Rants

Possibly the only real negative thing about living in a small town is the inability to get a slightly off-beat item on short notice. The stores are like 3/4 scale models of the ones elsewhere, so they don’t stock a real wide variety of merchandise. I had a idea (I know what you are thinking, keep it to yourself please) about a prize for a little contest I’m running for the Miata Club. Well, you get it in this town. Fortunately I have a couple weeks, allowing me to order it over the net and get it on time. If I needed by this Friday like I first thought I would have been shit out of luck.

My package from J.C. Whitney arrived today. I opened the box and dug down into the sea of foam peanuts and pulled out a small box with a window tinting strip. Huh!?! Must be a free gift or something, so I start digging again. I find nothing else. This sucks, I check the packing slip and it lists what I ordered, 7″ Round Chrome Headlight Protectors. I call “Customer Service” and after the usual 5 minute wait on hold the rep tells me to just fill out the RMA conveniently located right on the back of my invoice and send the part back. I guess this happens a lot. Now I’ve got probably another month before I get a 2nd try at getting what I ordered. The only marginally good thing out of all this is that they are really going to earn that $9.95 shipping & handling charge. They have to ship me my parts twice plus they are going to reimburse me to mail the incorrect part back.

Thursday evening while hooking up the new DVD player I thought I smelt a dead animal smell. Again on Friday when I passed thru the living room on the way out the front door to get the paper I caught another whiff. When I got to work I called the pest control folks and asked them to come out and check under the house for carcasses. We have had trouble with possums before and I thought maybe we had a dead one under there. The fellow came out and looked all under the house but could not find anything. He did say he could see where a possum or something was under there. He spotted some fleas so along with the smell killer he sprayed under the house for fleas. Friday I swear the smell was still there faintly. Saturday as well, but Donna nor her mom, who spend more time in the living room than I, have said anything, so I ain’t saying anything until they do.

A couple of days ago I whined about J.C. Whitney charging $9.95 to ship a 1.25 pound package to me. They also gave me a tracking number. If you have ever followed a UPS package on line they let you know every step of the way where your shipment is, by contrast the USPS thing leaves a lot to be desired. They tell you that the status is updated every evening, but don’t say when in the evening and my status didn’t change from the 13th until the 15th. Not only that the last entry says my package arrived in Aiken at 12:00AM on the 15th, but I didn’t get it today. I guess I’ll have to wait until Monday. Contrast that to the UPS delivery (click on the detail button) of my new DVD player, which I got Thursday morning thank you very much.

I bought some fru-fru for the Miata the other day – $7.95. Some stainless steel stone guards to put over the 7″ round headlights. It’s not like I travel any gravel roads or anything, I just thought it would look kind of retro (and different.) They charged me $9.95 for shipping! They can’t weigh much and they are sending the stuff via the US Postal Service, so $5 would be more like it. Maybe this rant shouldn’t be so specific because they are not the only ones who probably make a good percentage of their profits from the so-called shipping & handling charges. FWIW, Best Buy is shipping me my new DVD player for Free!

Finally got around to looking through the copies of my medical records from the doctor that fired me. Right in there he calls me hypochondriacal about my BP! Yikes. He also mentions that they told me I might want to seek some psychiatric care for my worries. I remember asking about that after all the test came back negative, but they pooh-poohed it. Hmmmm. Trying to sabotage my new doctor with those kind of comments? Or is that my paranoia showing?

Screwed around on the computer doing stuff I wanted instead of what I should have and lost track of time. So instead of actually trying to Blog at 10:20PM I just went to Blogger and typed in a couple letters and posted it. It is now 7:30AM on Tuesday morning and I’m at work entering this drivel. But because I did what I did last night, it will look like I blogged this last night. Too bad Enron isn’t hiring executives, I’d be a shoe in.