Bally’s Fitness is annoying…
I have had a Bally’s Fitness membership for many years, and I really haven’t had occasion to use it in the last couple. I maintained the membership because Lisa gets a cheaper membership through mine. She hasn’t been going much in the last year, so we decided it was time to cancel it. I looked up the contact information on the website and called the 800 number. After traversing the phone tree, I was told I needed to call a different number. Hmm. Ok, called that number. For the next 20 minutes, I traversed the phone tree trying to find a way to cancel my membership. None of the options applied. Finally out of frustration, I chose one of the cancellation options. After listening to another long list of things I didn’t care about, I was told “Press 1 to speak to a representative”. Ok, sounds good. “Please enter your member number”. Ummm. I don’t know. I can’t remember where I put my card… I entered all zeros. After a few iterations of that, “If you would like to speak to a representative and don’t have your membership number, we will charge you 10.00 for the service.” What?!?? I sat on hold for a few minutes. Hung up. Dug through the drawers upstairs and found the card buried there. Called back and went through the phone tree. Again. Entered the membership number. Immediately got a real person, which was odd considering there were “extended delays” when I had called just a few minutes ago. Told her I wanted to cancel. She asked why. “I don’t go”. Long pause. “We offer a service to maintain your membership on hold for $4 a month”. I just wanted to cancel. I was then informed I had to “mail a request to the central office stating that I wanted to cancel my membership”. What??! An hour of my life was eaten up in this process. I bet they are going to charge me to cancel too.
A few things were obvious from this experience:
- Bally’s doesn’t make it easy to talk to a real customer service person.
- They go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible to cancel a membership.
- They really don’t care about their customers.
- I won’t recommend them to ANYONE based on this experience.
An odd similiarity…
A coworker and I made an observation that there is a behavior pattern that is similar in both three-year-olds and members of Congress:
1. Choose a meaningless event that has recently occurred
2. Take the opposite position of whomever talked last
3. Throw a tantrum
A New Term To Add To Your Vocabulary
Posted by Jon in Uncategorized on December 8, 2009
A common term around the office is the “Silver Bullet”. It refers to the notion that some simple radical instrument or change is going to fix all the problems that are being encountered. I have begun referring to these instead as “Silver Boomerang” ideas. The implications of the term are that the results of the change are difficult to predict, and have the likely potential to smack you in the back of your head. Wham!
Required Viewing
I ran across this web site the other day while reading about climate change. In my mind, it is required viewing for anyone interested in residing on this planet. Especially check out the sections about Carbon Dioxide Levels and Global Average Temperature, as they speak volumes.
The only constant is change
I had been running this site off a Linux server in my basement for the last 7 years or so. At the time, I got the fastest connection available: 768k DSL. I later upgraded to 1.5Mb DSL. Now life has different priorities. I spend much of my free time with my family, and I no longer had time to maintain the machine or the OS. I have moved the server to a hosted space, disconnected the DSL and turned off the server after all this time. I can safely say that my basement is now devoid of the whine of fan motors. We also have a much speedier 16 Mb connection thanks to Comcast. Qwest had sent us advertisements over and over again saying that Fiber was coming to our neighborhood (with 20Mb service), and even went as far as to put flyers on the doors of the whole neighborhood saying that it was available. Calls into Qwest proved fruitless in that regard. Their loss.
For the curious, the previous site was run a dual processor Pentium III 450 that I inherited from a previous job on Gentoo Linux. I only had one crash the whole time it was up, and that was because of unexpected power loss and damage to the motherboard. I’d recommend a UPS for any computer without a built in battery.
The site goes on. Whee.
Eliminate Executive Restrooms
I have heard people say that CEO compensation isn’t really out of balance with their responsibilities. Really? Take a typical S&P 500 CEO. If they earn 1.5 million in salary, that is equivalent to 1,500,000/52/5/8 = $721.15 per hour. Considering minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour. Ok, so a typical CEO makes 100 times that of a minimum wage worker in salary. The reality, though is that only a fraction of the typical CEO’s compensation comes in as salary. The AFL-CIO database of CEO compensation lists the average compensation for S&P 500 executives at $10,836,843 a year. In other words: $10,836,843/52/5/8 = $5210 per hour.
I think we should eliminate executive restrooms. Here is my reasoning: Let’s say the typical S&P CEO visits the restroom three times a day during normal business hours, at five minutes a trip this adds up to 15 minutes a day. $5210/hour equates to $86 a minute, thus the CEO costs the company $1290 a day in bathroom trips. If this is a daily occurrence, $1290*5*52 = $335,400 a year to go to the bathroom.
Considering the President of the United States is compensated $400K a year, well, I’ll let you make the leap.
Mileage Accuracy
I started an experiment with the last fill up of the tank of gas in my truck. I reset the truck’s trip odometer, and also reset the trip computer in my Garmin Nuvi. After 140 miles or so, the Nuvi is reading a little over 2.5 miles more than the trip odometer. The question is: Which one is right? I guess I’ll have to find a known distance, and reset both of them to see. Something to add to the to-do list, but certainly not at the top.
Unmotivational continued…
It appears that the unmotivational posters are being done by someone at work. Here is the latest.
unmotivational posters
Recently at my place of employment, there have been a rash of “productivity” posters placed around the workspace, with the intent to give helpful advice about how to be a better performer. I just find them insulting. Take this example:
Work early, late, and on weekends and you will get more done!
Another poster, which disappeared prior to me getting a picture of it, mentioned that better collaboration is possible if you wear under-arm deodorant. I’m not kidding.
As we keep scaling back spending at work, I wonder how much they spent on this poster campaign. Hmmm.
Yahoo Autosync needs an update
Yahoo Autosync must be a low priority item for Yahoo. I am running Vista, and it isn’t usable. Looking at the help page for Autosync related to supported platforms, it is pretty obvious that it isn’t something Yahoo values (or they don’t update help very often):
What are the system requirements?
Currently, you need Windows 2000, Windows XP Pro, or Windows XP Home.You also need at least a Pentium Processor, 128MB RAM, and 40MB disk space.
Note: Vista/Outlook 2007 are not currently supported. We hope to have this by the end of 2007.
Last time I looked 2007, and 2008 have come and gone.
I guess I shouldn’t complain. I didn’t pay for it. 
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