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Hey! Bosch Has Got REAL Service Reps!

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And — get this! — Bosch service representatives actually answer the phone!

Readers Elissa and Jestjack remarked that they thought the dishwasher repairman I described yesterday — the one with the side gig where he peddles cut-rate appliances to his employer’s customers — sounded a shade on the sketchy side.

Well, come to think of it, so did I. And when I went online to try to learn more about the worn-out “impeller” he claimed was the problem ($350, + …maybe not worth it if he could come up with a new Bosch for $450 or $500), a great deal more suspicion was cast upon “Richard” and his line of bull.

A Google search with terms combining “impeller,” “Bosch,” and “dishwasher” in various creative ways comes up with next to nothing. The most intelligible post I could find on the subject claimed that if the “impeller” isn’t working, the washer won’t drain. But this washer drains just fine. Otherwise…scarcely a mention. Eventually it occurred to me to call the customer service number glued to the side of the dishwasher door, on the same tag that reveals the model and serial numbers.

So having remembered that customer service number in the middle of the night, by light of day I called Bosch and asked the owner of the male voice that answered if he could please tell me what an “impeller” is, what it looks like, and how the washer would behave if it’s not working.

He said, in short, “Huh?”

I explained that I thought a repairman was trying to scam me and recited the story.

He said, “Maybe the guy defines an ‘impeller’ differently than I do, but … take a look on the inside of the tub.”

“Yeah?” from inside the washer.

“See that pipe going up the back?” I’d have called it a small duct, but yup, I saw the pipe going up the back.

“The impeller is what pushes water from where the lower spray arm is, in the bottom of the tub, up  that pipe to the top spray arm, the one that’s attached to the upper rack. All it does is get water to the upper spray arm.”

“Uh huh…”

“What’s your washer doing? What’s wrong with it?”

I explain that it fills with water fine but then the wash cycle doesn’t kick in. He says probably the problem is the circulating pump, which is what causes the water to slosh around inside the machine to wash the dishes. A new one costs $138. Plus of course the cost of labor.

Bosch has one, count him, (1), authorized service man in this area. He says the guy will charge me $99 to walk in the door. I say I’ve already paid $90 to get a crook in the door but I don’t object to paying about the same to lure someone who’s not going to rip me off. He says Bosch will eat the “diagnostic charge” if I will pay the parts and labor. I remark that I have no objection to paying for the replacement part or for the guy’s work, since a man has to eat, after all.

In the course of conversation, I say that repairmen have told me all appliances on the market today are engineered to give out in seven years, and the Bosch in question is about nine years old. So I’m not anxious to do repairs on something that’s going to fall apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.

He now says that a dishwasher is a surprisingly simple device. It basically consists of a couple of pumps, a water heater, a couple of spray arms, and a control board. As long as the tub doesn’t rust out — an unlikely event given that mine is made of stainless steel and does not get banged around — the thing should run practically forever on the strength of an occasional replacement part. Forever, or until Bosch quits making the parts, which isn’t happening anytime soon.

The Bosch CSR’s attention now turned to Accredited Appliance and its service dude, Richard. He wanted their phone number. Expressing considerable interest in Richard’s sales tactics, he took the time to look the company up in Bosch’s records. It appears that Richard is about to land squarely in the dog house.

LOL! Nothing like the hive mind, is there?

😀

Bosch Customer Service:
1-800-944-2904

Discounted Appliances: Nifty Little Side Gig!

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The appliance repairman was just here, going on about the choices between spending $350 to repair my nine-year-old Bosch dishwasher and buying a new one. In the course of chatting, he revealed that he’s built an incredibly cool side gig, one that seems so obvious and yet not one that I, at least, had ever thought of.

As part of his job, he goes around to various retailers who sell appliances. Many, especially Sears, regularly discount kitchen and laundry appliances — sometimes deeply. Very deeply — about three weeks ago he found a dishwasher, brand-new, marked down 85 percent!

When he finds a serviceable, new appliance (note, these are not used machines), he buys it. Then he turns around and sells it for a profit on Craig’s List. He said he made $500 on the last one he peddled that way.

How about that? If you have a truck or service van that you can use to haul the things around, voilà! A handy-dandy resale business!

Chase, UPS, and Credit Card Application Fraud

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DebitCardWhile I was spending half the day on Monday dorking around with the latest identity fraud moment, it did occur to me to wonder why on earth a person would apply for a business credit card under a fake name and then fill in the business’s correct address. Wonder-Accountant speculated that the form may have had a mailing address as well as a street address. But if that were the case, then Chase would have sent the letter asking for more information to that mailing address. Instead, they sent it here. I had about concluded that what appeared to be application fraud was really more like a prank when I came across this amazing report, detailing an alleged collaboration between insiders at Chase credit card services and UPS.

Now, I have no way of knowing whether what this guy says is true. But it would explain why the perp would ask to have his fraudulent credit card sent to my business’s real address.

JoshEAC, the post’s author, describes learning that a credit card had been ordered from Chase, supposedly by his wife. After considerable argument, in which a Chase customer disservice representative suggested that his wife was lying to him when she denied ordering a card, he managed to obtain the UPS tracking number for the card Chase claimed to have sent. At this point he began to proactively track the package wending its way toward him via the Brown Trucks. In the middle of the afternoon, he saw that the package had been diverted from home delivery to the pick-up counter at a UPS station. Three hours later, the tracking system reported that his “wife” had changed her mind and asked to have home delivery after all.

And lo! A day or two later Chase calls to inquire about the fraudulent charges being racked up on the “wife’s” new credit card!

Two possibilities presented themselves to JoshEAC: gross incompetence on Chase’s part — altogether credible given the outrageously ridiculous interactions he had with the bank’s customer disservice reps and their supervisors — or organized fraud committed by insiders at Chase and UPS.

If you buy the second scenario, someone on the inside at Chase creates a fraudulent application. He arranges to have the fake credit card sent to the mark’s real address via UPS. He has access to the passwords for this account. The card is shipped off to the mark.

A few hours later, his co-conspirator at UPS arranges to stop delivery to that address and then, shortly afterward, to have the card delivered to her, only this time on the UPS crook’s truck. The card, of course, never arrives at the mark’s home. With the stolen password, the perps start charging thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise on the hot credit card.

Well. This conspiracy theory could, no doubt, be nothing more than a figment of its author’s imagination…EXCEPT that it explains, to a “t,” why the identity thief would enter my S-corporation’s address on his application for a fraudulent card. Presumably, once the card was diverted through UPS, the crook inside Chase would simply change the address in the bank’s records, thereby diverting the future statements, too. Or set the account not to deliver paper statements at all.

My monthly dues payments to the Scottsdale Business Association are paid by check and deposited to the group’s account at Chase Bank. The checks are printed with my business’s name and address only. That would explain why the perp didn’t have my name. And, since this is evidently an inside job, it explains why the fraudulent account was set up at Chase and not anywhere else.

JoshEAC described this episode in December, 2011. If he’s right, it means that two years later Chase has done nothing to bring a stop to this caper. Whoever’s responsible for it presumably continues to collect a paycheck and at the same time, no doubt, collects payment from “customers” who put him up to issuing fake credit cards.

By now, though, what’s happened is that the thieves have developed the sophistication to realize that small businesses are even more vulnerable to application fraud than are individuals, because the major credit bureaus give short shrift to business credit-card users. Identity-theft protections are set up to serve individuals. As a business owner, I’ve run into a wall — about my only recourse is to report the episode to the police and pray for the best.

Doing battle with Apple consumed most of the afternoon on Wednesday, and yesterday I was in business meetings or teaching all day. I’m out of food and gasoline, today being the first of the month, and so will have to spend this morning driving around the city by way of restocking the larder. So, the soonest I’ll be able to call the police again will be this afternoon, and presumably I’ll miss the guy again, since they’re not in any hurry to deal with this thing.

But if and when I actually meet with a police officer, you can be sure I’ll hand him a printout of JoshEAC’s post.

 

 

Annals of Fraud: Can You Steal a Corporation’s Identity?

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Day from Hell #1,247,679: The Editor struggles to get through 80 pages of the MOST arcane prose imaginable, written in Chinglish (no rudeness intended: Client  hires Editor with the express purpose of please translating her one-helluva-lot-better-than-my-Chinese English into Academicese, which is not English either but which is amiably incomprehensible to native speakers of any language known to earthly humans).

This elicits a number of Actions from the Gods, led mostly by the jolly Zeus (“jolly” is in the eye of the beholder: earthly humans think he has a warped sense of humor):

1. Apple’s fragile and frikkin’ e-mail system crashes. Again. For the third time since the whole lash-up was transferred to the endlessly annoying iCloud.

2. Apple’s frikkin’ update to iTunes DISAPPEARS all my music and (goddammit) also disappears my selection of radio stations, some of which might be expected to emit the type of noise desired to break up the blizzard-like Brain White-Out occasioned by trying to edit the above Chinglish, so that maybe I can stay awake long enough to finish the job, which is now beginning to run unduly late.

3. Recourse to the various forums that substitute for help in the Apple universe reveals that a) these are known issues (i.e., they’re happening to other customers) and b) no one else is getting a meaningful answer either.

4. This means I have to interrupt an already difficult day by making an appointment at the local Apple store, whereinat I will have to fly into ANOTHER STRATOSPHERIC RAGE to get these issues (especially the e-mail) fixed.

Thinking of buying a Mac? Helpful hint: If, when unhappy with the latest stupid stuff, you make noises that are loud enough for other customers to overhear your yelling and stamping your dainty little foot, you WILL get the issue fixed. It’s amazing.

5. Last night after dark (as usual) the mail carrier delivers a notice from Chase Business Card Services informing me that some dude I’ve never heard of has tried to open a credit card account for The Copyeditor’s Desk. This means I have to spend a good half the day in the following enterprises:

a) Get Human at Chase. Discuss.
b) Get Human at one of the three major credit bureaus. At length one is found, in Bangladesh. He has no clue what I’m talking about.
c) Try to Get Human at FTC. Heeeee!
d) Try to Get Human at Dun & Bradstreet. SNARK!
e) Get Human at credit union. Mission accomplished, to rather little avail.
f) Get Human at American Express. Mission accomplished, and useful advice received.
f) Try to Get Human at Experian, the credit bureau from which Chase pulled CE Desk’s credit report. Mission partially accomplished after calling FIVE DIFFERENT GODDAMN PHONE NUMBERS: fraud alert emanated to all three major credit bureaus, but because this is a fraud on a business and not on a person, the effort is probably for naught. Human advises
….1) calling the police, and
….2) reporting fraud to Dun & Bradstreet.
g) Try again to report fraud to Dun & Bradstreet. Exercise in futility.
h) Call police. Talk to nice lady at police station. Agree to wait around all day for officers to show up and take report.
i) Call police-lady back later in day; explain need to schlep computer to Apple Store as unplanned emergency business meeting (which it sorta is); receive explanation from police-lady as to the unholy reason her officers have been detained elsewhere, Gawd help us. Inquire as to safety and well-being of officers; receive semi-assurance that they seem to be OK, we think.
j) Drive to Apple store. Find route closed where cops are still dealing with aftermath of (i) (see above).
k) Raise Hell and put a block under it. Get e-mail fixed on one computer but (as it develops) not on the other. Get explanation of absolutely STUPID AND INFURIATING new iteration of iTunes. Want to fly down the throat of Apple upper management goons and throttle the bastards from the inside. Move on.
l) Return to Funny Farm. Figure out, on own, how to fix Apple Effing Mail on desktop iMac, largely because Apple Genius has fixed whatever-the-Eff he fixed on flicking iCloud.
m) Devise a series of new excuses to clients and friends; make new business and other appointments.
n) Continue to try to figure out how or if to cope with attempted S-corporation identity theft. How do you steal a corporation’s identity, anyhow?

6. Seek advice from Accountant, most of whose practice consists of small businesses. Receive intelligence that the three major credit bureaus (Experien, Equifax, and Transunion) are no longer the only major players spying on our every move.

When it comes to reporting and evaluating business credit histories, Experian, Transunion, and Equifax also have small business divisions that are devoted to tracking the business credit histories for every business and corporation.

Experian is one of the three primary consumer credit reporting agencies who has also begun to provide credit evaluations for businesses and corporations. BusinessExperian offers a wide range of services, including Business Verification, Business Credit Scores, Business Credit Reports, Business Credit Monitoring, and Business Public Records. Experian’s Small Business Services also offers Consumer Mailing Lists and Business Leads.

Here is the pertinent information you will need in order to contact Experian for questions related to business credit:
Mailing Address
EXPERIAN
P.O Box 9532
Allen, TX 75013
Website:http://www.experian.com/small-business/index.html
Phone: (800) 520-1221

TRANSUNION is another of the primary consumer credit reporting agencies who also provides business and corporate credit histories. In addition to Business Credit Reporting, Transunion also provides assistance to small business owners through Marketing Services, Fraud and Identity Management, Risk Management, and Collections Management.

Here is the pertinent information you will need in order to contact Transunion for questions related to business credit:
Mailing Address
TRANSUNION
P.O Box 6790
Fullerton, CA 92834-6790
Website: http://www.transunion.com/corporate/business/business.page
Email: contactdesk@transunion.com
Phone: (800) 813-5604

EQUIFAX SMALL BUSINESS ENTERPRISE is the business division of one of the primary consumer credit rating bureaus. Equifax Small Business Enterprise provides business credit histories and evaluations for over 22,000,000 small businesses and corporations. In addition to Business Credit, Equifax offers assistance to small business owners related to Data Management, Data Reporting, Fraud, Marketing, and Risk.

Here is the pertinent information you will need in order to contact Equifax for questions related to business credit:
Mailing Address
EQUIFAX SMALL BUSINESS ENTERPRISE
P.O Box 740241
Atlanta, GA 30374-0241
Email: businessreports@equifax.com
Website: http://www.equifax.com/commercial/en_us
Phone: (888) 202-4025

In addition to these three agencies that have their origins in personal consumer credit reporting, there are also several other business credit reporting agencies that are devoted solely to business credit reporting and evaluation. These business credit reporting agencies include Dun & Bradstreet, Credit.net, AccurintRBusiness, and ClientChecker.

DUN & BRADSTREET (D&B) is, without a doubt, the most well-known and established business credit reporting agency. D&B has compiled business credit profiles on hundreds of millions of global companies and corporations. In addition to Business Credit information, D&B can also assist small businesses collect debt from customers, find new customers, and research new opportunities.

Here is the pertinent information you will need in order to contact Dun & Bradstreet for questions related to business credit:
DUN & BRADSTREET
Website: http://smallbusiness.dnb.com
Email: sbssupport@dnb.com
Phone: (800) 333-0505

CREDIT.NET – Credit.net is a division of InfoUSA that generates credit reports on over 14,000,000 businesses and corporations. 6,000,000 of the reports in their database have been completed on small businesses with four employees or less. With a Credit.net business credit report, you can make better decisions on extending small lines of credit, locate data on small, privately-owned businesses, verify the existence of a business, and identify headquarters and lines of business credit.

Here is the pertinent information you will need in order to contact Credit.net for questions related to business credit:
Mailing Address
CREDIT.NET
5711 S. 86th Circle
Omaha, NE 68127
Website: http://credit.net
Phone: (800) 993-5323

ACCURINTRBUSINESS – This is a new business that is a combination of forces between LexisNexis, one of the leading providers of business services and information and the Better Business Bureau (BBB). With a business credit report from AccurintRBusiness, you can get all the information you need on over 150,000,000 small U.S. businesses in order to make better decisions on vendors, partners, customers and competitors. In addition to Company Profiles (including addresses, phone numbers, DBAs, etc.) you will also receive credit and payment data, public record data (such as bankruptcies, judgments, tax liens, and UCC, associated businesses and principals, and a Better Business Bureau membership report.

Here is the pertinent information you will need in order to contact AccurintRBusiness for questions related to business credit:
Mailing Address
ACCURINTRBUSINESS
Website: www.accurintbusiness.com
Email: accurintbusiness@lexisnexis.com
Phone: (866) 528-0776

ClientChecker – This is a credit reporting bureau that started in 2003 and specifically targets small businesses, freelance professionals, and contractors seeking information to help them determine which other businesses they should do business with. ClientChecker Business Credit Reports provide a comprehensive summary of users’ trade payment experiences with their clients. Business Credit Reports are created when the users of ClientChecker and BillingTracker invoicing software report that their clients have paid on time, late, or not at all. The data from each user is combined to produce a business credit report of average days paid late, number of incidences of non-payment, and a PayQuo™ score.

To coin a phrase: Holy sh!t.

And so, to choir practice…

“Follow Your Bliss”…REALLY?

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Have you read this exceptionally fine post at I Pick Up Pennies? If not, you absolutely should. It’s the most articulate rant I’ve seen yet on an idiotic idea that permeates the American middle class. As Abby encapsulates it: “I’m sick unto death of hearing, ‘Do what you love, and the money will follow.'”

Amen, sister!

The truth of the matter is, there’s a reason we call our jobs “work.” We’re not supposed to think of them as defining our lives. Work is what you do to put food on the table and a roof over your head. Fun, fulfillment, and all that good stuff is what you do outside of work. Nowhere is it written that you have to “follow your bliss” to make a living.

Well. Nowhere credible, anyway.

While there certainly are jobs that are fun and fulfilling for people with a cast of  mind that fits said work, there aren’t enough such jobs to go around. Even those of us who have the skills to become, say, a forest ranger, a handsomely paid travel writer for the New York Times, a rock guitarist, a mightily marketed dog trainer, or an artisanal bread baker are unlikely to find that kind of work, because lots of other folks, most of them with more talent, better training, and more experience than ours, want those jobs, too.

Abby managed to survive a life-threatening illness that very nearly spirited her away and that left her with some long-term disabilities, which she has described at her blog. Now that she can return to the workplace, she has a decidedly pragmatic view of work:

Now, each time I get a paycheck, I’m flooded with an emotion that I can only describe as equal parts pride and greed. Well, 60/40 tops.

Maybe the ability to work — or, more realistically, the paycheck — should be a passion in and of itself. Whether due to unemployment or physical limitations, there are a lot of folks who wouldn’t care what they did, just that they could do it.

I, on the other hand, have been amazingly lucky in the health department and uncommonly privileged in other ways. These circumstances have made it possible for me, over the years, indeed to “follow my bliss.” Several “dream” jobs have come my way, and every time I’ve settled in to a desk at a workplace where some people would kill to be, I’ve thought, “Gee! I could do this forever! I’m going to hang onto this job for as long as I live.”

Uh huh.

I’ve been a freelance writer. I’ve been a magazine editor for the largest regional in the United States. I’ve been a full-time faculty member at a large research university, teaching writing and editing to upper-division and graduate students. I founded and directed a nonfiction writing program at that university. For the same vast learning factory, I founded and directed a scholarly publishing office that was unique in the land, possibly in the world. Today I’m a contract editor and I teach an online course in magazine writing, from home. All in all, these were (and are) pretty fun jobs.

But lemme tellya something: the money does not follow.

When you get a raise after ten years at your job and then you learn that a cashier at Costco earns as much as you do but she doesn’t have to take work home with her, she doesn’t put in hours of unpaid overtime with no comp time, she isn’t expected to spend her weekends and vacation time working for no pay…well. It does something to your “bliss.”

At one point I learned Costco was paying its forklift operators more than I was earning.

For this I got a Ph.D.? For this I cranked out a string of books through major publishers and more articles than you or I can count? For this I ended up with Social Security benefits that are a fraction of SDXB’s, who never finished a bachelor’s degree?

Okay, okay. No, money isn’t everything. But it sure as hell beats whatever’s in second place. When you realize you have significant talents, finely honed skills, and can do a job that benefits the society at large and that you’re earning less than a janitor for the City of Phoenix earns, you realize that your “bliss” is simply not valued. And the “bliss” part of the job slips away — imperceptibly at first, but over time the slippage becomes noticeable.

When you’re working every weekend, most evenings, and every holiday for nothing, the bliss starts to show some tarnish.

When you’re paid nine months of the year but are expected to spend your summers in meetings, teacher training,  and course prep — free of pay of course — “bliss” gets tired.

When a former student of yours who’s doing public relations declines to apply for the job you had at the regional magazine (which circulates in every country in the world!) because it pays nowhere near enough — nothing like what she earns in her 9-to-5, paid-overtime job — the blissful bubble in which you dwell gets a hole in it.

Would I care to be a janitor at the City of Phoenix? No. Would I like to be a Costco cashier? Maybe — maybe not. Do I want to be a forklift operator? Mmmm…I think I could do that job. Would I like to work in the PR department of a huge utility producing its light-weight in-house newsletter, tweeting messages from Management over the company’s intranet, and serving on the outfit’s Dilbertish cheerleading team, nine to five, no weekend work, no evening work, full benefits, a defined pension plan and Social Security? Damn right I would.

Just imagine having a life outside of work!

When you “follow your bliss” (heaven help us 🙄 ), what happens is that work merges with life. And when that happens, there is no life outside of work. All of your life is your work.

And that is why, IMHO, it’s not only foolish to go around trumpeting that people should make their living at something that makes them “passionate,” it’s probably dangerous. When you identify yourself with your work, you have no escape from work. And ultimately, you feel you have no worth outside of work.

Seriously. I had an editor who talked about having been out of work for three months after being laid off a job. The words he used in describing that period in his life were “I felt like I wasn’t worth anything.” This was a guy who wasn’t a worker with a fungible job. He was an editor.

That was his identity. No identity, no personhood. No personhood, no value.

From the vantage point of two careers started, built, and (mostly) wrapped up, I’d say the healthy approach is to think of work as separate from self. Work is something you do to support yourself and your children. If you enjoy it, bully for you. If you don’t, try to find a new trade or a new employer.

Either way, build a life outside of work, and seek your “bliss” there.

Is a Business Lunch with a Friend Deductible?

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Well. Technically, it is. Let’s say you have a friend with whom you also do business. You go out to lunch, and while munching your tacos you happen to talk about the project the two of you are working on, for which your friend/client is paying you — or, more specifically, your S-corporation. 😉 Let’s take this a little further and posit that you actually come to a decision, over lunch, about some tiny element in the project. In theory, that conversation magically turns a social event into a business lunch, and so in principle the cost of the lunch could be tax-deductible or chargeable to your business’s credit card.

How do you feel about that?

Saturday evening Wonder-Accountant and I went off to a choral concert (we both sing on choirs), and beforehand went to dinner. On Friday, I had engineered the planned bank-account consolidation maneuver, reducing the number of accounts and their associated complicated transactions from four to two, only one of which will ever see much activity. As a bonus, I arranged for Fidelity to deposit the funds for my share of the mortgage on a house my son and I co-own directly to our joint account, rather than bouncing the money first into my checking account and then into the joint account (my son pays the mortgage bill from that account and also uses it to accrue savings for maintenance & repairs).

As you might imagine, W-A was most pleased, since this strategy acts as aspirin to a headache, where she’s concerned. So we toasted our mutual genius over dinner and spent some time discussing it.

Presto-changeo! A business meal, right?

Possibly. But personally, I don’t feel comfortable with it, as a general practice, and so paid for my dinner out of personal cash. Ex-DH, who was a corporate lawyer, always said that any time you talk business over a meal out, even briefly, the tab becomes a business expense. W-A says that if you’re talking business over a restaurant meal, you can pay for the client’s (or vendor’s) meal with corporate money but you should pay for your own with personal funds. If that’s the case, I could have paid for hers and she could have paid for mine and thereby charged the entire meal to our respective businesses.

To my mind, the technicalities of it are beside the point. It seems to me what matters is the primary reason for the meal. If you’ve arranged with a client or vendor to meet over breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the specific purpose of discussing business, then what you have, obviously, is a business meeting. In that case, all the costs associated with it, including the tab and the mileage, should be tax-related.

However, if the people involved are friends who also do business together but they’re out on the town to have a good time, then it seems to me that the meal is a social occasion — even if business matters come up in conversation — and deducting it is fundamentally unethical.

The only person who knows that would be you. The IRS can’t know or confirm whether you organized dinner out specifically to talk business.

So…how would you regard the deductability of a meeting with a vendor or client in the privacy of a public place?