Basically, it’s not letting corporate America put one over on you or letting yourself sit and stew in your displeasure with a product. If it’s broken, spoiled, stale or doesn’t live up to the hype… SPEAK UP! Be heard. Don’t throw your money away especially in this day and age.

If you’re not happy, tell them. At the very least you should expect an apology for your experience.

And now on with our story… We’ve got some glasses/mugs that are rather tall, pint plus sized. Regular straws aren’t tall enough. In the past we’d bought 10″ tall Diamond brand straws at the local supermarket. They’re remodeling the store and dumping a lot of old products. One of those they ceased carrying was the straws we liked.

I didn’t want to waste the time and effort and put the wear on the car to chase all over the county checking out the ‘where to find our products’ list Diamond had on their web page so I scoured the internet. Did you know tall straws are hard to find? I know it now! Unfortunately Diamond brands do not sell their products from their own web page.

Straws I found were either straight, we wanted the bendy kind, only sold by the carton or outrageously priced. I even found stainless steel straws ,can you imagine what could grow in those if you didn’t clean them carefully?

I wrote to Diamond telling them I couldn’t find their product at the store we’d always bought them at nor could I find them anywhere on the internet. Then I finally stumbled across some slightly shorter, but usable, straws on Amazon, 125 for $2, two freaking dollars! I ordered two bags so we’d have plenty on hand.

Karl Z. a regional sales manager (should that be capitalized?) at Diamond wrote back two weeks later, long after I’d stopped expecting a response. He apologized for the trouble we had finding their product and said if I’d send him my address he would “…see that some of these straws come out to you directly- our compliments.”

I sent him my address and my thanks not really expecting more than a pack or two of their straws (they come 100 to a box) and I wasn’t expecting any immediate action since it had taken weeks to get an initial response out of them.

Sometimes these companies just blow my mind. Anyone need some straws?

I have a couple Hotmail accounts that I’ll check back to back every day. When I log out of one I get dumped to an MSN landing page. In the past and for the most part I ignored the landing page entirely and popped right back into Snotmail. BUT, occasionally, some story would catch my eye. Usually something about breasts or cheerleaders or cheerleader’s breasts or… cars. Whenever I clicked one of those MSN links to read the story it would launch Messenger, Microsoft’s online chat and spam tool. Not ONLY would it launch Messenger it would modify my registry because it thought I WANTED Messenger loading at startup. Wasn’t that NICE of Microsoft?

But now? Now when I get dropped to the MSN page it is greyed out and I get an overlay window keeping me from seeing those marginally interesting news stories at all. This window tells me ‘Congratulation your new Bing Bar is ready to use.’ Aren’t you excited? I’m excited! I didn’t even know I had an OLD Bing Bar but now I’ve got a brand new shiny one all ready and waiting for me to click the button… Then it tells me ‘This software may also download and install some updates automatically.’ and right there, I don’t click. I won’t click. And no, I’m STILL not going to switch to Chrome or Firefox or dump Windows and get Linux. I’m content. Microsoft, by trying to force me to install Bing Bar (whatever the hell that is) is protecting me from launching Messenger and having my registry modified. Aren’t they sweet?

Oh, yeah, around Christmas time they also pushed me to a landing page with presents and holiday greetings for everyone and a happy Bing Ding Bar holiday for all… I still wouldn’t click on it. Nope, not me.

First and most annoying… Your servers were broken. You had technical issues. You KNEW you had technical issues but when I reported that in every group I’d checked that no multipart binary posts were complete you responded by accusing me of illegal activity, with no proof, and refused to further follow up on the ticket. You finally admitted to and fixed the problem eight hours later.

You cripple the speed, and that’s fine, you offered Bright House subscribers this hosting at no charge. It’d just be nice if you actually gave the speed you offered and didn’t half and quarter the already minimal speed at peak hours.

You FURTHER cripple popular and heavy use newsgroups. Seriously, two minutes to pull FIVE headers? Did you think no one would notice that? five thousand headers arrive in another group in 30 seconds, we’re not that dumb!

You won’t add groups you ALREADY offer to this server’s feed. Plus it took you idiots five email exchanges to even understand my request.

When I asked if you had a crossposting limit you replied “Yes.” When I asked what the limit was you acted like you were protecting the codes to launch the missiles. Twice you said you didn’t release that information (yes, I could have trial & errored it but it was more fun to see how anal you guys would get) another two times you simply said it was “A reasonable number.” When I finally got this stupidity escalated to a supervisor his immediate response was “10.” Was it that freaking hard or did all the idiots in tech support not want to admit they didn’t know?

In your snottiest tone you’ve told me several times if I want better support, more features and groups I need to subscribe to your paid news service. Yeah, like I’m going to pay for incompetence and bad attitudes, I get that for free. Thanks!