Wagner Felons Turn Out To Commit Felonies

 So, this happened. Was anyone surprised?

Police Militarization Undermines Mission

First, some background: the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a nonprofit society of scholars created by an Act of Congress that President Lincoln signed into law in 1863. It's not some site founded to subvert the government, or undermine the rule of law. To the contrary, its purpose is to advance the sciences. The National Academy of Medicine, for example, was founded under its charter.
NAS' publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America recently published "Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation," which includes graphs that suggest adding SWAT teams to police departments causes more assaults against police officers.  Of interest to those who like to argue militarization serves some kind of beneficial purpose in protecting police may be the observation that "Estimates for officer deaths, both accidental and felonious, are precise and near zero, partly because they are so rare[.]"  Although there was little increase in death to explain even after SWAT teams' exacerbation of conflicts elevated them, data "show[] a statistically significant 3.2% increase in noninjurious assaults" before adjustment for time trends.  Although the evidence for increasing officer risk is iffy, "there is no evidence that acquiring a SWAT team lowers crime or promotes officer safety."
The article observes that aggressive policing strategies disproportionately target minority communities, but that defenders of militarization claim it's necessary to protect officers. The data disagree. The author concludes that "the routine use of militarized police tactics by local agencies threatens to increase the historic tensions between marginalized groups and the state with no detectable public safety benefit."

California Police Show True Colors to Cameras

Police of Pomona, California arrested teenager Christian Aguilar for filming the brutal manner in which they arrested his family.  When they spotted him filming the crimes they committed against his family, they arrested him, too – for "resisting arrest" … which is in fact not an offense under California law if the person is not in fact charged with some other offense that would justify an arrest.

Police then noticed Robert Hansen, whom they spotted recording their beating of the teenager.  Naturally, they arrested him, too – alleging a slew of bogus offenses.

They had it all neatly wrapped up – they wrote reports that spun a bald-faced lie how the encounter went down, and they edited the video they seized so that their wrongdoing never appeared.  It was this video they presented to the District Attorney's office of Los Angeles.

While this was going on, they delivered Christian Aguilar – a minor – into the hands of actual criminals by locking him among a population of male offenders.  They kept him there despite his protestations he was a minor.  Pomona police told Christian Aguilar's mother that her son could not have a lawyer.

The terrible allegations made by police against their victims cost the job of one of Christian's relatives, a respected cardiac nurse. 

The story gets worse.  Read all about it here.

Also, some of the video is available.

Whistleblower Cop Fired, Of Course

Lest anyone mistake police for a body dedicated to upholding the law, or even referring criminal activity to a District Attorney for prosecution, we highlight Kentucky's New Albany Police Department.  An officer identified that its employees – other officers – were lying about their overtime and performing work for third parties while on the department's clock, all resulting in theft of public funds for "work" they were not in fact performing for the community.  Was she given a medal?  Did she get a promotion?

Of course not.  This is an American police department, dedicated above everything else to making sure its own members never faced the consequences of the law they swore to uphold.  Their first move was to fire the woman.

If you're thinking the District Attorney will prosecute the corrupt cops, leading to the vigilant public servant's reinstatement, don't hold your breath.  There's little hope for police who want clean departments in Missouri (demoted for truthfully answering questions about an in-custody death), New York (committed following crime-stat fudging report), Maryland (branded a snitch after "ratting" out police brutality, and harassed), Illinois (harassment and death threats after reporting corruption, and instructions not to provide backup to rat cops in danger), Washington (officer was abandoned and allowed to be shot, despite calling for backup, because he reported excessive force, then was disciplined on pretext; his shooter was allowed to plead to "attempted assault"), or pretty much anyplace else they might report wrongdoing.

It's corrupt, and we don't have enough democracy in this country to get departments that will reflect our hunger for real justice.  We need more democracy.

No Trial Needed: How Mr. Browder Died

New York magazine offers an articulate look at how the criminal justice system's servants took the freedom, and ultimately the will to live, from a teen charged with a felony the government never bothered to bring to trial.  The story is called "How All New Yorkers Killed Kalief Browder" and it's worth your time.  If you don't live in New York, the bail statute is likely much more restrictive, increasing the probability that an accused will languish in jail for years. 

I had a civil client I met in a Montgomery County jail whom I discovered had been in custody more than a year without trial.  His last attorney had tried to get him a plea deal that the State liked, to improve his bid to obtain a job in the prosecutor's office.  Other appointed counsel hadn't done much on his case because they weren't paid to prepare it for trial, they were paid to show up for court settings.  Getting paid for something outside a scheduled setting took extra work, and was iffy.  Whether the client did it or not, we should provide the same due process we'd like to receive ourselves – because the rule is there to protect not criminals we expect should lose, but to protect US when we're broke and wrongly accused. 

If the law and its servants can't do that, they have failed.

Retired Cop's Nonsense Explanation For Police Violence Explains A Lot

This video segment does a great job of showing how one retired cop explains away violence against unarmed peaceful protestors by saying that (a) there was violence someplace else, and (b) someone else shot police someplace else.  Therefore, he argues, we should understand police beatings and tear-gassings at peaceful protests by unarmed people.  You kind of have to see this to believe it.

The African American guest has it right:  the retired white cop can't connect any of his grievances against those involved in violence against police with the violence actually witnessed by the guest.  So he makes up explanations to get the conclusion he wants, which is that all the police violence is justified.

If the retired cop's view reflects that of active members of police forces around the country, it's no wonder there's escalating violence against civilians:  cops feel tit-for-tat violence (and killings) is justified.  No wonder people chant "No Justice, No Peace."  And no wonder it makes thugs like the retired cop nervous.  They intend violence and know they're the problem.

911: "If This Is An Emergency, Hang Up and Call …"

Americans have become used to being transferred into purgatory on "customer service" calls, but 9-1-1?  In New Port Richey, Florida, a married couple with a child and a visiting in-law called 9-1-1 in response to a home invasion in progress, only to be transferred to a recorded message.  The dispatcher who picked up the 9-1-1 call wasn't "qualified" to respond to a call requiring assistance from law enforcement, and transferred the call to the Sheriff's Department's non-emergency line, which played the emergency victims a recorded message suggesting they consider calling 9-1-1 if they had an emergency.

This didn't just happen once: the victims called back and got the same response again.

In a Kafka-esque twist, the person who was qualified to field the call was sitting right next to the dispatcher who proved incompetent to transfer the call.  You'd think that "help I'm being attacked" would elicit enough concern to hand the phone over, or grab the person who could help so the right assistance could be brought to the phone.

Alas.

Google Not Trustworthy With Your Credit Card

I have a domain name I use for professional work to receive email. In order to get reliable email (in light of Apple's abysmal track record with MobileMe and Mac.com email) I pay Google once a year for a professional-grade email service. Benefits include huge-attachment-handling.

I don't use Google to advertise; I don't advertise my day-job online at all. The couple of places I've appeared in professional listings online have, in fact, resulted in nothing at all but wasted time due to low-quality leads from "prospects" who don't understand what I do and have no desire to pay me to do it. So imagine my surprise when I saw Google Inc. on a credit card statement, charging me for AdWords service.

Say what?

Naturally, Google doesn't supply any contact information through which to find out what on Earth was supposedly done for the $4.16 billed me, and how to stop it. And since Google has enrolled in some kind of signature-less service that prevents my credit card from being able to provide itemization, my credit card company's online interface said I needed to contact the merchant directly about the charge.

Um. Google is as opaque as can be. How am I supposed to contact Google about charges, when Google's phone number says "Because Google does not offer live customer support at this time, please visit our web site at www.Google.com/support"...? Google.com has no apparent interface for people who want to know why Google is charging them money. Worse, I can't see a way to limit Google to charging my only for the one service for which I'm actually willing to pay.

Pretending interest as a new customer to get a human resulted in transfers to automated call queues which disclaimed the power to help.

At the end of one of my longer calls to Google (ie, transfers followed by new combinations of numerical responses designed to avoid the areas of the menu tree known to refer me to Google.com), I was asked whether I wanted to take a survey in English. Sure, why not. After spending several minutes giving answers (by pushing numbers) and leaving a recorded message ... I was kicked back to the menu position in which I was asked whether I wanted to take a survey in English.

Google's idea of a customer-friendly interface probably says something about why Apple is making all the money in interfaces.

Solution: I told my credit card to block Google as a merchant. I have about eight months to replace Google for my email service. Any suggestions?

Why DRM Is A Bad Deal

Amazon illustrates why buying entertainment data crippled by DRM is inappropriate for anyone expecting more than a temporary rental.  Google made a similar illustration when it closed a DRM video business in 2007, which involved killing the back-end systems that make it possible for users to read the DRM content.  The only upside was that Google refunded its victims customers.  Given the likelihood of customers getting financially-worthwhile relief from a DRM vendor under the arbitration provisions governing the clickwrap agreements facing most of the buyers of DRM on the planet, there's little reason to believe future DRM vendors will issue refunds when they close – or reason to suspect they will be solvent when they do.

Apple Service Tops PC Vendors Again

This might not be "news" after 8 years, but ....

Teotihucan's: Iced Tea Done Right

I met a friend and some business acquaintances for lunch at the Teotihucán Mexican Café.

Shortly after receiving an excellent salsa and a basket of nice, fresh chips, I was served the iced tea you see below:


Note that it comes with a lemon, a spoon that is an iced tea spoon, and a straw for those who, unlike me, don't discard them immediately.

The only downside was that on refill – and I note that refills were readily obtained the whole lunch – the servers tended to slowly pack the glass with ice so it became hard to stir sugar.

Great food with the tea, by the way.

GRADE: A

China Stix Doesn't Get Iced Tea

I ducked into China Stix* for dinner for starving children and learned that thousands of years of expertise in making tea doesn't help some Chinese fast food vendors to deliver a decent experience to iced tea customers.

(1) Overbrewed and bitter.
(2) You don't get refills but have to chase them yourself, which means that if you're with children you're S.O.L.
(3) They will hear you and nod to you when you ask for a tea spoon, but after three tries with different employees you still won't get a spoon suited to stirring tea into the plastic glasses they dispense for cold drinks. You will eventually end up trying to stir your tea with a knife (see photo).
(4) You will run out of little rice-flour pancakes for your honest-to-goodness Chinese dish – like the mu shu dish you read about in the review – and when that happens, the staff will nod like when you asked for a tea spoon but will, in fact, completely ignore your pleas for help.
(5) You will leave unhappy.

It is literally more convenient to brew it yourself. Only approach if dehydrated and traveling far from home.
Grade: F.

* --> There's apparently a restaurant by this name in California, which apparently won some local awards and whose web site reflects no connection to the Houston fast-food joint. My advice to the proprietors: sue for impairment of your valuable trademark.

Consumer Update: Bank of America

After having spent over a week getting Bank of America to begin automatic, recurring payment of a home mortgage recently bought by Bank of America, I have an update:
Nice, eh?

I discovered this while on the phone with a customer service representative who called me in response to by scathing feedback in one of several surveys I was invited to take in response to my multiple, fruitless contacts with Bank of America to set up automatic recurring payment of the mortgage. After 14 minutes on hold, she tells me that (a) according to the mortgage department it is set up to pay the mortgage automatically every month and (b) if I will write down a host of access numbers, pin numbers, etc. I can make my next call quicker and the options offered by the automated phone system more relevant. What she says in (a) may be true, but the BS meter goes offscale on (b).

Much more of this and I'll refinance with another bank just to be rid of the bastards.

Bank of America: Don't Bother

After deciding not to borrow from Bank of America, I ended up with Bank of America's "service" anyway: they bought my loan.

So, to avoid the SNAFUs I foresaw with Bank of America screwing up ordinary transactions as I'd seen in the past, I decided to make timely payment of the loan Bank of America's responsibility: I decided to set up automatic recurring payment of the loan. The steps to reproduce my experience are:

(1) Go through the dance to set up an online ID for managing Bank of America accounts. There were several steps, involving emails and snail-mail instructions, but this was ultimately accomplished without incident. Ameriprise Bank could learn something.

(2) Search diligently for evidence of how Bank of American invites users to accomplish payment online. This can take a while. The online information does indicate that setting up what Bank of America calls a "pay plan" – the automatic recurring periodic payment of an amount due under a loan payable to Bank of America – can be accomplished online. Searching for the mechanism to accomplish this will take longer than your patience endures, however, because establishing automatic payments of amounts due under mortgage agreements has not been possible since last October. This last but critical fact is not disclosed online, and is entirely inconsistent with – in fact, directly contrary to – the instructions advising users they can establish pay plans online.

(3) Call for help.
(a) This part is tricky because the numbers to which mortgage customers are routed tries very hard to steer you into making a one-time payment, and there is no recurring payment mechanism available by phone. This mirrors the situation online, but it's easier to identify on the phone because the options are fewer in number. When you try pressing "0" to get a human, a voice warns you that using a human can lead to higher fees. It is possible, using contact numbers buried in the web site, to get a human without facing the phone queue and its fee threats, but this is probably not the experience you'll have from the outset.
(b) Let's say that after an hour of trying to follow web instructions that don't work, you eventually get a phone number that leads you to a human. This is where, in hindsight, things really because irritating. The human was obviously consulting notes in giving his instructions, which lent an air of authority: he wasn't making this up, he was guided by printed materials to keep everybody giving accurate information. He instructed me that I needed to set this up online. You are going to see the punch line coming long before I did on this one, but bear with me. I was carefully led through a laborious process of associating my external "pay from" account with my online mortgage account so I'd be able to set all this up, and even informed that I was just one step away from completing the automatic payment setup.
(c) I entered bank info online so BoA could pull cash from my account at will, and I looked for a way to ask it to start. The helpful guy told me that, of the options I read him, I needed "verify" – that this would clear the account to start automatically paying the mortgage bill.
(d) Over the next days, I read from my account at a real financial institution that Bank of American had deposited $0.43 and $0.63 into my external "pay from" account. I dutifully logged into the BoA site and entered these numbers in the account verification boxes. My external "pay from" account was now verified! Hurray! I was done! And only three days of effort!
(e) Or was I? I tried to find evidence the account was actually going to be charged. The confirmation information simply said the account had been verified and that it was ready for making payments, not that any were scheduled. The online system included a make-a-payment link for folks who wanted to pay from an external account (or another BoA account), so it was quite plausible that nothing was set up at all. I began hunting for evidence of how to start the automatic payments. See Step (2) above. After patience failed, I began Step (3) again, looking for a human to finish what was obviously half-done.

(4) Get Help For Real. The same phone queues I accessed in (3) above tried to direct me to make one-time payments and actually hung up on me. In my last call, after 37 minutes of alternately being interrupted by agents trying to tell me that "bill pay" can't be used on a mortgage (BoA has a product called "bill pay" that is used for something else) and being placed on hold waiting for someone able to speak intelligibly about the bank's products, and being placed on hold waiting for someone authorized by BoA to confirm I intended to authorize BoA's payment of the mortgage from the account I verified online and from which BoA presumably would allow me to make an unlimited number of payments in any amount I chose, I finally was told the mortgage bill was set to be paid on time every month without one of the fees BoA charges for many of its payment options (the payment scheme is dizzying, and every tier has a different fee).

All told, it was about a week to get the account set up to pay the mortgage loan automatically, a half-dozen calls, numerous trips to the web site, and lots of mistaken online and human-provided instruction. An enormous waste of time.

I'll be looking for alternatives to end up in business with a different bank. As for you: borrow from someone else. Try to make sure you borrow from someone who'll be servicing the loan, not just originating it. You may save some middle-man fees that way, too.

HP Service: An Oxymoron

When HP emailed me to survey me about my recent email support contact, I wrote this in the little box in the web form:

Email "support" demanded I re-do everything I explained I'd done in my original support contact message, including all the testing tips on the tech support site, which the idiot just cut and pasted into his email without apparently reading anything I wrote. Then, he was unable to resolve problem; when he realized this, the promised call to arrange item replacement never came. HP products suck, HP doesn't stand behind its products, and HP lies about how it will try to make things right.

I think this about sums it up. I have a 1990s-era HP LaserJet 6P that works like a champ. Somewhere along the way, HP forgot how to make a quality product.

UPDATE: On, June 28, 2010, HP called about the replacement I was promised. (Although the call traced back to a Buford, GA address, the speaker sounded very convincingly like a worker at a foreign call center.) For a fee, HP promised to expedite the replacement, but in HP's defense they aren't charging me to send the HP in (prepaid FedEx label) and doesn't require receipt of the broken unit prior to sending a replacement. (Of course, they wanted my credit card number to hold hostage against my promise to send the broken unit.) Let's see if the new unit works when it arrives ....

Ameriprise Bank: Not Worth Your Trouble

Years ago, a relative who was trying to take control of her retirement finally expressed willingness to have her state retirement plan's funds rolled into an IRA account she would be able to invest at her discretion. The State was not easy to deal with, but at last we had a rollover check for a six-figure sum (excluding decimals) that was more than anyone in their right mind wanted to lose.

I had her send it to Ameriprise Bank. Ameriprise has a dizzying array of account types – bank accounts, IRA accounts, brokerage accounts, Simple Employee Retirement accounts, who knows what else – and the cover letter spelled out very clearly what account type the check needed to get into, what account number, and the name on the account. It was all quite straightforward. We watched the account for a while, waiting to see the money show up so she could begin buying things she'd become interested in (like Apple, which has done damn well in the last five years).

After a while, we called for an update: when would the check be in?

Amerprise's answer: "What check?"

Ameriprise lost a six-figure check sent by a state retiree from a state retirement fund from which obtaining a subsequent check would be like pulling teeth from an angry tiger. After some lengthy "discussion" about the check (we were told we might have forgotten to send it, etc.), it turned out that the department with the check was not the department that handled IRA accounts at all, and that it was a department that used an entirely different mailing address than the one to which we sent the check. It also had its own phone number. And that department didn't have any accounts with the tax characteristics required by my retiring relative.

Not an auspicious start.

I am here to tell you that in the intervening years, Ameriprise hasn't gotten any more organized. I've had an Ameriprise Bank account since the company was part of American Express. I used the exact same userID to log into the bank account as I did to log into my American Express credit card accounts. I used the same password. American Express still recognizes them. Ameriprise? Ha. Ameriprise has undergone repeated website infrastructure reorganizations – based on the error messages I get from Amerprise's site, all of which involve Microsoft products – and with each, I get new headaches. Features that stop working, features that are re-implemented with new third-party partners, features that are obsoleted ... and when I call for support on any of these I get the same level of service Amerprise has always delivered.

Service at Amerprise works like this:

Amerirpise: I can reset your password for you and you'll be ready to go.
JadedConsumer: Great!
A: Write this down: y-e-j --
JC: Uppercase or lowercase?
A: It doesn't matter. y-e-j-m-3-#. Can you read that back to me? Good. Now log in and it will let you change your password!
JC: Well, stick with me for a minute to see if this works. I've been through something like this before, and it was a bust. Yeah. Like this. Using the window where I normally log in, it doesn't log me in. It just gives me the same window again. No error message, or anything.
A: What web site are you using?
JC: The one I bookmarked when I opened the account.
A: Try w-w-w-dot-amerprise-dot-com.
JC: Okay ... now it's asking me to enter a password ... and now it's giving me an error, saying it doesn't like the password.
A: What password are you using?
JC: The same one I used for years.
A: But you wanted to reset it.
JC: No I didn't. I wanted to log in. You said you could fix my problem by resetting it. And now it won't take the password that it used to take.
A: You need to use a new password.
JC: What's wrong with my old password? I could remember my old password. That way I didn't need to call for resets.
A: If you want to reset your password, you need to use a new password.
JC: I didn't want to reset my password. I said I wanted to log in. You said you could solve the problem with a password reset. I still can't log in.

Next the new password failed with the exact same Error 500 Internal Server Error courtesy of Microsoft Internet Information Server's Active Server Pages technology. Eventually A said I needed to call back the next day and talk to a web support team. I explained that it wasn't me who forgot the pasword, and it wasn't my browser that was generating pages that said "Error 500: Internal Server Error", and that the last time I had this it took days to sort out. I suggested that he pass mu number to the web support team so they could call me when they figured out how to get my account accessible. Alas, A would not. A pretended that the web support team was somehow cloistered away from public access and unable to phone anyone no matter what they learned. I pointed out that he'd just ordered me to contact them by phone, so they clearly had phones. And since the problem was clearly within Ameriprise's control and not mine – I can't generate Ameriprise server errors, for example – it made sense that the web team be alerted to the problem so it could be fixed.

Although A kept insisting that only Web Support could fix the problem and that I had to call Web Support the next day, it still took about 15 minutes to talk him out of the number I was supposed to call to reach Web Support. He preferred to win an argument with me first regarding the necessity of speaking with them at all.

When I called the number the next day, it wasn't Web Support's number. The people there put me through a series of identification-verifying questions that didn't seem irritating as a precondition to transfering me to Web Support, until after they transferred me to Web Support I was made to answer all the exact same questions all over again. I mean, there's only so many hours in the day. A2 told me to log in, and I reminded him that as I'd just explained, my password had been reset the previous day from the one I had used for years. He told me he'd reset it again. "Write this down. It's not case-sensitive ...."

The exact same failure repeated. What kind of computer system was I using, he asked?

A: That Safari browser is not ... they changed some settings with that browser.
JC: Safari is one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the planet. What is wrong with your server configuration that it is having trouble serving Safari the same content it serves anyone else?
A: Don't be so quick to blame our server, they changed some settings in Safari and we're trying to figure out how to handle it. Did you download Firefox?

In Firefox, the login was made to work. However, when I clicked the "bill pay" option, I got this:

We cannot process your request at this time. Please contact customer service at (800) 297-7378.

Instead of risking this new number, I asked A2 what we should do. He put me in touch with the integrated services department, which (he said) handled bill pay. The discussion with A3 didn't go well.

A: How much are you trying to pay?
JC: I have no idea. Just trying to set up a bill payment leads to an error message.

After explaining where I was on their site (the top-level account summary window you get on login) and what caused the error (clicking the button to look at the bill pay options), A3 began to clue in – or so I thought.

"Oh!" she said. "Bill pay is listed as inactive in your account." Bollocks. I'd used it for years, in the past. Just not recently. Some new back-end change, apparently, that blenderized everyone's existing settings. "I'll activate it for you. Close your browser and try again."

I wasn't about to close every window – including the one in which I was writing this – at the suggestion of the recorded message she'd been taught in 1999. So I logged out and back in, and got the same results.

A: You may have to clear your cookies in your browser.
JC: The last guy said that if I used a different browser, then everything would work fine, and it's not. Why don't you tell me exactly what it is you want me to do and I will try to do it.
A: First, open Internet Explorer.
JC: That is going to be a problem.
A: Well, you need to open Internet Explorer to clear your cookies.
JC: I don't have Internet Explorer and have never needed it to access any of your site's online banking features. If you think the solution to this problem is that I begin using a Microsoft product famous for its insecurity and for not working properly, I'll suggest that we need to get someone on the line who actually understands what is wrong here so we can get it fixed.

Eventually, I was put on hold (for about the 10th time) and then informed that the people who run bill pay said that it would take 24h from her re-activation for it to have any chance of working.

"Is there anything else I can do to help you?"
"Well, it doesn't look like it."
"Thank you for calling Ameriprise Bank."

So ... sign up for an account -- today!
(Not!)

Electrozone: Don't Buy Switched-After-Baited Products

I called Electrozone about a 58" Samsung plasma television I ordered (PN58B860, for those who want to follow at home) with delivery 7-14 days from over a week ago, to find out when they were going to let me know when to expect delivery. The thing isn't small and it isn't light and someone needs to be able answer the door when they plan delivering it. Being there is important.

The guy who answers says I ordered shipping without tracking information. Yes, I say, but has it shipped yet? Oh – today. Today, he says. By the way, have I ordered from Electrozone before? No? Let me tell you how the company works, he says. We buy overstock from closing companies and so forth to get deals, and when Samsung opens the boxes to verify the products they are shipped out new and unused but we have to invoice them as "Class A Refurbished."

So, it's not new, I repeat, trying to make sure I have it right, and despite your site saying nothing about the product being used or secondhand or the like ... you plan selling me a refurbished product? One that will get me into trouble with the manufacturer when I need warranty service? One that won't be eligible for American Express' warranty-extending program?

He says the manufacturer will offer a year of warranty, but that the manufacturer "opened" the box "for verification" that the product was okay.

The product description on the site and in online price-comparison aggregators give no indication Electrozone plans fulfilling orders with refubs, of course. And the guy at Electrozone can't explain why, if they are buying unopened new stock from a closing competitor, they think it's necessary to ship those new and unopened products to Samsung "for verification" instead of selling the closed new boxes as new, while expecting Samsung to honor its new-product warranties for the new products. The guy sounds like he really expects me to believe that sending unopened new boxed electronics to the manufacturer to be relabeled "refurbished" is the most natural business practice in the known universe.

Liar.

I canceled. Don't bother ordering from Electrozone. They can't be trusted.

Iced Tea Report: Ruggles

Friday night, some parents took their Kindergartners' teacher to a "nice dinner" at Ruggles' original restaurant location near Montrose. The event was held upstairs, the only plausible solution to the layout of the noisy restaurant, and an effective way to police the movement of the children: guard the stairs.

When we arrived, nobody took drink orders even as family after family arrived with children. Nobody took appetizer orders. It was an undirected mess for the better part of forty-five minutes while I walked around wondering who would take responsibility for ensuring that we were served. It took forever to get a waiter to come to our tables, and I knew the kids were at their limit.

The hunger-maddened children was my first order of business with the waiter.

"For the safety of your establishment," I began, "bring this girl --" and here, I pointed at a child who was past all patience but soldiering on like a champ "-- Mac and cheese as fast as it is possible for the kitchen to deliver." I gave this instruction before ordering anything at all. I kept pointing at the girl while I looked from the waiter to the girl and back to make sure he had directed his attention appropriately. I thought my point had been clearly made: this was an emergency.

After an eternity, one parent begged for some bread, or something, to aid the increasingly distressed children. By then some kids were past reason, unwilling to eat anything but what they'd ordered. Like the Mac and cheese ordered by my targeted would-be diner.

The girl held her abdomen as if in pain and said, "I'm hungry."

I found the waiter and urged him to do something about the kids' meals and the Mac and cheese I'd specifically requested be brought faster than anything else. He agreed.

Adults began receiving their appetizers, mine included, and I went in search of the waiter. I asked about the Mac and cheese. He said they were moving as fast as possible and he was doing everything he could.

The adults received their entrées. I tried to work with the little one about whom I was worried, and she was insensible. She was hungry past reason. She wept – literally wept.

I went asking after a manager, and found someone willing to enter the kitchen and ask for the Mac and cheese. Within a minute, Mac and cheese sat before all the kids who'd ordered it. One parent reported that from their arrival to their kids' receipt of food took an hour and forty minutes.

Then, I reached for my tea.

The big steak in the foreground of the photo on the left was well-favored, but I'd ordered it medium and it was delivered mostly well-done and therefore considerable drier in the middle than I am accustomed to eating and lacked the texture I expect in a quality steak. Despite the definitely-quality-steak price of the thing, I was starved and unwilling to wait again for food, and entirely unwilling to take up another customer service issue with the staff. The stress of telling people they've botched things when you are trying to have a sit-down dinner with your family and the kids' teachers is just not my idea of a good evening.

After a couple (2) of tea refills, they stopped sending anyone near enough to notice, or even to have their attention attracted to the state of my tea glass. So look carefully at the picture, paying special attention to the empty glass with the ice, lemon, and tea spoon: if you go to Ruggles, this will happen to you!

Eventually, dinner was completed around 8PM, and the kids needed to go home. Unfortunately, Ruggles doesn't help people get home with any more seal than they help people get food or iced tea. Those families that came in two cars split up: the bill was so slow coming that a paying adult was left to wait while the families took off for home and bed.

It took an hour from finishing dinner to see a bill. A dinner that "started" at 6PM didn't let me back to my car ($4 to valet, and no apparent parking anyplace) until after nine o'clock.

Everyone had pitched in to cover the teachers' bills, so they were together. Everyone else had a one-family bill. Nevertheless, despite the three- and four- and five-person checks, that characterized the room (we went so far as to place name tags on the table so the staff could tell whose bill they were serving), there was a 20% tip added. After an hour waiting, and with kids past sense, I had no possibility of spending time getting justice. The wretched service – one waiter for maybe thirty people who took up the entire upper floor of the restaurant, and not a very attentive waiter at that – wasn't worth 5%, except that I like to make sure the people who actually work get paid. (L's chicken was superb, but you won't want to suffer the rest of the experience to get it.)

By chance, I had a lunch date the next day at the more mainstream-priced Ruggles Café and Bakery in the Village on Rice Boulevard. I ordered a turkey Reuben and iced tea, with fruit substituted for the fried potatoes that are normally served with the sandwich.

The iced tea is self-serve, so you can get all the lemon and sugar and refills you care to pour. There is no tip tacked onto your bill, even when you eat with friends. If you are lucky enough to get a table close to the drink fountain, you can get refills without much hassle.

The picture on the left shows how Ruggles substitutes fruit in favor of fries.

My conclusion is that while there are outstanding elements at Ruggles' associated restaurants, there is no ethic of service at all, and the tea – despite being offered with lemon, a tea spoon, and even sugar in the raw – is a C at the main restaurant for want of service. It is a B+ at the Ruggles Café if you can get a table close enough to the drink fountain to make refills likely. (Otherwise you leave your company repeatedly to get refills, or forgo them, either of which greatly reduces the quality of your experience.)

Between the two, Ruggles Café is the one to visit. It is also vastly cheaper. You can easily get better service nearly anyplace else in town, though. For the price, what you get at Ruggles' main restaurant is awful.

Why I Don't Invest in Bank of America

I'm shopping for a home. Since we sold our last home due to outgrowing it, we've been renting. It's a buyer's market, so this seemed an auspicious time to shop.

Among the potential picks was a property located close to the Texas Medical Center and not far from a pool where underwater hockey is played. It's not far from my kids' school. The location had a lot going for it.

The asking price – when I first noticed the property – was north of $410K. The property was owned by Bank of America following a foreclosure, which occurred in 2009. In 2005, the house sold for $550,000. A deal in the making?

The Harris County Appraisal District thinks the land (ignoring the structures) is worth a shade north of $300,000. The house is old, and not good-old. The garage is a fright. We offered dirt value.

There is a good reason we offered dirt value: Bank of America would not let us inspect the property before it had a contract. We couldn't assume anything had value other than the dirt. Had Bank of America allowed us to spend a few hundred bucks inspecting the property, we could have learned more, faster, and shortcuted this whole fiasco by either finding the right price up front or discovering we could not agree.

Bank of America, which was conned into lending on the house in 2005 on the theory it was worth $550,000, apparently believed that there was still value in the structures, and made a counter-offer accordingly. We shrugged, said "Okay" and played ball: we bid on the assumption that the structures had some value. At the speed of a squatting glacier, we reached a price. It took Bank of America's property person a week to get around to signing the contract that Bank of America had written. I say Bank of America wrote it because they sent us an addendum that was full of a complete set of terms and stated that it superseded other agreements to the extent of any conflict. Once BoA's lawyers had done with that agreement, it really didn't matter whether or not there was another document: the addendum covered everything, and did so in BoA's favor.

While this was going on, I was informed that we wouldn't get a contract from Bank of America until we were pre-approved through Bank of America. I pointed out that I had been pre-approved by a financial institution with which I was actually willing to be in an ongoing business relationship, and that pre-approval from Bank of America couldn't do anything but reduce my credit. Bank of America was adamant. So we lost another day getting pre-approved by some loan agent at Bank of America.

Still, they took forever with the contract addendum. Then, they demanded we send another, "corrected" copy of the original contract we'd sent them – making corrections that the addendum was designed to obsolete, and which the addendum said were corrected in the addendum. It was a make-work project, and it took another half a week to get them to process. Their seller's agent also sent us a raft of papers that are apparently highly prized in the office, but which don't purport to be contracts and which don't have anyplace for a signature by the seller. They apparently like to paper their files with this crud. I told them I was through humoring them and left them with a keen idea what I thought they could do with their papers.

Then, they said I needed to put money into an escrow account "by noon". A day previously, the story had been that I could mail a check. Now, they wanted certified funds by noon. I considered driving to the place with cash, but I didn't have the time. TD Ameritrade will wire money without charge from individual accounts they categorize with mine, so I got the escrow company's information – Charter Title – and sent it there, for the benefit of L and myself.

Bank of America owns Charter Title.

Once it became clear that the house's exterior was covered in wood whose damage could not be diagnosed because it had all been concealed with putty and recently repainted (Bank of America said it wasn't required to produce the seller's disclosures Texas law requires, because it didn't know anything about the condition of the house), and that the structure that wasn't covered in putty and paint (the garage) was infested with active termites, and that the water heater was freely leaking and that standing water had pooled beneath the floor beams and was sitting there in the shade growing whatever is possible to grow in stagnant water shaded from the sun in the swamps of south Texas, and all the electrical work had been done by a weekend warrior with no concept of the safety codes, and the upstairs renovations had been done by the same dufus and almost all of the bedrooms had serious fire safety concerns, and ... and ....

As you can imagine, I didn't feel it likely I would succeed in educating Bank of America about the value of its foreclosure. Some of the structural problems would have been readily ascertainable in 2005 had a real inspection been done, but Bank of America apparently still doesn't think its properties are worth knowing anything about. Bank of America's ask price has drifted south of $370 on the property, but the cost to level the structures and haul off the debris will push the net value of the property below dirt value. Apparently, Bank of America hopes to hold the land until it's worth more.

So under the contract (which, following Bank of America's addendum, had no option period), I instructed Bank of America what features made the property unfit at the price we'd agreed. Knowing Bank of America was not about to put a cent into the property, this was tantamount to exercise of an option to cancel, because the consequence of Bank of America refusing to correct demonstrated flaws was termination.

So I asked for the escrow money back, a process that involves getting Bank of America's consent on a form (tick tick tick) and asking Charter Title how it planned paying me. I had an itch to demand certified funds by noon, but I was being nice. It went like this:

JadedConsumer: How will you transmit the escrowed funds back to us?
Charter Title: What funds?

Actually, their exact words were "We do not have this file here." They also had no idea where the file was, or if it even existed. Doing business with a Bank of America company is never as easy as you expect.

I have the wire confirmation showing their wire instructions were followed to a T, but their response – after having my money for two weeks, and allowing me to inspect the property following instruction they'd forbid it until earnest money was in escrow – was that they had no idea where the money was. Isn't the point of an escrow agent to be able to receive and hold money while a transaction is pending? What does Bank of America think it's doing with an escrow company that has no idea when it has money and no file explaining what it's to do with the funds?

Of course, this isn't the first time I've seen Bank of America pull some outrageous gaffe, but it's the most recent. Maybe I shouldn't've wired the money April 1.

Next time I talk about Bank of America I'll tell you about how they treat old accounts. Bottom line? If you want to invest in a financial institution, consider one with competence in financial matters.

Starbucks Appreciates Customer Calls, But Not Enough To Solve Their Problems

After my recent experience with Starbucks' online feedback service over the weekend when its customer service line was down, I called today to find out what Starbucks would do to solve my problem.

They reviewed the notes from the previous call, listened to my explanation of how ridiculous their feedback system was and how worthless their "solution" to my concern was. The response? They appreciated my call to let them know.

Not that they felt like lifting a finger to look into the problem, much less solve it. They could – had they desired – contacted the manager of the store in question, found out who was on duty when my card was rung, and ascertained the facts behind the problem transaction. They could have learned something about how to prevent it, not simply recorded an incident of failure. They might have learned about the peculiar conversation between the school teacher who didn't like Where The Wild Things Are and the barrista, and about how Maurice Sendak thought children afraid of his monsters didn't need to see a watered-down version of the movie but could stay home and wet themselves, and while they were learning about the day in question they might have found out that I was really there and there really was a transaction that got messed up and they really needed to do something to fix it, at least in the future.

Because Starbucks didn't get me to answer a survey before I hung up, they've obtained only good feedback from me to date in their customer survey system. This kind of bias – where unhappy customers driven off the line by obviously insincere saccharine niceties never last long enough to provide a survey result, and only happy customers interested in rewarding apparently adequate customer service stay on the line by way of appreciation – likely pervades all Starbucks' feedback systems, and assures management (in error) that everything is copacetic out on the front lines.

Check out the five-year chart comparing Starbucks to McDonalds:


Starbucks' hold line contained information about a coffee grinder recall. If Starbucks' effort to make money in coffee has really degenerated to the point of trying to increase profit by helping them make coffee at home – and their apparently sluggish (the salesman laughed as he tried to sell it to me) effort to sell customers "via" instant coffee confirms that this is the case – SBUX is really headed toward a sad life as a commodity vendor selling stuff people can get anywhere, including more convenient places and places that will sell for less.

Starbucks certainly won't be differentiated by its customer service.