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Consumerism

Cox Wheedled Down; Phone Solicitors Walloped

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BlackPhone…for the time being, anyway. Learning that La Maya and La Bethulia, who live less than a block from the Funny Farm, get cable as well as Internet and a land line for the same amount I pay for no cable, I called up Cox and whined until they gave me a nice deal: $30 less a month AND “selective call blocking” AND “anonymous call rejection.” Between you ‘n’ me, I was willing to pay extra for these in hopes foiling at least some of the damned phone solicitors. The best I expected was a wash. So I felt like I came out a winner to get both of those and a cut in the monthly bill.

I get about a half-dozen nuisance calls a day from damned phone solicitors. Don’t answer them — they listen to my interminable voicemail message until their machine hangs up — but still is really an annoying nuisance.

The kind of work I do is abstract, difficult, often very complicated, and it requires me to focus. A jangling phone interrupts my concentration and the aggravation breaks my train of thought. Some of what I do is painfully boring and all I want to do is get THROUGH with it. Any distraction means that much longer it’s going to take to get done with the project.

A half-dozen such distractions is really beyond the pale.

1896_telephoneCox’s call blocking service is limited to 30 numbers. Phone scammers spoof numbers and change them all the time, so you soon run out of space — which is annoying. There is a program — a free one approved by the FCC — called NoMoRobo, but naturally Cox refuses to accept it. Cox claims this is because its system doesn’t support a needed feature called “simultaneous ringing,” which is ridiculous because they provide it for business customers. Probably, like the deservedly defunct Qwest, they sell residential numbers to phone solicitors.

However…as I was chatting with Cox’s exceptionally helpful CSR, she remarked that most phone solicitors, including those that call from 800 numbers and that spoof numbers, use caller ID blocking. One possible solution, she suggested, is to combine “selective call blocking,” which allows you to block up to 30 numbers from specified callers, with “anonymous call rejection,” which blocks calls from phones with caller ID blocking.

So yesterday I signed up for these.

Along about 10:00 this morning, it dawned on me that I hadn’t gotten a nuisance phone call. They usually start around 8 a.m.

From what I see in the various forums habituated by Cox users, selective call blocking and selective call rejection are far from perfect. The perps’ software soon figures out what you’re doing and finds ways to foil you. And with room to block only 30 numbers, they quickly overwhelm this service.

The FCC gave NoMoRobo’s developers an award, and users say it is the most effective way to foil nuisance phone calls. So it’s infuriating that a major telecommunications company like Cox refuses to accommodate it.

Today only one phone solicitor got around the two blocking features. If and when the bastards start getting through again, it looks like the alternative will be to sign up with Ooma, a VoIP system that does provide NoMoRobo. Abigail over at I Pick Up Pennies highly recommends it — last time I talked with her, she said their bill is never over $5 a month. Even Ooma’s business service is only $10 a month, a far cry from Cox’s gouge…and lookit this! They’ll even help promote your business on the freaking Internet!

Anyway, I got one call all day long, from the outfit that calls once a day claiming to represent a breast cancer charity and talks over my voicemail message to ask, “Is the lady of the house there?” They’re now the first number in the selective call blocker. Not a one of the others have managed to get through!

So I guess I’ll give Cox one more chance. If this complicated, nuisancey scheme doesn’t work, then it’s good-bye Cox, hello Ooma.

Images:

Totally retro black phone (can you believe I used to have a phone like this?): By Kornelia und Hartmut Häfele, CC BY-SA 3.0,
1896 phone: By 1906 Kungliga Telegrafverkets apparater (Royal Telegraph Administration apparatus) at Project Runeberg. Public domain.

 

 

What Happened to Consumer Reports?

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Harveyballs_red_black_modificationY’know, I haven’t read a Consumer Reports in years. Occasionally I’ll look at Consumerist, a related website, but I do not pay to access Consumer’s Union product reviews online. A few days ago, The Atlantic commented on the apparent decline of the venerable magazine, noting that it hasn’t done well in the computer age. The Atlantic itself being in a bit of a decline (IMHO), the article wasn’t very deep, although its author, Paul Hiebert, did ruminate on a study that pointed out some rather obvious differences between CR’s involved, systematic, and highly comparative reviews with the off-the-cuff user reviews you see online and cited the public’s tendency to give undue credence to online reviewers.

More telling were the comments to the article, in which readers complained about CR’s political biases (and yea verily, many a review there is informed by one sort of political correctness or another), about the paywall blocking access to information that can be had for free elsewhere, about the drop in quality of CR‘s content… and in amongst those comments is a reply from one of the magazine’s former editors, pointing readers to two articles describing the dissatisfaction of the many former staffers and the disgust of a former reader.

To that I’d have to say “yup.” Consumer Reports lost me the time SDXB and I purchased the same model of high-end Hoover vacuum, enthusiastically high-rated in the magazine. At the time, he was living in a house a block from mine. He could get into the Base Exchange at Luke Air Force Base, and when he came home with his, I noted his delight with it. A week or two later I bought one for myself at Sears.

My standards for vacuum cleaners are high but not astronomical. I had a German shepherd and needed the thing to extract dog hair from Berber-style synthetic carpeting that was easy to clean. SDXB liked his house clean but was not what you’d call Suzie Homemaker (not if you wanted to live, anyway…).

I found myself not very pleased with the machine’s performance. It was sad compared with my old Hoover, which had died of old age. But I’d spent a lot of money on this top-rated machine, so I stuck with it.

A year or so later, within two or three days of each other, both machines dropped dead! It was altogether too clear that we were looking at planned obsolescence. He had figured out by then that the things left a lot to be desired (like, say, quality). I had never been nuts about mine but was amazed when both machines broke in identical ways. They were just shoddily made.

So are consumers crazy to put more faith in Amazon reviews than in the decrepit Consumer Reports?

I doubt it. Most of us know that a lot of 4- and 5-star reviews are written by shills. We all know that many of the 1-star reviews are actually complaints about delivery or customer service. As grown-ups, we can generally parse out a pretty clear view of the typical consumer experience by reading enough reviews and winnowing out the ones that don’t appear to be a) real and b) valid.

Many of Hiebert’s commenters enunciated what we said just a few weeks ago: they start with the 3-star reviews, then peruse the lower- and higher-rating reviews. With the most credible-looking of all these in mind, they form a kind of “big picture” of what consumer experience is likely to be for a given product. Scientific? No. As good as the OLD Consumer Reports‘ hands-on testing? Probably not. But just now it seems to be better than whatever else is out there.

Image:
Consumer Reports modification of Harvey Balls. By Stephen Schulte.

Big Brother: Not about to quit watching us

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Interesting op-ed article in today’s NY Times: former CIA officer and NSA contractor Edward Snowden rejoices that at last Americans and people around the world are waking up to the ubiquitous spying on innocent private citizens accused of no wrongdoing. He applauds Congress’s move to ban the NSA’s phone-call tracking program and President Obama’s about-face in stating that surveilling every citizen of the United States has done nothing to prevent even a single terrorist attack.

All very nice. But it’s a day late and a dollar short, in my opinion.

In the first place, a huge government infrastructure designed to track the private movements of everyone in the country now exists and has been deployed against us all. Does anyone seriously believe it’s suddenly not going to be used anymore?

And in the second place, Big Brother is not the government. It’s private industry. Note that only the NSA has been told to stand down from spying on us.

Google hasn’t. A few weeks ago, members of our neighborhood association reported that Google mapping trucks were moving up and down the alleys with vehicle-top cameras peering down into people’s backyards. Google tracks every move you make on the Internet. Every time I walk down my home’s hallway, the Nest thermostat on the wall records that I am home and sends that tidbit of information back to a Google-owned server. Nest also records and transmits the details of when I use power to air-condition and heat my home, and how much I use.

Just about anyone who wants to sell you something or to keep tabs on the public is watching you.

• Using cookies, any business on the planet can keep track of every website you visit, every message you post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, every search term you enter in  your browser, every whatnot.

• When you walk through a major shopping mall with your phone in your pocket or purse, curious minds are watching what stores you enter, what food kiosk you visit, even which window you pause in front of to eyeball the merchandise.

• Insurance companies, healthcare corporations (that would include your doctor’s and your psychological therapist’s employers and any hospital or out-patient facility you visit), financial institutions, and credit bureaus gather and store — permanently — vast amounts of private information about you.

• Here in my state, the county sends helicopters aloft to photograph people’s property; the aerial images are stored, and when you go in to ask for, say, a zoning variance so you can build some addition on the back of your home, an inspector studies a picture of your lot. If anything is found to be out of order, the supervisors will order you to take it down. They’re also likely to deny your variance request.

• Every time you telephone your credit-card company, a utility, or many other entities, your phone number is recorded and checked against the number you gave when you started doing business with that entity. This overrides any caller-ID blocking you may have in place.

• Retailers track your buying habits by name, phone number, and address every time you foolishly hand over your private information in exchange for a card giving you a few cents off a store’s inflated prices.

• Facebook tracks everything you do on its site and often uses casual remarks to spin advertisements to you and to your friends.

• Netflix knows what you’ve been watching, reminds you of what you spent time with, and tries to persuade you that you’d like something else based on your viewing habits.

• And by now, you may be sure that some hacker somewhere knows your name, address, birthdate, Social Security number, employment history, and educational history.

Most that information is none of anybody’s business. But in fact, just about anybody can easily make it their business.

That Congress is finally coming around to putting the eefus on the hideous Patriot Act is all well and good. But we’re not going to get our right to privacy back until private enterprises are also prohibited from gathering and storing personal information about us.

Phone Solicitor Discouragement: The Long-Winded Voicemail Message

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By pure, ridiculous serendipity, I found a way to almost bring a stop to phone solicitor calls, a major nuisance for dinosaurs who wish to hang onto their land lines. As we know, the National Do-Not-Call List does nothing to discourage phone solicitors, and playing mind games on the creeps just seems to egg them on. They’ve found a way to outsmart the formerly effective Telezapper, and the new analogues to that technology come out of Great Britain and so work less than optimally in the US. A few weeks ago, though, by way of asking the political hucksters to quit invading my private space, I recorded a new phone message that was altogether too long-winded. It goes on and on and ON all the way to the end of the available recording space.

It annoys the friendly caller as much you might imagine, alas, but it does have one surprisingly delightful unintended consequence.

Videlicet: It appears that automated robocallers, whether they deliver recorded messages or whether they have some trained cockroach on the other end, are programmed to hang up after a certain period of jabber.

Yesh. Thanks to Caller ID, I never pick up the phone unless I recognize the caller. So I don’t pick up until the voicemail greeting ends and a real person starts to speak.

After I engaged the byzantine phone message, I noticed the incoming nuisance calls all hung up at EXACTLY the same place in the recorded greeting. They’d shut off right at a specific word. Most of them canceled without even trying to leave a message.

Few robo-calls start babbling as soon as the line opens, for the obvious reason that if they start yakking while your voicemail greeting is running, you’re going to miss some of their golden words. So if they detect a recorded message, they stay silent for a short time — probably the length of a typical voicemail greeting. If they don’t get a person at that point, they disconnect.

Think of that….

This accidental strategy instantly stopped the political messages, because those have humans at the end and they don’t want to listen to that stuff again. It stopped almost all of the robo-calling business and scammer solicitations, because their auto-hangup never gets past the automatic hang-up point.

Just now, the only recurring nuisance calls are the ones coming from some outfit that Caller ID identifies as “UTILITY.” I assume that’s the scam where they threaten you with cutting off your power and water unless you pay up right this instant, but I don’t know because of course I’ve never talked to them. These people are extremely persistent. They have a way of making your phone emit a busy signal, which signals their system to automatically redial. So whenever one call comes in from this bunch, two more will follow, one from the same number and then another from a spoofed number.

That’s annoying, but it’s sure better than the vast quantity of incoming annoyances that slammed into my phone before the Endless Greeting went live.

If you have a home-based business, it’s pretty easy to make an Endless Greeting. Just pitch the business until you run out of talking time. Mine starts with “You have reached The Copyeditor’s Desk, Incorporated…” (Five syllables in that last word! Drag it out!!). Then it delivers the corporate motto. Then in goes on to describe all the wonderful things we can do, of which we have a-plenty. Then it says “If you would like to discuss a book publishing project, please leave word…” and “If you would like to [blah blah blah],” each time giving rather obvious instructions to leave an effing message.

It’s unkind to friends and business associates. But it does work on most of the phone nuisances. And it’s free. And it’s easy. No dollars flying out the window. No time wasted figuring out complicated programming instructions. No confusion over British vs. US phone system functions. Very nice.

Just talk the ba*tards down.

Huge Rip-off Narrowly Averted

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Review freshly posted, by me, of Leslie’s Swimming Pool Service, on Angie’s List:

My pool pump stopped working about a week ago. It’s one of the old single-cycle pumps, and I’ve expected it to go out  sooner or later, but this could NOT have happened at a worse time: one  unexpected expense after another, starting in early January, has drained my emergency savings and then some.

I tried to reach my go-to service, Swimming Pool Service and Repair, but when I called the number I have — and that’s still posted on the Web — I got a “no longer in service” message. So fell back on Leslie’s.

On Saturday they sent a guy over. He took one look at the thing, listened to the “hummmmm” it made when power was turned on, and announced I needed to buy a new pump…to the tune of $1500!!!!!

This is $1500 I don’t happen to have. I explained that I’m trying to live on Social Security and that I’ve had a series of burdensome unexpected expenses. I asked if he was sure  he couldn’t fix it. He said no, it couldn’t be fixed. I said I’d seen a pump like it at Leslie’s website for $625, so why can’t I have that? He said our lovely legislators had passed a law stating that only the new power-saving multicycle pumps can be installed. That sounded a little fishy — you can say many things about Arizona’s elected representatives, but “environmentally sensitive” is not one of them.

As it developed, the soonest the new pump would be in was today, Tuesday, but this particular service dude was going to be off work today. So, he said, they’d send another guy.

Thank heaven for small favors!

This morning, a young man named Chris shows up.

In the course of conversation, I happen to mention that $1500 is a hit I can’t afford. He says, “Well, do you mean you don’t want the pump?” I say, “Well, I’ve gotta keep the pool running — it would cost more than fifteen hundred bucks to fill it in.” He says, “I think all it needs is a capacitor.”

Say what?

I say, the guy who was here last week said it couldn’t be fixed. He says, I’m sure I can fix it. I say, will you get in trouble? He says his boss will be mad. I say, I don’t want you to get canned. He says, no problem. He goes off to acquire the part.

Not counting the junket to get the part, it took Chris all of about 10 minutes to replace the thing and get the pump running happily. Total cost: $141.97.

The part itself cost $32.29. Leslie’s gouged me $85 for the “service call” (what d’you bet Chris never sees much of that?) and $22 for the “trip charge”: that would be $107 just to drive over to my house.

Chris obviously is worth a great deal more than that, since an honest man seems to be hard to come by these days.

I’m hugely relieved to save $1400 that was needed to cover food bills. But on the other hand, I’m not pleased that at the outset Leslie’s sent a guy who obviously tried to cheat me. I don’t think I would do business with Leslie’s again: evidently their business model is such that their workers are treated in a way that tempts them to rip off customers. Next time I’ll come back to Angie’s List and look for some other provider.

Does that take the cake, or does that take the cake?

Read. The. Statements!

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The credit union’s bill-pay system is set up to pay the monthly Cox telecommunications bill in two chunks: a slab from The Copyeditor’s Desk to pay the (alleged) high-speed Internet connection, vital to doing business, and the rest from personal checking to cover the land line and the various indescribable bullshit the company uses to jack up its prices. It emits these transactions automatically, without my having to do anything special to make that happen.

This morning I opened the statement that came in last night’s mail. (That’s right: in the abysmal straits to which the U.S. Post Office has sunk, mail here is often delivered after dark.) Lo! It was ten bucks more than the total allotted monthly payment!

Dayum!

Annoying close comparison between last month’s bill and this month’s bill revealed that, for no discernible reason, Cox had ratcheted up the price of the Internet connection by a little over nine bucks.

Note, however, that they did nothing to ratchet up the speed of their interminably tardy “high-speed” service.

Ah, well.

So I called and, once connected to a human (only took about 10 minutes…), asked for an explanation.

Right away, without even any whining or caviling from me, the youthful-sounding man on the other end offered a $10 “discount,” good for a year.

Welp, it doesn’t solve the ultimate problem. But it’ll save me $120 in 2014.

Better than a hit on the head.

I sure do wish cell phones came with unlimited extensions, the way land lines do. Actually, somewhere I heard of a service that allows you to have your cell phone ring on a land line, thereby converting your land-line phones to de facto extensions. But alas, I’m afraid you prob’ly still have to pay for the land-line service to pull that stunt off.

Which is an aside.

The PF take-away: Always open every statement, no matter how routine it looks, and read it. And when confronted with something new, annoying, or bizarre: Question Authority!