Here’s the letter I originally sent to the Boston Herald, with mark-up (strikeout for removed text, green for added) showing what they actually printed today: To the editor: It is infuriating to see rich people, who can afford to give back their imaginary “profits” from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, whining about the actions of Irving… Read More »
In the last six months I have received no less than 16 promotional mailings from Comcast, many of them only a few days apart. I have tried repeatedly to get them to stop sending me these mailings, to no avail. I filed a complaint about it with the Better Business Bureau; not only did Comcast… Read More »
You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year. Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in… Read More »
Apparently it’s “big companies that can’t keep their Web sites up in the middle of the day” week. Yesterday, Citizens Bank online banking was down for over two hours. Today, National Grid’s main US Web site and online account management site are both down:
At 9:45am on a weekday:
Last July, when we were preparing for our trip to Israel, I called Citizens Bank and asked this simple question: “What is the least expensive way for me to get Israeli sheqels out of my Citizens Bank checking account?” In response, the customer service representative told me the following: The fee for withdrawing currency from… Read More »
A week from today is election day. In Massachusetts, there will be three statewide ballot questions in addition to candidate elections. These ballot questions are important and I strongly urge all registered voters in Massachusetts (if you’re not registered, register before the next election!) to visit the polls and weigh in. I recommend voting no… Read More »
I have to confess that at this point it seems like posting examples of Citizens Bank incompetency is sort of like beating a dead horse, but here’s one that might amuse a few people. (Stay tuned for a future post about the >$300 in fees that Citizens Bank stole from me, which I’m holding off… Read More »
[Read the whole series of postings about Winters Plumbing here.] I posted a while back about a bogus “free safety inspection” Winters Plumbing convinced us to have, where “safety inspection” actually meant “excuse for one of our plumbers to get into your house so he can try to convince you to buy all kinds of… Read More »
On Monday, July 12, I rented a ZipCar for an hour to go grocery shopping. During the half hour I was in the store, some asshole thief put a grapefruit-sized dent in the bumper of the ZipCar and drove off without leaving any contact information. I called ZipCar immediately on my cell phone. The rep… Read More »