with the proper title (just in case you’ve already read it too):

The Bill of No Rights by Lewis Napper

I was at Weis grocery store, going through the u-scan thingy again with just a few items. There was no wait, a good sign. I scanned my bottle of soda water and plopped the tall skinny thing on the belt. The belt lurches into action, probably a little too suddenly. while the belt is trying to pull the item through the plexiglass tunnel, the bottle topples over and starts rolling. The sensors in the plexi tunnel sense that there’s only one item, but they can’t get it to transfer to the second belt to be conveyed to the bagging area. Usually, in this case they try to kick the thingy back for rescanning, but the bottle is sitting in the “V” junction spinning between the two belts being variously jiggled back and forth. The anti-shoplifting plexi tunnel of shrinkage prevention is looking mighty frustrated for a smart terminal, and it finally gives up and starts flashing the red strobe.

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You can guess the outcome, when it?s busy, you can?t get any help at the robo-scanner, when it’s slow, except there’s three people in line at the only real teller, and those three people are buying two weeks worth of food each, and the u-scan-it thingy gets flummoxed over a bottle of seltzer water, you can’t get any help either. That big flashing strobe might make you think that at that very instant, in the secret manager’s bat cave, there’s a red phone flashing to get the manager’s attention, but that’s a false hope. One minute, two minutes, two and a half minutes and I leave my purchases there on the belt and scattered in the cart.

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It was a dark and stormy night. I was at Blows, trying to buy a electrical wiring box….

I went to the hardware store the other day. I got what I needed, and decided to go through the you-scan-it auto-till robo-teller checkout thingy at the local Blows hardware store. I get to the front, and theres a freaking queue to use the machines. There’s four machines. One is out-of-order, on another one there’s the one sales-droid helping a customer, on the third, there’s a guy that’s stuck because he had the audacity to buy a piece of trim. Apparently, when you purchase certain items, a flag is raised and you can’t finish and pay for your purchase until teh sales-droid comes around and keys in their special code that says ?yes indeedy, the person is only rightfully purchasing the same number of these things that the customer scanned?. On the fourth machine, there’s a guy stuck, just like on number three. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the store, the few tellers staffed by real breathing clerks have tremendously long lines behind them. This store is always like this. I’ve gotta quit shopping here.

I ask the sales droid (who has been at her keyboard clicking away for the last three minutes, and didn’t clearly look like she was helping anyone) ?Excuse me ma’am, do you think you could help this customer ahead of me who’s been waiting patently for the last five minutes for some help??, gesturing over to till #4. She looks up from her keyboard and says ?I’m sorry, but I’m still helping this customer here (waves to till #2). We wait another minute and the lady waiting ahead of me gives up and goes to stand in the impossibly long clerked lines, I’m head of the queue now. I say ?this guy (#3) merely needs to be approved, and he’s been waiting forever? The sales-droid gets up and quickly blesses till #3 and starts walking back to her keyboard. The guy at #3 starts feeding in pennies and dollar bills. I pipe up again, ?could you possibly call over the manager on duty? I could check out over here, but the guy that’s been waiting here for five minutes for your blessing, and he gave up and then walked away. Don’t you have anyone to help you when it gets busy?? I really didn’t mean to take her away from the guy at #2, but she walks up to the now-free #4 and says ?what’s wrong?? I told her that the guy gave up after waiting so long and the crap he scanned in needed to be cleared. She had to go into service mode, delete, and key in her super-secret code each time she wanted to take a single item of the list.

I don’t get any satisfaction out of being the squeaky wheel, or tormenting the poor sales-droid, but I’ll be dammed if I’ll sit by and receive crappy customer service. This lady was on top of things, but she was overwhelmed. It’s unbelievable that she could not get some quick help from her manager when it gets busy. I don’t know why she was stuck for so long helping the guy at till #2, but I suspect he wanted to buy 3 feet of wire, or a random nut or bolt and didn’t happen to come prepared enough to bring his own pen and paper and she was stuck looking up the cost of an unbarcoded 98 cent item.

It’s no secret that I hate grocery store “loyalty cards”. A chain will give discounts to it’s shoppers, but only if they sign up with all their most personal information. Then, the data provided is used in a number of privacy detracting sleazy ways.

Anyway, there’s a number of ways you could go about circumventing the system, although there’s no guarantee that they are completely legal.

Just off the top of my head, and not advocating anything, I suppose in theory you could:

Trade cards with friends

sign up with fake information

Use Rob’s bonus card swap page to generate a new barcode (does not seem to be working anymore, he used to serve up 5 or so random barcode pictures)

Mail away for the other Rob’s Safeway barcode sticker, and place it over your own.

Key in another person’s phone number at the checkout kiosk.

It’s that last method that seems to have given me the most mileage. You see, I have a number of coworkers who have home phone numbers were just a bit off from mine, and since I don’t call myself that often, I’d sometimes misdial at the kiosk. The funny thing was, it seemed to work every single time. (I thought I was being pretty slick.)

Someone tipped me off, and it wasn’t until I started making a number of dramatic misdial mistakes that I was sure it was working. And it does indeed work.

It seems that at the local DC area (and further) chain, Giant Food, you can key in any phone number, any number at all, and still get the discounts. I suspect that this is a kludge to allow a customer to receive the discount even before their application for a bonus card has been properly processed into the database.

So if you were to go through the auto-till self checkout thingy and key in a number, (say area code + a local exchange + a random number between 9800 and 9999 (which were traditionally reserved for payphones)), and that number was not in the database, the thingy would say, “your bonus card has been accepted” and then immediately say, “your bonus card was not recognized” and then of course, you would receive the current advertised discounts.

Simple as that. No tags to carry, no barcodes to scan, and the only skill needed would be having poor keypunching abilities.