That’s Pretty Dumb

I am not like a great number of husbands, boyfriends or significant others in this world. Although I am a typical man who likes to go to a store, find what he came for, and pay for it and leave, I still go to Wal Mart with my wife for groceries and other necessities.

Wal Mart has to be at the top of my list for pet peeves or “life’s little annoyances” A typical shopping trip goes as follows; My wife and I have been in the store now for what seems like an eternity (about 45 minutes in man time) and I can’t seem to get her to keep up with me. She keeps stopping and looking at things that are not on the list. I keep telling her that there is no reason to make a list if you are going to ad lib. She gives me that look and I see right away that this cannot possibly end well for me so I shut up!

Finally we are done (hallelujah and praise Jesus) and are heading to the checkout. Getting to the checkout is not usually very hard to do because the line usually comes to meet you! The trick is not choosing the shortest one but the one that is moving the fastest. Now I don’t know about most of you guys reading this but just when we get to the conveyor belt to put our groceries on and check out this is when MY wife decides to go back over the list one more time or remembers something that wasn’t there in the first place. Instead of this happening when the line was back in sporting goods, now I have to run real quick and get it before we get through checking out! Now comes the fun part; it’s never ever something I know exactly where it is! I think this may be her pay backs for me using the treadmill as my clothes hanger.

I tell you this story to get to my “life’s little annoyance” with Wal Mart! After I get back from aisle 34 with whatever it is that my wife has remembered and while I am trying to figure out where all of the oxygen in the store has gone, I take a good look around. What I see is about half of the population of our fair city of 70 thousand (the other 35 thousand are at the Wal Mart across town). All of whom are lined up in five lines. Five lines! Here is a store that America spends almost half of their available income in every year and they can only afford to pay five checkers? I look around again and see that there are 36 checkout stations each with a cash register which tells me either someone anticipated using them or made a huge merchandising blunder. Just look at all of that merchandising space wasted with checkout stations!

After checking out I push our cart out the door all the while mumbling about never coming back. You do know about never saying never, don’t you?

I saw this sign on the side of the road.  It’s near where I work, and I drive past this location almost day.  However, I have no idea what “Trilogy” is.  I guess it’s a church, but I have no clue where it might be.

Even if I was interested in attending a random Easter brunch, this sign won’t do anything to lead me to theirs.

This one goes hand-in-hand with our recent Wal-Mart example.  It’s not a bad sign, but it’s not very clear.  I saw this sign on a Monday morning on my way to work.  Was it left up from the previous weekend?  Or does it really mean “this Friday” coming up?

This neighborhood often has outdated signs posted, so I have no idea which is correct.  A simple fix would be to add “this Friday, Nov. 30″ and there would be no questions.  Of course, they have these signs all over the neighborhood, so it would be a sizable task to change them all.

This is one that I took a while back but forgot to post.

We were at Wal-Mart when I noticed this sign in their photo lab.  What’s wrong with it?   Try telling me how long it’s been up there.  Do I need to wait 30 minutes for someone to come back?  Or did they hang it up 29 minutes ago and they’re walking back right now?  There is no way to tell.

A simple timestamp on the sign would do the job.  Even better would be a sign that says something like “Photo lab will be closed until 8:15pm” or something like that.

I have Verizon Wireless for my cell phone and I’m reasonably happy with them. However, they seem to be having a very hard time figuring out what their rates are.

First was the very amusing story of George Vaccaro, who couldn’t convince Verizon that $0.02 and $0.0002 were actually different numbers.

Now we have a guy that called Verizon 56 times and asked them two simple questions regarding their rates:

1 — What is the data overage rates for the basic 10MB data package for $29.99?
2 — If you get the Core Choice 450 minutes package with unlimited data, what is the data roaming rate in Canada?

Of the 56 reps he talked to, only one quoted the correct price for both rates and he received a total of 22 unique reponses.

Check out the video below for the whole story:

“If it doesn’t say Wood & Fullerton above the door, you’re at the wrong Goodyear.”

That was the tagline of a commercial I heard on the radio yesterday. While I understand where they’re coming from, it seems to put a downer on the Goodyear brand as a whole.

I heard it as “all of the other Goodyear locations suck, but ours is pretty good.” Wouldn’t you want people to think the entire company is great? It sounds to me like they’re competing against themselves, which isn’t a great business plan.

This seems very much to me like churches that are competing for each other’s members. Shouldn’t they really all be on the same team?

They’ve been pimpin this thing on the radio (and TV) around here non-stop. They make it sound like the best website ever created.

Really, it’s not a bad idea. It gives great info about each stadium/city, and a map with useful info. However, since it’s sponsored by Regions Bank, they only show Regions Bank ATMs - no others.

Now, I realize that Regions ATMs should be featured prominently, since they’re the sponsor. The problem is that they bill this as the most useful site you can imagine, then purposefully leave it short-featured in order to appease their sponsor.

Stuuuuupid.

This was kinda funny.  We went to an apple orchard on Friday (great place for the kids to go).  Anyhow, this was the sign they had when you left the parking lot.

Jeremy Zawodny has a rough tale of trying to buy a new washer from Sears.  I’ve always had pretty good luck with them, but I’m a bit wary after reading his story.

We’ve decided to change our ad sharing revenue from 50% up to 100%. This means that if you submit your own story, you keep all of the ad revenue from it.

More details here.