The Substantially Similar Weblog

I’ve complained about Verizon twice before, and still haven’t gotten around to my omnibus Verizon entry. The latest issue is that I cancelled my Verizon DSL over two months ago, having switched to Speakeasy, which, although much more expensive, provides so much better service (both by way of connectivity/throughput and customer support) that it’s actually worth it. I called Verizon at the time, and asked them to cancel the DSL, which they said they would do immediately. The next month, DSL was still on my bill, but I figured it was probably a billing cycle issue.

The following month, the DSL charges were still on my bill, so I called to find out what happened. They had no record at all of my prior request to cancel service, but said they would happily cancel it now and refund both months. I asked them if there should have been a paper trail for the earlier request, and they said there wouldn’t be. I asked them if I could have some sort of paper or email acknowledgment of my current request, and the representative insisted it wasn’t necessary (and apparently just “not done.”).

Now again this month, I still have the charge on my bill, and the last two months have not been refunded. When I try to call today, however, after maneuvering through several menus to get to a human, I am informed that not only are all representatives currently serving other customers, but there are no available phone lines for holding, and I should call back later. Click.

How is it that this country’s largest phone company doesn’t have enough phone lines?

(I suppose another question is how is it that they manage to retain so many customers. But that’s a question for another day.)

(Any Verizon folks out there who could comment on this entry and provide some illumination?)

Dear Msnbot: why do you hammer on port 8080 when there is nothing listening there?

I recently set in place a comprehensive iptables firewall and have started logging dropped packets. I’ve noticed the highest number of dropped packets comes from 65.54.188.51 aka msnbot.msn.com. Does it just try port 8080 on every known domain name, “just in case”?

I’m not so fond of Ticketmaster, given that they seem to have a monopoly and charge exorbitant fees with very little value added.

So I was pleasantly surprised to come across these frogs reviewing the Ticketmaster website.

A few months ago, I blogged about a bad experience I had with U-Haul that indicated the company has serious systemic problems. A few weeks later, a U-Haul employee posted two pseudonymous responses to my critique, apparently not realizing that their U-Haul IP address would reveal the true author. For some reason, my “consumer complaint” blog entries tend to get high rankings in Google and attract poorly crafted rebuttals.

Just now, the entry received two more comments. Both are from the same IP address, apparently again a U-Haul employee who didn’t realize their posts were easily traceable. I won’t respond specifically to these comments, but I thought it would be worth highlighting them here. I hope consumers (and perhaps U-Haul management) see these:

The first one is entitled “loved uhaul”:

all of you suck. i hate people like you. you see it’s people like you who actually hold there trucks up and mess up the schedule process. i moved 4 times with u-haul in the past year and only had a problem once but it was because people like you. you people who wanted to be given more time and not return it on time. while making a reservation over the phone i was told my move was being held up because a person tried to pull a trail that they were not supposted to causing it to overheat. these are trucks they do break-down, just like cars to. muck-mucks.

The second, “hey there” (remember, from the same author):

I’m a current U-Haul employee and I must say you’ve all had some really bad experiences with our company. It is very unfortunate, but really is venting out your problems really the answer? I’m responding to this very dim-witted website because I think your cause is in vain. We are the largest self-moving company in North America. While you may want to think that you’re hurting our business, your not. If anything you give us employees something to laugh about on our breaks. Hundreds of thousands of reservations our made throughout our thousands of locations everyday and we fill about 95%. For you unfortunate saps I petty you because when you get alate pick-up you can blame the person who had the truck ahead of you. Ask them why they felt like it was at their own leisure to bring the truck/trail back when ever they felt like it, to which every location they wanted to. Ask them whey they thought our trucks were built for speeding down highways or to move dirt or trash. We do and say things for a reason. And please don’t forget about all the good stuff we do like give free storage to families of hurricane victims or support various charities. So in the end, please keep up the log coming because we like reading them. Ha Ha Ha Ha.

Update (6/21/05): someone actually tried to purchase a Powerbook from this outfit; here is his story which seems to confirm that it is a scam as expected.

My cousin Rachel· pointed me to www.apple-computers.us·, which appears to offer “rock bottom” prices on Apple laptops and desktops. The thing is, it’s pretty hard to find much variation in Apple prices—I think Apple keeps a pretty tight lid on new Apples, and last time I looked there wasn’t more than a 5% variation in top and bottom prices for the same new machine.

Which leads me to suspect that “apple-computers.us” is a scam. Interestingly, a google search on the domain comes up with nothing relevant at all. The whois record is funny (in the odd sort of way): a California mailing address, but a Ukrainian email address and phone number. Not to be xenophobic, but my recent experience is that anything coming from a former Soviet Republic and relating to Internet commerce is…. sketchy.

It’s also worth noting that the domain name was just registered this month, and appropriates much of the look of the official Apple website.

I thus must reluctantly conclude that apple-computers.us is a scam, unless anyone can present evidence to the contrary. Hopefully, this blog entry can serve as a tip-off to future searchers.

In any case, could you ever really trust a company with this as their emblem?

I suspect it will now be less than a week before Apple files a UDRP complaint, or perhaps something more aggressive.

Update: the site seems to have changed its prices from dollars to euros, which makes them slightly more reasonable. Still not sure if it’s legit, though.

Interesting short article in Wired — Question Authorities: Why it’s smart to disobey officials in emergencies. It turns out that people in the World Trade Center on September 11 who ignored official instructions fared much better than those who followed the rules:

The report confirms a chilling fact that was widely covered in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.

Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives.

People too often believe there must be someone higher up who really knows what’s going on. One thing I heard often before the Iraq war was that, even if the public hasn’t seen convincing evidence of a real threat from Iraq, they (the administration) “must know something we don’t.” After all, why else would they be pursuing this policy?

I suppose it’s reasonable, or at least comforting, to think that someone wouldn’t get into a position of power like President or Secretary of Defense without being pretty damn smart and on top of things, but unfortunately I don’t think history supports that assumption.

I’m actually usually the last one to make arguments that begin with “history shows that…”, but I think in this case we can at least say that history shows that we shouldn’t make unfounded assumptions about the competency of powerful decisionmakers.

I get more comments and visits to my Webloyalty AKA Reservation Rewards is a Scam blog entry than almost anything else I’ve written. Since the entry was posted in December, it’s received over 300 comments, and nearly 20,000 hits from nearly 5,000 unique visitors. The short version is that this affinity program signs people up for a “rewards” program where they pay $9 per month in return for discounts on other purchases. The problem is that most people (including myself) never realized they signed up for anything until they notice the charge on their credit card bill, and I’m sure many more never notice the monthly charge at all. The company probably figured $9 was just below what would catch the attention of most people when they glance at their bill.

This comment from Marshall posted yesterday is probably the most useful one so far, so I wanted to highlight it here:

Same experience here, for the most part. One difference, however, I would recommend that if we really want to stop these guys we take a different approach to getting our money back. When they give you a refund of $9.00, it costs them $9.00, which they originally stole from you. There is no further damage to them. When you dispute the charge with your bank or cc issuer, they lose the $9.00 immediately, and are charged approximately $25.00 by their merchant processor for a chargeback fee. If their chargeback volume exceeds 1%, they will most likely have their merchant account shut down or suspended. This means they may not charge other people in the future and will likely go out of business. It should take about the same amount of time and effort for you, but could “put the hurt” on these scam artists. Just because they work with large companies, does not mean they are reputable, and you just mis-understood. I own a credit card processing company, and I know for a fact that I never agreed to the charges. Also, I went back to www.deepdiscountdvd.com and went through the steps of purchasing from them. The discount offer does not tell you anything about the charges or the membership at all. They are violating Visa/MC regulations, as well as perpetrating fraudulent transactions. Please dispute the transaction at your bank or cc company, instead of getting the refund. If your bank or cc company takes too long, or won’t reverse the charges, then you can always call back for your refund later.

It seems to me the other vital part of reining in this company is putting pressure on their affiliates, e.g., Columbia House, half.com, Fandago, and others. I can’t understand how these relatively reputable Internet businesses would agree to this arrangement.

I keep intending to write my omnibus Verizon gripe entry, but small Verizon gripes keep getting in the way.

The latest: I’ve had crippled DSL service for over a week now. At best, I’m getting 80 KBps down and half of that up, while I’m supposed to be getting 300-400 KBps down and 80-90 KBps up (still nothing to write home about). When I called over a week ago, they said they were in the process of fixing it and usually these outages were just several hours but this one might be a day or two.

The problem is actually at Verizon’s “trunk.” When I do a speed test on the Verizon site, it’s fine—in other words, my Internet connection to Verizon is full speed. Somewhere after the packets reach Verizon’s routing area it slows to a crawl. It would seem like this would be much easier to fix than a problem closer to the edge, but so far no luck.

The Verizon support person I just spoke with said they only just became aware of it because of the phone calls coming in. They had one team working on it, but now that they realize it’s a “big” problem, they have three teams working on it.

Do they really rely on subscribers to call in to find out their network is down? Don’t they monitor this kind of thing? Why is Verizon not able to deal?

Okay, gripe out.

I’ve been building a litany of criticisms of Verizon, to which I fork over something on the order of $200 a month for two cell phones, a land line, broadband, and fees too numerous to mention. I’m in a real crunch time right now, though, so let me just settle for one question: why does Verizon always make me call several different phone numbers when I need to change something? Aren’t they the phone company? Shouldn’t they have fancy phones that let them transfer a call from one Verizon office to another? In fact, I bet they don’t even have to pay long distance charges!

More exactly, why do I have to do all this calling? I’ve been trying for several months (since August, actually) to consolidate my two cell phone accounts into one account, and then consolidate that account with my landline and broadband, and have one bill that is automatically charged to my credit card each month (no discount for that—just “convenience”). Last night, I called Verizon Wireless Customer Support, asking them why it’s taken three months to do this. They told me I had to call Verizon Wireless One Bill. Verizon Wireless One Bill told me that Verizon Wireless Customer Support didn’t know what they were talking about, and I had to call Verizon Residential One Bill, but they were closed. Now, why can’t Verizon Wireless Customer Support just call Verizon Wireless One Bill or Verizon Wireless Residential One Bill for me and take care of it? In fact, I bet they even have interoffice email, so perhaps they could do it that way.

Anyway, just imagine four or five more stories along those lines. I’ve got ‘em.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog entry detailing some of the problems I’ve had with U-Haul. Just a few minutes ago, I received two additional comments, one from “jen”:

i think you people need to relax and realize that we are all human and so mistakes can be easily made also we all know computers are all ways having problems so i think you people need to stop whining and move on with your life

and one from “ange”

cry me a fuckin river

Interestingly, these are actually both the same poster—here are the entries from my server logs:

 205.241.11.6 - - [19/Jan/2005:16:06:44 -0500] "POST /weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html HTTP/1.1" 200 33399 "http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)" 205.241.11.6 - - [19/Jan/2005:16:07:52 -0500] "POST /weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html HTTP/1.1" 200 33563 "http://adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)" 

The person got to my site by doing a Yahoo search for “u-haul” (hey, I come up #7):

 205.241.11.6 - - [19/Jan/2005:15:58:02 -0500] "GET /weblog/the_man/uhaul_sucks.html HTTP/1.1" 200 12184 "http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=u-haul&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0)" 

Most interesting, however is the identity of the IP address block—here’s the result of ‘whois 205.241.11.6’:

 Sprint SPRINT-BLKF (NET-205-240-0-0-1) 205.240.0.0 - 205.247.255.255 UHAUL, Inc. SPRINTLINK (NET-205-241-11-0-1) 205.241.11.0 - 205.241.11.255 

So apparently a U-Haul employee pretended to be two anonymous/pseudonymous posters to say, “Give U-Haul a break, they’re not so bad.”