March 6th, 2008
I have been needing to write here for quite some time. I have stories about my cell phone company calling the cops on me, a story about going to El Paso instead of Los Angeles one weekend. I also have a funny story about Salt Lake City and the aftermath in Reno. Never ending work and the family keeps me on my toes full time. That’s my story and I am sticking with it.
Ok, Alltel and their revenge. In October I bought a smart phone and signed a 2 year contract for a smart phone plan. I wanted the phone, not the plan. They told me I had 30 days to change my mind if I didn’t like it. Well, I did like the phone but my first months bill came to over $900 so I decided to back out of the contract and the phone. I was out of town for most of that time so as soon as I got back, I went to the local Alltel store and tried to give it back. The manager was out so they told me I needed his help with this, in the meantime, here. Try this Blackberry. I went home with it. Was out of town for a couple days and when I got back (less than 7 days later) I went back to the store and said “no, I don’t want this either” I was told too much time had passed and I was stuck with the blackberry and the plan. I was not happy and decided to fight back. I kept calling managers and supervisors until I finally found a guy who agreed with me. I have been a customer of Alltel since ‘99 and I should be able to get what I wanted. When he asked me what that was I told him I wanted a regular phone with a regular plan. No contracts, just a regular customer. I said I would even pay full price for my new regular phone. He sent it to me, overnight so I would have it for my trip to San Diego the next day. I went to the store on my way out of town to get the numbers transferred to my new phone. They informed me that they could not do that because they didn’t have the software. I accepted that. I would have to look at the blackberry for the number then manually punch it in on the new phone. I didn’t really want to do it to over 350 contacts, however I could deal with it for a week until I could find an alternative way of dealing with it. That wasn’t ok with the guys in the store. They were obviously unhappy that I ended up getting my way so they thought they would turn the screw a little bit (or a lot) They said they were going to keep the blackberry because it was Alltel property. I had arranged with the corporate guy to send the phone back to him and I had that in writing. I didn’t have the letter with me, as I was on my way to San Diego. I told them the deal and they insisted they were keeping the phone and my only copy of my 350 contacts. I assured them they were not keeping the phone adding that all the little boys in the store put together weren’t man enough to stop me from walking out the door with the phone. When I grabbed it off the counter they tried to take it out of my hand. I felt showed great restraint in not popping someone then. They told me if I left the store with that phone, they would call the police and tell them of my “theft” of the phone. I walked, saying “go ahead” About 150 miles west, in the middle of the desert, I get a call from a Gilbert city policeman asking for my side of the story. He acted like a worn out father of 4 who was tired of his kids squabbling. I told him and he said “don’t go back into that store” I agreed and assured him I had no intention of going back into any Alltel store except to give them all the phones and to cancel my service with them. That is exactly what I did as soon as I got back to town. I am now a happy customer of AT&T and think it was the best move I had made in a long time.
More stories later. That was longer that I expected. I will keep an eye on comments in case there are any questions. funny, though, isn’t it?
Thanks for listening.
Merlin
merlin |
Blog |
January 4th, 2008
Wow, I unloaded 6 towers at the house the day before yesterday, then another one yesterday. that makes a total of 8 on the bench. Kind of a personal (professional) record. The coolest thing is, I really love this stuff! Making older hardware work. Getting the best performance out of the hardware. Setting up windows so it is easy and productive. Getting the most information out of each and every window and application. For some unknown reason, default settings in windows xp are not that way. So I go into every installation and tweak settings. I once wrote down all the things I did to a new install and it took up a page and a half! The response I’ve gotten for this has been clearly positive. Everyone seems to appreciate the steps I take to make things go more smoothly when on the job or at home. Lately, I have been putting Ubuntu Linux on older hardware. That’s pretty fun too! It runs great on older hardware, stuff that windows struggles with. Not like linux installs of old, this version actually sees all the hardware and installs it almost automatically! Comes with some great free applications too.
Getting ready to go to San Diego for a crane job. This is the last time we will move this tower crane on this jobsite. There has been a crane there for about 9 years, hopping it from one building to the next about every six months. This is the last building. In about another six months, we will take it down and truck it away. Not a bad rental contract. Wonder how many cranes they could have bought outright for that money. Good thing it isn’t my job to decide those things for them. I might have gone a different way. Of course the first crane on the job was burned down a long time ago by a bunch of eco-terrorists so that may throw the money out of whack a little bit.
Still twittering and there are some good pictures of heights on my flickr page. There are a couple of Hannah Pictures up there too, aint she cute?
merlin |
Blog |
December 29th, 2007
Well, I am writing in Windows Live Writer. I am giving it a solid trial to see what it looks and acts like. I have to say, the Word style highlighting of misspelled words is a cool thing. Something Wordpress doesn’t do. Spell checking is something wonderful if you are used to it and then suddenly it’s gone. Also, the fact that adding links to posts is really easy, as easy as Wordpress itself.
All in all, I have to give it a thumbs up. So far. I’ll keep you posted. (no pun intended)
merlin |
Blog |
December 23rd, 2007
I was just out in the backyard putting together a HUGE swingset for Hannah. She is gonna love this thing! It got dark on me so I didnt finish it. Glad I started a day early. I posted a few pictures up on my flickr acct. Go check them out. There are a bunch of phone pictures I shot while up on various cranes and hoists I’ve worked on this past year. They are tagged “Up There” Easy to find.
I have been twittering too, thats a site that I go to to answer the question “what am I doing right now?” You can follow me and many people way more interesting than me. I recommend Andy Ihnatko, Cali Lewis and the incomparable Veronica Belmont. There are lots of cool tech people there I enjoy following. I am also on Pownce, Facebook and Technorati. All in the interest of networking for my business.
Happy Holidays everybody! Thanks for being there, without you, I would be even more boring. He he
merlin |
Blog |
December 13th, 2007
All I can say is this: I have a ton of podcasts and rarely enough time to listen to them all. So this last week has been good. A week ago, Wednesday, I left my home in Mesa, AZ and drove to Salt Lake City, Utah for three days of work. Due to the weather, I only got one day in. Loaded seven trucks with parts of a crane. Then a fifty mile jaunt down the road to do some work on another piece of equipment. Then the drive south to avoid the snow that was threatening. Got home Friday evening. Apparently, driving in the rain is foreign to desert dwellers, because it took me an extra two hours to go about ten miles. Altogether, a half day trip took all day. So, get home friday night, ate dinner with the family during which a computer was delivered to the house. The next day I got the computer fixed (asked the customer to bring me the part and installed it while she waited. Thanks Patty!) Then jumped on a plane bound for Reno, Nevada. Rental car, hotel, dinner and bed. Got up early Sunday, did the job, flew back to Phoenix so I could tear my patient, kind, loving girlfriends computer apart. (Who knows, she may read this) Got it close about 11:00 p.m. Monday night then went to bed for the drive back to Salt Lake the next morning. Drove up, hotel, dinner, early to bed and overslept by almost three hours! Got to work just as the trucks were arriving so no real lost time. did the two day job in one (long) day. Up today at the crack of night; 4:00 a.m. and drove all day to arrive home this afternoon. Thats about 4400 miles in less than ten days. 2800 of it driving. I still didn’t catch up on all the podcasts. Maybe I ought to rethink the amount I download…
Thanks for being part of my journey. You can follow me on Twitter if you are a real glutton for boring punishment.
Merlin
merlin |
Blog |
