Archive for the ‘ Ripped off ’ Category

I need my nookie. Where oh where is my nookie? nook sucks.

Author: Krissa

Feb 27

Hello me lovelies! And how are you doing today? (Picture me nodding appreciatively.) Yes, yes… very good. That’s just great. Me? Oh, I’m just fine.

Or am I? No, thank you so much for asking, by the way, but I am NOT fine. I am steamed up. And not the way the title would lead you to think, either.

For the pitiful few men stumbling upon this blog, Sorry. You’ve been duped into thinking it’s going to maybe be racy. You couldn’t be more wrong. Not this particular one. But you never know, so keep checking back!

Now, where was I? Oh yes! I am all steamed up about something.

Remember last Christmas when I said I wanted a nook? It’s an e-reader put out by Barnes and Nobel. Well my wishes were heard by more than you guys! Santa Clause, John, Mither and Pop, and the girls all pitched in and bought me one. And I was thrilled with it. It worked great and was easy as pie to use. It allowed me to read any book I downloaded in extra hugeass sized font as well as bookmark, highlight, and look up words as I was reading. It’s small, lightweight, slim, fits into my purse very easily and never left my side. Well, not much anyway. Downloads for almost all new releases are $9.99 and I was rapidly working towards getting it to pay for itself when all of the sudden, it got a bit damp. It probably wouldn’t have been the end of the world since it was just a tiny bit of water that apparently got splashed from a glass, but it was in the protective gel case I bought for it and the water quickly went underneath it and pooled in the bottom. I didn’t know it was there and it sat in it for a while before I discovered it was wet. Soaking in it.

Anyway, I wasn’t the least bit worried because the nice little people at Barnes and Nobel sold me a handy dandy 2 year protection plan that is bumper to bumper, covering everything 100%. So I called the wonderful people at nook and talked to some very nice little man who did a “rapid return” and I had a new nook, literally the next day being dropped off by UPS. I then boxed mine up with the postage paid shipping label they emailed me and dropped it off at the nearest UPS drop off place.

No problem. This product and service is glorious. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Now the second one I got automatically had everything I had put on my old one as soon as I went on it and registered it to my account. I picked right back up with the book I had been reading and was soon engrossed in it.

Then the pages  started being really slow to turn. The old one hadn’t done that.

The thing would shut down quite unexpectedly and have to be restarted.

Then it started freezing up and would refuse to turn the page until I turned it off and back on. Remember the font was set in extra large hugeass size for me, so I am flying through pages pretty fast and when it does that every three pages, it sucks.

Then, all of the sudden, when I turned it off, it wouldn’t turn back on. Nothing. Well, crap. I waited a few days just because you have to spend a good deal of time on the phone when you call them, not just waiting on hold, but trying all the things that I had already tried, (like taking out the battery and putting it back in, etc.), while on the phone with a tech person.

So I called the people and went through the whole mess with them and the guy finally took my credit card number and said that the new nook was on it’s way. I guess they overnight them, or maybe do second day air. I don’t know, it’s just really fast. So almost a week later I am wondering WHERE THE HELL MY NOOK IS and I NEED SOMETHING TO READ, DAMMIT! am having some mild, reading withdrawal symptoms. I begin the extraction of hair on my head, by the roots, patiently wait a few more days.

You know I should take a sec and explain that that credit card number was so that they would have something to have on hold while they are waiting for their broken one to get back to them and I had 15 days to get it dropped off at the nearest UPS place before they would apply a charge for a new nook to my card. No problem, this seemed reasonable. They really are a bit expensive. The nook itself is $260.00 and the two year “Protection Plan” is another $70.00.  So it’s a rather large investment when you put it in perspective. I mean $330. isn’t much to pay for like, braces or something like that. Hey, it’s a heck of a deal! But this is just a lot of books! It is a frivolous thing in the grand scheme.

So the first time I talked to them about this particular nook and they were taking my card number and sending me a new one was on the 20th of February.

So I decided to call the dumbasses at nook headquarters. DUMBASSES IS TOO ONE WORD!

Huh? Oh, sorry. I lose my train of thought sometimes when I am STAND BACK! ABOUT TO BLOW! agitated, this can happen.

Loooong story short, (I know, too late… nobody likes a smartass. SMARTASS IS TOO ONE WORD!), I got Ali on the phone and he was polite, professional, good-natured, and not the least bit helpful.

I was on the phone for over an hour and a half, people. I could almost hear Ali thinking, “OH, DEAR LORD, PLEEEEEEEASE LET ME HANG UP WITH THIS WOMAN!” And I SO wanted to. Yet, I kept not getting the answer I was looking for.

So I just stay on the phone until someone there gives it to me.

Actually, John and I were both talking to them. Ali told us that the protection plan that we had purchased would only replace a nook I damaged accidentally, one time.

That? Is SO not what the people at Barnes and Nobel told us.

The argument was on.

First of all where the hell is my nookie? It’s been a week and it’s not here and they are going to charge my credit card for the old one after 15 days. That’s half gone! I’m not sending the old one back till I get the new one. I was very firm about that.

There never was an answer for that question. No tracking number they could give me. Nothing. And considering how much just one little gizmo costs you’d think they’d keep better track of them.

Second of all, I didn’t do anything to damage this nook, it was defective when I got it. Refurbished? That’s what I’m thinking. The other one worked great! But to tell me that I have no more coverage for damage by me dropping it, or running over it with the car, or letting a St. Bernard slobber all over it, or an eagle picking it up and depositing it in it’s nest for it’s babies to poop on? Well, THAT? is not what I was told when we purchased the “plan”. We argued this point with Ali and his supervisor for over an hour. While I was on the phone with them John got on his and called our local Barnes and Nobel and asked to speak to some one about purchasing a nook. He was promptly directed to a nook specialist. He asked about the nook and the protection plan and asked if the nook would continue to be replaced for the two years the plan is effective even if it is repeatedly dropped or abused by moi. “Oh, yes, Mr. Lopez! As many times as needed during the two years the plan covers! It’s foolproof!”.

Apparently this guy doesn’t know the fools at 1.800.THE.BOOK.

So then John asks to speak to a store manager and poses the same question to him. He is told the same thing from the manager. It is covered 100%, no matter what happens or who’s fault it is for two years. Bumper to bumper, as it were.

He took the phone from me and proceeded to tell the people at the mysterious call center that we were assured when we bought it that it was covered, and they are still telling us that it is covered for any problems I cause it.

And you know I can, too.

They then asked if we read the “Protection Plan”. NOW I’m pissed. Not just insanely frustrated. Completely. Ticked. Off.

If you go to this web site you can read the entire fascinating, small texted policy. Really! Just go ahead! Ton’s of fun!

I love to read and I couldn’t get all the way through. Besides I found where it admits that the afore mentioned fully covered thing isn’t entirely. It’ s waaay down  in the ugly insides of the thing. On towards the poop end.

Not to mention, we discovered that we are able to take the dumb thing back and get an exchange at the store! Those people are going to stand by what they believe to be the policy and exchange anything we take there. Until the dumbasses up in the corporate ivory tower figure out what is going on waaaay down here and pass down some mandate saying that the store employees have been instructed to do their sales pitch wrong.

Anyway, here it is, Saturday night and still I have no nookie.  *sob* At least John is going to be home from work soon and I’ll get some nookie from him! 😉

16 Comments
Filed under: Chapped Arse, nook sucks, Rants, Ripped off

Ongoing developments.

Author: Krissa

May 4

On Wednesday, April 29, Henrietta turned 87 years old.  There were festivities as you’d expect from a festive family like this.  I do, in fact have pictures that I would like very much to post, but this stupid thing won’t let me as the file size gizmo has pissed off the maximum load of shit thingy.  Or some such crap.  And it’s not WordPress’s fault this time.  It’s that rat bastard, Vista.

Have I mentioned how I loathe Vista?  I do.  We are getting an Apple sometime in the near future and all I have to do is find a way to finance it….  Hum.  I have children I could sell.  They are 18 and 19 now, but really, if I list them as “slightly used”, won’t that cover my butt?

Anyway, as I was saying before I got all sidetracked, H had a birthday with a beautiful cake I made and Kes iced for me and presents and whatnot.  She had a grand time.  Only her daughter never showed up or called.  So about half way through the day, I’m figuring she may have forgotten and I started trying to call her.  I left messages and never heard back from her.  John did the same from work.

The next day, Thursday, she showed up with the most gawd-awful looking pot of almost completely finished blooming tulips.  Some of them were lying over the side of the pot.    She said she hadn’t called the day before because she was out of minutes on her cell phone and she never gave any idea about why she didn’t come.

She doesn’t own a car, but drives a 14 year old piece of junk Accord that belongs to her boyfriend.  And I DO mean junk.  Rust showing through, no A/C, dings and dents everywhere.  Ugly as sin.  She always parks right in the middle at the end of the sidewalk.  We always make a point not to park there because it is directly across the street from my neighbors driveway.  It’s the elderly couple with the red door that I have posted about before.  They are very sweet and terrific neighbors.  It just makes good sense to not park right where someone has to back out.  You know, the courteous thing to do.

We should have told her not to do it too.  The man that lives there was backing out and hit that piece of junk and dented the front quarter panel.  So he rang the bell and asked me if he could talk to me and I went out and he showed me the dent and said that they were going some place right then and just tell SIL they’d be back in a little while.

So SIL called her boyfriend and told him.

Here’s where I get politically incorrect.

He’s a wet back an illegal alien.

Of course he wanted the insurance info.  **Sigh.**

She stayed here longer than usual visiting with her mother that day so that she could go and talk to my neighbor.  That’s the only good that came out of this.  He gave her his phone number and asked her to call him when she got an estimate.

That was all on Thursday and Friday SIL was calling saying that she’d talked to him and he’s supposed to be bringing a check over.

For $244.00.

To fix body damage on a car.

Yeah,  right.

John was appalled at the whole thing of course and we are both embarrassed.  So when the neighbor came over with the check, he talked to him and apologized.  When the guy left John told me that he’s going to tell his sister that he brought the check but needs a copy of the estimate for his records. He didn’t believe for one minute that $244.00 was going to fix that car either.  And, he and I both know the car will never get fixed.  It will just be an embarrassing reminder every time she comes over here of what happened and how she extorted money from our retired, on a fixed income, neighbors.

She came back on Saturday earlier than she has been here in many, many months, (1:15), and while I was surprised to see her that early, I wasn’t.  My first thought was “OK, at least she’s in time to change her mother’s diaper this time.”.

She stayed 10 to 15 minutes and left.

H promptly rang the bell to be put on the bedpan.

This is my life.

The copy of the estimate she brought looks legit enough.  It’s barely legible, but has the name of the garage stamped on it.   So… whatever!

7 Comments
Filed under: Chapped Arse, just plain weird, Oh crap!, Politically incorrect, Rants, Ripped off, SIL, Strange and socially akward

There's a thief amongst us.

Author: Krissa

Jan 14

Hello people!  Well, Nana and Pop have gone home and should actually be there shortly.  We had all kinds of fun during the short amount of time they were here.

We also did some sleuthing!

Now I bet you are all wondering what happened with Henrietta’s aide/thief that we suspect swiped the $100 out of my purse.  Well, we set up the camera that Lisa had loaned me that is motion activated.   Got it all set up on top of the fridge and John and Pop left and then Mither announced, (loudly), that we needed to run over to Lisa’s house to see what was going on with her.  So I told the aide and H that we’d be back later and we left.

John got home first and found the camera lying on it’s back on top of the extremely tall refrigerator.  It was lying in a manner that it was incapable of “falling” into.   It was incapable of falling in the first place.  He took the card out and he and Keelan were looking at the pictures when we got home.  There are a lot of them simply because it snapped one every time the light went on or off or anyone left or came in, but here are a few showing what happened and in the order it happened.

Here is John leaving.  My purse is on the counter on the right.  You can see the top of the faucet in the sink in the wet bar.  My purse is the blob to the left of it.  Right beneath the “10”.

Here is Mither leaving and I am right behind her.  I guess the light was on in the kitchen since the wall is now green, (as it really is), and it looks turquoise in the first one…

And here is the last one it took.  You can see the fingers and the double exposure from the movement.  It happened 8 minutes after we left.  Undoubtedly she saw the camera on top of the fridge and turned it over.  I hadn’t left any cash or credit cards in my purse but she didn’t know that until she looked.  Henrietta said that she stood “behind the counter” to watch the soap opera with her and she didn’t know why she didn’t sit down like she usually did. She said she kept going and looking out the window and then going back to stand at the counter.  The widow is to the left outside the frame of the picture.

I do.

Henrietta doesn’t know that we suspect the aide of anything.  She doesn’t know about the missing money, or the camera or any of it.  She has such a negative view of the world and all it’s inhabitants anyway, we all just think it’s better that she not feel like she was duped.  The sad part is that she really likes this aide a lot.  They spoke Spanish to each other and H was thrilled with this as her Spanish was really rusty and getting to be more and more of a second language all the time.  She did an excellent job with her and they really got along well.

I will just tell her that the company had to send her to another area or something and she has to have a new aide.  Oh, I don’t know.. I’ll have to think it through.  I have to have a better story than that, I guess…

John asked H where the aide was and where all she went while we were gone and then I did too, separately. and she then got the idea that something was wrong and when she asked if something was missing and I lied and said, “No.”, she got a bit defensive for her.  She told me that she was a good person and there was no reason to “look into her”.   I feel really bad, but I have enough to go on and I called the company and told them not to send her back and that I wasn’t accusing her of anything, (after all I don’t have any hard evidence), but that I didn’t want her back because I couldn’t risk trusting her.  I asked to talk to the owner but she was out of town for a “few days” so I told the lady what had happened and she was nice, but I can tell there was no way they could afford to lose any employees so I feel sure they won’t fire her even if they have reports of this kind of thing happening before.

I hope to talk to the owner when she gets back in town.

10 Comments
Filed under: Camera, Henrietta, John, Keelan, Mither, Rants, Ripped off

The saga of the missing money… (sorry it's so long)

Author: Krissa

Jan 10

Well, people this just sucks.  No.  Not the poop of yesterday.  It is still here today and has happened twice so far.  H clearly has a stomach bug of some sort.  Bless her heart, no one else in the family has had one but, being so old she is more susceptible to catching things, I guess.

But that is not what I was talking about sucking.  No.  There is a thief amongst us.  It could be your neighbor, friend or YOU.  Well, OK, so maybe none of that is even remotely close to likely.  STILL!

Yesterday when I was in here, in the boudoir, hacking out carefully constructing the poop post for yesterday, Kes came in and told me that the next day, (today), she was going to go up to U of H and purchase a text book that she has to have for school.  Those dirty bastards are requiring her to buy a $250.00 book with some sort of electronic gizmo that has to go with it, that you can only get at UH. Her dad and I had discussed it and we were going to help her with that book so I gave her a little stash of cash that had been lying on the desk for a few days waiting to go to the bank.  It was $190.00 even.  A hundred bill on the outside, four $20.00’s and a $10.00 on the inside.  She said no, she would pay for it, she knew we were having a hard enough time with bills and why not spend the money she has been saving for her education now while we are strapped, blah, blah, blah.  She was being very sweet and understanding and trying to pick up some responsibility.  But I insisted and pushed it on her and she took it eventually and went her way.

Today she came and found me and asked me if I had taken money out of my purse.  I said,…. no?  And she raced away looking for her sister.  She came back in a bit of a panic and said that she doesn’t know what happened to the $100.00 dollar bill in my purse.  I must have looked a bit blank and told her I don’t have a $100 in my purse.  She explained that yesterday when she left my room she just walked straight in and put the $190.00 in my purse in my little coin purse thing where I keep my cash and cards and zipped it up and dropped back in the middle section where I always keep it.

Today she was looking for change for a $100 dollar bill of hers and remembered the money in my purse she had put there last night.  Nobody knew about it but her at this point. So she looked in there to see if she could scare up another $10.00 to make an even 100 out of the smaller bills and the $100. bill was missing from the outside of the folded cash.  She called her dad at work and asked him if he had gotten it out of my purse this morning and he said, no, he knew nothing about it.

Oh crap.

There was a complete scouring of the area and searching on hands and knees and looking so far deep down into my purse I found traces of Jimmy Hoffa.  Every single item came out and was examined closely to see if it had ever even tried to look like a $100.

Next she went and looked for her sister and was frantically asking about the missing money.

Keelan was clueless as well and responded with something like, “Money?  In Mom’s purse? No, I didn’t even know Mom had money in her purse…”  Neither one one of them have ever even thought of taking money from us without asking and so that wasn’t really a valid way to go, but Kes was trying to exhaust all avenues because the money had to be somewhere.

About this time we started backtracking who all had been here between last night and this afternoon.  I mean it’s the only place left to “look” cause, people we have seen things in this house now that make YOUR dustbunnies look like pansy assed wimps.

The small group of friends Keelan had come over with her just popped their heads in to say hello over from the foyer.  They never even came through the living room and went to the other side of the wet bar, where I stash my purse so it’s easy to grab on the way out the back door.

HOWEVER, this is Friday and the Caregiver Provider Aide was here from 11:00am to 2:00pm.  About noon I went in and ran a nice hot bath for myself like I always do when she comes and John is not able to be off work.  So she knew I was in the bath and my purse is there sitting on the wet bar right by the door where she goes to put the dirty linens in with the laundry.  H is turned in her chair with her back to that general area and there is no one else in the house.

My first thought was why would she wait and do this when I am home with them instead of when I am gone with John when he is off?  And then I heard that little intelligent voice I rarely hear from say,  “Because my purse is gone with me then.”  And the dumb ass in me replied, “Oh.”

So now, we are starving to death and don’t have the money required to pay attention, we are trying to figure out what to do next.  I consult with my dear Mither and Pop and then, of course, Lisa is called into the loop.  Kessa’s  boyfriend suggested we get a camera and set her up and record it.  I feel it would cost much more than the lost $100. to buy the equipment for that and she is here for three hours, so it would have to be a motion sensor kind that would come on when she walks in front of it.  I guess?

Well, I was telling Lisa about this and she said that they have a camera that does that.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I asked, Why? And she said that they put them up on deer trails and what not in Colorado on their vacation property and see all kinds of wildlife.

Whatever.  How cool is this?  I swear if I catch her, (and I will cause I am stealthy like that), I will show you guys the video footage.

After I get finished beating her to death with H’s bedpan.

6 Comments
Filed under: Henrietta, John, Kessa, Oh crap!, Ripped off