That’s Pretty Dumb

This was pretty funny.  We ordered a handful of things online from Office Depot and one item was a box of paper clips.  Just a small box of 100 paper clips — small enough to easily fit in your pants pocket.

For some reason, the paper clips were shipped separate from the rest of the order.  That’s understandable, given stock quantities, warehouses, etc.  But check out the huge box it came in (with the paper clips on top):

Sure enough, the contents were:

1. A small box of paperclips.
2. A ton of inflatable bags to hold the paperclips in place.

We got a bit package the other day. It was something for my wife – a bunch of old maternity clothes being returned to her, I think, so she could give them to someone else. Needless to say, it was a heavy box.

64 lbs, to be exact. That’s why UPS put a big yellow sticker on it that said “CAUTION – Heavy Package Over 70 lbs”. On the sticker they filled in the “weight” box with the correct “64.0 lbs”.

My only guess is that they wanted to make sure we knew it was very heavy, but didn’t have the right sticker to put on it. Close enough, I guess…

I got an e-mail from Yahoo Answers a few days ago with the subject line “A little thank you…”. Here is the full message:

Where is the “thank you” in that message? The whole thing is about why I should be using Yahoo Answers even more.

FWIW, I think Yahoo Answers is pretty neat. I use it from time to time and try to answer some questions. I figured that since I use it sometimes, they were thanking me for that. I guess not…

We’ve used SunTrust for years, and overall we’re quite happy with them.  Our issue lies with their apparent trouble in updating their own system.

The first case of this was about a year ago.  Three times in the course of a month, we’d try to pay for something (usually a meal) and our card would be declined.  I knew we had plenty of money, so I’d call them and they’d unblock it.  It was blocked “for our security”, which is fine – I appreciate them being proactive.  The dumb part was that when they blocked the card, they’d call me to let me know — but use an old number of mine that I haven’t had in years.  Every time, I’d have them update it to a new one, but the next time they blocked the card they’d use the old number again.  I eventually called and got escalated high enough that someone was able to change it in a way that would stick.

A similar thing just happened with our checks.  I tried to order new ones online, but couldn’t because our address had changed.  I called them up, explained that, verified the address, and placed the order.  The new checks arrived yesterday at our new address — printed for our old one.   I have no idea how they still have that address.  They verified the new one on the phone, they sent the checks to the new one, and I changed our address online with them about 10 months ago.  Anyhow, they’re re-printing them now…

I’ve not looked close enough at this plan to see if it’s anything that parents should do, but I have no confidence in their ability to keep track of money. Check out this chart they show during their commercials:

The bar on the left represents $10,000. The one on the right represents $20,000. Notice anything strange? The bar on the right is nearly three times as large as the bar on the left, not just double the size.

Here are the same charts, only zoomed in and measured. The numbers represent the height (in pixels) of each one. You’ll notice that the one on the right is more than three times the height of the other.

I realize that the one on the left is set back a little bit, but not nearly enough to cover that kind of difference. Also, I have to say that I got this idea from an old article on cockeyed.com that dealt with Quicken in almost the same way.

Some friends of ours were staying in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, so we went down to visit them. We went swimming and let the kids play for a while, then went up to their room so we could figure out where to eat.

Their room was up on the fifth floor. When we got up there, they warned us to keep our daughters away from the railing. It turns out that the bars around the rail are wider than your average 3 year old and they could easily slip through and fall five stories into the atrium.

Is that just a lawsuit waiting to happen or what? Other than that, it was a pretty nice hotel, too.