apartment + cable deals suck

Published: 9 March 2010

In searching for apartments, I found one place that I was really pleased with. It was in my price range; had a dishwasher, washer, and dryer in every apartment; and was in a generally pleasant area of town. I just found out that they’re working out an agreement with a local cable company that would require residents to buy cable TV, though, which is a big part of why I’m leaving my current apartment. I don’t watch TV and I don’t want to pay for some service that I’ll never use! It’s so frustrating. The guy at the new apartment that I’ve been talking with told me it will “guarantee 252 customers for [cable company]“. Yeah, and it will piss off a bunch of your residents, I’m guessing, and perhaps make potential residents like myself pass by your apartments. Whose side are they on? Are they in the apartment business to have residents, or to line the pockets of x cable company? I’m entering an agreement with the apartment complex, not with the apartment complex and whatever other companies it wants to tack on. Let the cable company get its business from customers who actually want their service, not from people that just happen to live at an apartment complex and are forced to pay for television they do not want. Residents would get cable at a discounted rate, but why not let individual residents choose which services to buy and from whom? I don’t want to be locked in to cable TV for the duration of my lease, nor do I want to be required to buy it from a particular company. My apartment search continues, apparently.

Edit: I’ve been continuing my apartment search online and I’ve discovered one thing that is both baffling and annoying. Apartment complexes brag about all kinds of extra stuff, e.g., “We have a duck pond!! Come see our manicured lawns! OMG we have a fitness center!!!1” without having things like a dishwasher or washer/dryer. I would give up crap like the duck pond and fitness center in exchange for an apartment with a dishwasher, washer, and dryer.

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got a PS3

Published: 4 March 2010

Just a quick note to say Best Buy happened to get some 120GB PS3’s in today and I just happened to call at the right time, squeal “Omigod, can you hold one?!”, and buy one. :) I couldn’t find Eternal Sonata at either Best Buy or Gamestop, so I ended up with Bayonetta instead. After dying repeatedly in the prologue on Normal setting (the hardest setting there is, for some reason), I realized that using Triangle + Circle does combos a lot better, or something, and I’ve since progressed to Chapter 3. I’m really enjoying it. Anyone who has a PSN account, my user name is cheshire137, if you want to friend me. :)

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up early for test and soup-bowl latte

Published: 4 March 2010

I feel like the walking dead but will be heading to a coffee shop for studying this morning since I have a test in my Linux kernel class. I did this last week in preparation for my requirements engineering test and it went pretty well. They gave me a latte in what looked like a soup bowl with a handle, and I snuggled into a loveseat in the back corner that was mostly quiet.

I’m so tired because I have the worst time falling asleep, so I stay up late and then of course end up waking up late which repeats the whole cycle. I got up last night after I’d been lying down a bit and just wandered around the apartment, stretching and doing yoga. Everyone loves lights-out, 1-AM yoga! I ended up stretching out on my rug in the living room and almost fell asleep there before panic about not hearing the alarm the next morning woke me, so up I got, surprisingly stiff after that brief time on the floor. I’m going to the gym after I get out of class today and will hopefully be so exercised and exhausted tonight that I’ll fall asleep at the ripe old time of 11 o’clock.

In web site news, I recently adjusted my .htaccess file, using this guy’s tutorial, to redirect all non-Feedburner traffic that goes to my posts RSS feed to the Feedburner one. If you’ve had any trouble with my RSS feed recently, it may be due to that, so please let me know. I was also amused that a friend called me “a one-woman consumerist.com” after all the cell phone and PS3 posts here. I can’t help having trouble with these online purchases!

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more corporate confusion

Published: 3 March 2010

First there was Toys R Us and a PS3, now there’s AT&T and my refurbished phone purchase. I blogged just this morning about buying a refurbished Samsung Magnet to replace my dying Sony Ericsson Z750, but I had some hassle today when I checked the AT&T web site and saw that I could’ve gotten a new Magnet for less than what I paid for the used one. How that slipped past the marketing department is beyond me, and it wasn’t just the price that differed:

Refurbished Magnet New Magnet
Age Der, it’s used Shiny!!
Price $9.99 $0.00
Warranty 90 days 365 days
Contract required? Yes Yes

When I saw that I was pretty much getting the short end of the stick in every way, I tried to cancel my order online. Couldn’t do it, so I called AT&T. I spoke to one guy for a few minutes before he told me I’m a Premium customer, whatever that means, and transferred my call. I then spoke to another guy who said he couldn’t cancel my order and he couldn’t refund any money, so I asked to speak to his manager. I was then put on hold for the longest time ever, around fifty minutes according to my call timer. I was at work so I went back to my desk and continued working, letting the happy hold music play while the phone sat on my desk.

Finally some lady picked up and I explained what happened and that I either wanted to cancel the refurb order or get $9.99 credited back to my credit card. Neither could happen, apparently, because the order was already processed. She told me what I could do was wait until Fedex had a tracking number for my package, then call Fedex and refuse the package, causing them to send it back to AT&T. She checked AT&T’s site and confirmed the new Magnet’s price. She explained AT&T would then exchange my refurbished phone for a new phone, give me a refund, and I would get the new phone for free. I asked if there would be any kind of restocking fee or any fees at all: yep, a $9.95 “Buyer’s Remorse” shipping fee. Well, of course I had buyer’s remorse when I saw AT&T’s web site sold me an inferior product at a higher cost without so much as a peep that I could save some money by buying a new phone instead! I confirmed that there would be no other fees and that, essentially, I was going to get a $0.04 discount. Yep, pretty much. I get the $9.99 back for the refurbished phone but have to pay $9.95 in Buyer’s Remorse fees.

I went ahead and okay-ed this plan of action because of the extended warranty I would get with a new phone, plus it’ll be new and I can hope it will be in better condition than a used version. The delay is a bit annoying: when I called Fedex, they said it would have to reach its destination center before it would be turned around and sent back to AT&T. They estimate that will happen on Friday, so then its status should be updated to “return to sender” and I can call AT&T and have them send me a new Magnet. I confirmed with the AT&T manager that this was all being noted on my file so that I would get the right phone for free and there wouldn’t be any confusion, and I wouldn’t have to reiterate my story. I also asked the manager if she had any sway over prices of refurbished phones versus new ones, and why it was that a used phone could ever be sold for more than the same model new. Nope, she said, these are just every-other-day deals that change and so sometimes this happens. Still seems to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.

When I told the story to a friend at work, she hoped that AT&T would send my $0.04 refund to me in a check. If they did, I would totally try to take it to a supermarket and see if they would cash my third-party check. I’d probably get some runaround about how they couldn’t go out on a limb in case the check was no good, haha. Nah, I figure I’ll get the four cents credited back to my credit card, which will be a fun line item in my next statement.

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new phone on the way after mine snooped on me

Published: 3 March 2010

I’ve had a few problems with my current phone, a Sony Ericsson Z750, over the past few months. It started when I would try to make a call and it wouldn’t ring, it just sat there silently displaying the text “Calling whoever…”. I would hang up, try again, and it would usually work. It later proceeded to the weirdness of starting to ring when calling someone, then would suddenly stop ringing with a depressing BE-BOOP! sound, dumping me back to the main screen. So I’d try again… That problem would repeat itself many times before finally connecting me to a person; I blamed it on AT&T’s shoddy network, but who knows.

More recently, the phone would cut out audio on my end when I was talking with someone. I would keep talking to them, asking “hello? hello?”, but it was dead silent on my end. The phone would vibrate once (its “death rattle”, I decided), the screen would go completely black, and I’d just shut the phone in disgust. A couple minutes later, the phone would come back, the outside display once again showing the time, the inside screen no longer black. It would take it a bit for the bars to come back, and then I would call the person back and find that they had been able to hear me the whole time, had been talking, and I had just been unable to hear them. Not cool. This seemed to happen with a frequency of every other call I made or received, and I was no longer chalking it up to AT&T’s network.

Last night, I talked with Jon on the phone for a while before we each [voluntarily] hung up. He had recommended I watch this YouTube video, so I proceeded to do so, speakers turned up, phone nearby on the coffee table. Jon apparently tried to call me back three times, the first time failing somehow, but the second time he seemed to be connected… He heard music in the background and he heard me cough, but I didn’t respond. Now I didn’t respond because I never answered the phone, it was still by my feet on the table, shut (it’s a flip phone). He disconnected and called me back a third time, and this time it rang as expected and I answered. He told me what had just happened, I confirmed I was watching the music video and had possibly coughed. Yeah… Kinda creepy. No one likes the feeling of being spied on by their technology.

So I dug around last night and my phone was upgradeable through AT&T’s site. I ended up buying a refurbished Samsung Magnet for $10, though it did require I extend my contract again. *shrug* Everyone I talk to uses AT&T, and I haven’t been impressed with some of the policies (Verizon) or coverage (T-Mobile) of other companies, so I’m not too bothered by sticking with AT&T. When I get the phone in, I’ll take photos and post on here.

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