Moo! The Musings of a Plaid Cow

Even it is one of the biggest flops McDonald’s ever had, I still miss the composite triple beat

Being outside the USA has given me a new perspective on customer service—Americans put up with way too much bad stuff.

This evening, after eating dinner at a cafe, I came into the restaurant at the hotel to talk to one of my co-workers. As I was leaving, one of the waitresses asked why I we were no longer coming down for the free continental breakfast. (I really would enjoy coming down, but the bus for work leaves at 7:30 now instead of 8:00, and since the restaurant doesn’t open until 7:30, we can’t make it down.)

So, to sum it up, the staff wanted to know why I was not longer taking advantage of their free service. That is customer service.

In the five years or so that I have been running OSX as a non-Admin user, I have only found a few annoyances. The biggets of which is that Software Update no longer checks for updates automatically (since no one is logged in as an administrator).

Thankfully, with updatecheck that is no longer a problem.

online casino time I call IT support at work, I am reminded of how much I hate the laptop that has been assigned to me for my business trip. Actually, I guess it would be more correct to say, that everytime I see my laptop I think of the smiles from the people with the IT helpdesk. My “security” question is “Which brand of computers really suck?”.

The best thing that I can say about this brick is that it has cool “Pentium M” and “Designed for Windows XP” stickers on it. And that it was really good that I managed to get it upgraded to 1GB of RAM just before I left. I’m not sure I could handle it being any slower.

I do not understand why so many people like having a two button trackpad on their laptop. I am forever clicking the right button. Perhaps it is just the training of having a single button for so long that has convinced my thumb to rest there.

What if delivery people ran the schools? Occasionally,

• Even though the school said he was dropped off, your kid would not arrive at home.
• The bus would drop your daughter off with a broken arm, then disavow any knowledge of the injury.
• The school bully would be left at your house, until the special bus could come by at the end of the week.

I’m glad they don’t.

During the press conference this evening:

Random Questioner: Why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the Attorney General’s office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geitner and say “Look, we’re outraged.” Why did it take so long?

President Obama: It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.

Awesome.

With all of the push for online banking, changing a routing number has got to be one of the most god-awful things to go through. Why does every site make it so freaking hard to change the number that indicates I want to send them money? And this is just the credit cards. I haven’t even started on all of the companies that automatically pull money out of the checking account. But I am tired tonight, and this will have to be enough.

Citi

• You must change your checking account number separately for each AutoPay account.
• You cannot change an AutoPay checking account number if the next payment is within six days. No, you can’t change it for every payment following the one just coming up.
• When changing a click to pay checking account number, you (sometimes) must enter the three digit code off the back of the card and the account “code word”. The code word is never otherwise used and the website will give you no hints. (If you call in however, the helpful CSR will give you enough hints to get the right answer.)

Chase

• You cannot add a checking account as a payment source if you already have an account with the same account number (but different routing number).
• You cannot add a payment account until you select which account you want to add it to. Once you do, however, you can select to have the change “applied to all accounts”.
• When you are deleting old accounts from the manage bank accounts screen, after deleting a checking account, you have to navigate back to where you were. There are no bread crumbs or automatic way to return you back to the manage bank accounts screen.
• User IDs are required to be 8 characters or more—for your security.
• Each primary cardholder must have their own account.
• You can’t delete a bank account that has an automatic payment associated with it. So, instead of being able to change the routing number, I have to delete the automatic payment, delete the bank account, add the bank account, and add the automatic payment. (Even if I could just edit the automatic payment, I couldn’t add the second bank account without deleting the first since they have the same account number. This would be so much simpler if I could just edit the account number in the first place.)

Discover Card

• Not an issue. I haven’t had any issues with their website since they got the bright idea of using account login names instead of the 16-digit account number.

American Express

• Once I actually found the link to change the checking account number, it was fairly smooth. I don’t think that a website should try to actively hide the link on you though.

After the first two rounds of the tournament, the Big East still has 5 teams in contention. Five out of sixteen. My brackets have them all making it into the Elite Eight, but I might be a bit biased.

This may not be the best conference in a season ever, but it certainly is close.

It didn’t take too long till I heard back from my letter to the editor:

Thank you for contacting us. Please note that the article you are looking for is “A Mortgage You Can Pay” on page 140 from March’s “Neighborhood Watch.” We will certainly pass along your request that every cover line be represented in the Table of Contents.

I had read that one page inset and didn’t think it even came close to the title on the cover. Apparently the only advice they can give on slashing your mortgage payment is a “loan modification” through your lender. Yeah, good advice.