Posts tagged as "consumer watch" - Chris Hardie

Fair warning: this post is pure rant. I have a Sprint PCS phone that I use as my primary, and only, home phone line. There are tons of reasons why I like this arrangement, which I won't go into here, but I've been a loyal, pay-on-time Sprint customer for several years now. Which is why it was maddeningly frustrating to go to make a call today and get a note that my account had been shut off because I was over my spending limit. I went to Sprint's website to see if I could find out how I'd used...

I'm usually very much in favor of using local vendors, service providers, etc. instead of big corporate versions whenever possible and reasonable. Current cultural trends make that a challenge. But I've recently had an experience where the branch of a big corporate bank impressed me much more than that of the local bank that I would usually like to celebrate on that basis alone. It turns out that it's mostly about the people. If you start comparing pricing, interest rates, etc. it's often hard...

Random rant: In 1970, Intel produced a memory chip, the first, capable of storing 1 kilobyte of data - a couple of paragraphs of text or so. Today, one can obtain memory chips that store many gigabytes of data - enough to hold entire movies, encyclopedias, and more - for mere hundreds of dollars. So, why is it that when I finish pumping gas at a gas station and hit the "RECEIPT YES" button, the piece of crap machine can't store that one simple keystroke in its input buffer long enough that it doesn't...

I have this problem with impulsiveness. On Sunday, Carrie and I were sitting in the park, soaking up some of the first real sun of the season, and we reflected on how nice it would be to grill out that night. Stating what I thought was a minor detail, I noted that we did not, in fact, possess a grill. No problem! The Modern American Way dictates that even though it's 6 PM on a Sunday evening, one should still be able to go from soup to nuts, no grill in sight to happily grilling out, with just...