Squeaky Wheel

The finance guy from the car dealer called me the other day - he had heard that I wasn't excited about getting screwed regarding the Lojack (perhaps because of an e-mail I sent to the salesmen he worked with :) and wanted to call to explain himself.

In my e-mail, I spelled out a bunch of things that I wasn't happy about, including:

1. He suggested that some insurance companies give discounts - mine didn't. But the the thing is, he knew who my insurance company was, said he used the same one, and - he also had Lojack installed on his new car - I would have thought he would know that his/my insurance company doesn't give discounts
2. He had misled me about Lojack's recovery rate - he said it was 98%, Lojack says it's 90% - who should I believe?
3. He said if my car is stolen and not recovered in 1 or 2 days I'd be refunded the cost of the Lojack - Lojack says they'll only refund a portion of what I paid.

To characterize his explanations as humorous would be an understatement. His wife, he said, pays all of their bills, so he didn't know they weren't getting a discount for the Lojack. He mentioned that on one bill he had seen there was "some sort of discount" but in thinking about it, that might have been a multiple vehicle discount and not for the Lojack unit.

The recovery rate explanation, he said, was just a simple math misunderstanding. What he meant to say was that 98% of all Lojack recoveries happen in the first day. It's true that only 90% of all vehicles are recovered, but 98% of the recoveries are recovered in the first day.

Right, ok, he must have me confused with a complete idiot. The fact that 98% are recovered on the first day is completely irrelevant - nothing changes the fact that only 90% of vehicles are ever actually recovered.

You're a finance guy, do the math. How about if we use your approach when I pay for the car? Assume it costs $30K. I'll pay you only 90% of that ($27K), but I'm going to give you 98% ($26,460) the first day, and then the other $540 later - how's that sound?

He also pled ignorance on the refund amount as well, blamed it on the Lojack representative in fact. He felt guilty about the whole ordeal and is sending me a check for the difference between what I paid for the Lojack and what Lojack will reimburse me for. Though that probably wasn't so much guilt though, it was more concern for how he will get rated when Toyota surveys me about the buying experience.

Let's see - he misrepresents information (most people would just call that "lying"), and then sends me a couple hundred dollars as a bribe. Yeah, let me just think about that for a bit..

Olympic Coverage (with stress on the "limp" part)

I've been trying to watch the Olympics on NBC - not because of national pride or anything like that (some of our athletes are a bit embarassing), but because I'm genuinely interested in the sports - skiing, luge, bobsledding (now known as bobsleighing now - when did they rename it?), skeleton, and even curling.

And what a pain in the ass it has been. I've been using my computer to record "everything" (not for rebroadcast mind you, as I don't have expressed written consent from NBC) and then trying to skip through the things I don't care about to find the things I want to see.

To say that NBC has made this a challenge is something of an understatement. Ten minutes of historical data followed by two minutes of a ski run is a bit extreme (is that what's meant by "extreme sports"??). And the repetitiveness of it all - nothing personal, but I don't know Scott McCartney, and I'm sorry his mother had cancer and she wiped in a tree well and was saved by his father, but how many times do I need to hear about the story? And Hermann Maier's leg? Great, he nearly lost it in an accident - it looked pretty firmly attached the other day, can we move beyond the story?

On, and the site - nice idea - I like that I can go to the web to see if there's anything "good" on. But maybe, just maybe, instead of having the main site show the results and have a tiny link off to the side that says "go here if you don't want to see the results yet," maybe the default site could not show the results and the impatient masses can click elsewhere to get them? Just a thought..

And maybe, just maybe, you can stop ragging on the athletes. Ok, some of them aren't doing so well, but do you have to humiliate them? Lindsay Jacobellis (why isn't it called "sno-bo-cross" anyway?) fell. Maybe she was grabbing her board and showing off, maybe she wasn't. She knows whether she did or not and is going to have to live with knowing that she might have blown her chance at a gold - do you need to rub her nose in it, to force her to come up with excuses on the spot? Are you going to pay for her therapist? She's probably going to need one.

I'd also like to propose a new format for the next televised Olympics - how about "events on demand"?? There are events I want to see, and events I don't. Show everything, but show it as contiguously as is humanly possible. Don't take a break from skiing to show me ice dancing, show me all of skiing. And then show all of ice dancing. And then curling.. And so on.. Perhaps even show events in parallel, on different channels (it'd help sell multi-tuner DVRs as well). I can't believe anyone actually enjoys jumping from sport to sport to sport?

This year, I think everyone gets to take home a gold with the exception of the NBC team - they get banned for doping.

The New Car is Here! The New Car is Here!

Woohoo!

After a mere six months, my Prius finally arrived. It was a bit anticlimactic really - the dealer called, said "it's here." I said "sure, right, I've heard that before." He said "no, really, it is, come down and get it." So I did - a few hours later - I figured I waited six months for them to get the car, they can wait a few hours for me as well (though secretly, I'm sure I was thinking "shit, if I don't get there soon, they'll give my car to someone else").

But I don't want to talk about the car itself (which is very cool) - I'm not like that. I want to bitch about the whole car buying experience, because that's just the way I am (more on the car another time).

The salesmen were really cool (there were two - the one who listened to me complain about their "system" every two weeks for six months, and the one who happened to not be on vacation the day the car actually arrived). Always trying to be nice, understanding, etc. But in my limited experience, those are the only nice people at the dealership.

I traded in my old car ("old" is relative - it was a 1998 BMW 3 Series convertible). It was in pretty good condition, but has 90K miles. The trade in value estimator took a look at the car, and then took a look at what kbb.com said the car was worth, and then decided I should get the lower of the three amounts listed (for cars in "poor," "good" and "excellent" condition) - his rationale was straightforward - the car had high miles. Not that my car was in poor condition, but it had high miles. Ok, listen you dumb shit.. It might have high miles, but the kbb.com prices are based on the mileage - remember when it said "how many miles?" and you typed in 90,000? Doesn't that mean they're taking mileage into account when they suggest the car's value? Yeah, I thought so..

And then there was the finance guy.. Or, rather the purported finance guy. He would make Ron Popeil proud. He might have had a financial background, but really he was more of an "and if you order now we'll throw in a set of six steak knives" person. He must have gone on and on for at least an hour about how owning a car is expensive and it's best to get the paint sealed (they use water-based paints now, rain is bad for them), and how a single repair will cost $2500. I want to say it was entertaining, but it wasn't.

It bugged the shit out of me. Not that he was trying to sell me these things, but his style - scribbling little graphs on a piece of paper, talking about the number of cars stolen every day (tip: the salesman spent quite a bit of time telling me how secure the "Smart Key" is, you and he should sync up before you tell me how often Prii are stolen, ok?)

And, of course, with anything car-related comes a chat with the insurance agent. I was pretty excited when I called - I'm getting a new, responsible car, so I was expecting my rates to go down a bit - and I've got Lojack, even better, right? Nope, not with my insurance company. It costs $80 more a year to insure a brand new Prius than it did to insure a seven year old BMW worth $10K. That just makes no sense, as I tried to explain to the agent.

Here's how I see it - all things being equal (clean driving record, comparable coverage, etc), the money I pay to the insurance company is somehow supposed to be loosely correlated to the value of the car I'm insuring (i.e. expensive car, higher payments, cheaper car, lower payments). So if the rate for my new car only goes up $80, that means one of two things - either I'm not paying enough for the new car's policy, or I was paying way too much for my old policy. It's left as an exercise to the reader to decide which is the more likely scenario..

SLVR Me Timbers

I finally broke down and bought a new cell phone the other day. I got a Motorola SLVR, to replace my Motorola V330, which was a replacement for my previous V330 (battery life of 2.5 days - which one guy I spoke with said was just fine - thankfully his colleagues aren't all from Dumbfuckistan!), which was a replacement for my Sony Ericsson T610 (nothing but static on calls). I was planning on getting a Sony Ericsson W810, but, well, it's not available, and when it finally does come out, it'll probably cost a small fortune.

To say the SLVR rocks would be an understatement (it would also be confusing, because the Motorola ROKR is supposed to rock - so maybe the SLVR slivs?). It's got everything I need in a phone - it's small (I carry my phone in my front pants pocket, so the unsightly bulge of the V330 was getting tiresome - you can only hear "is that a V330 in your pocket or are you happy to see me" so many times in one day). It has bluetooth, it plays MP3s, and it just plain looks awesome. Ok, it's got a mere VGA camera, but do I care? (no, I don't)

I've only had it for three days so I certainly haven't tried every feature it has to offer, but of the ones I've tried, the only things I'm not so fond of are:

1. No matter how large a memory stick thing I put in it (it comes with 512MB), iTunes will only let me put 100 songs on it. That's not so bad really, as my memory's short enough that I wouldn't realize I had heard something a few hours earlier, but I just don't like the idea that I'm being artificially limited (Apple decided that Moto shouldn't allow more than 100 songs). Also, since it's a digital device, any numbers/limits should be powers of two - so I should be allowed 128 songs :)
2. Transfering songs via USB is painfully slow. It took nearly an hour to load up the first 100 songs (which, incidentally did not fill up my memory card - hint hint!). Hopefully it'll be faster in the future when I'm just adding/removing a few songs at a time (or maybe I'll just transfer directly to the memory card thing)
3. There's only one "plug" on the phone - which is used for headphones, charging, and syncing; so you're sort of limited as to what things can be done simultaneously - when the phone is charging (either via USB to a PC, or the charger) for example, you can't plug the headset in to listen to music

With luck, when my new Prius arrives, it and the phone's bluetooth will talk to the car's so I can sync and drive..

Wabbit Season

I saw a story in the news the other day about a man who was arrested for having 150 dogs. My first thoughts were "cat lady gone over the edge" but then I read the rest of the story - he was raising them for fighting. What an asshole. Can't you find a better way to make money? Was selling crack not paying the bills?

I wondered what suitable punishment for him would be. I thought maybe taping some pork chops to him and locking him in a pen with a few of his very hungry dogs would be pretty cool. Something like this - just to scare him of course - we certainly wouldn't want to hurt him! And then throw him in a cell for a good long time and maybe perform some sort of Pavlovian experiment on him - ring a bell every time he's raped by one of the other prisoners and then see if shakes whenever he hears a bell ring later in life.

Then, last night, I watched the news on TV. There was a story about a group called "National Open Field Coursing Association" and their pastime - "greyhound coursing." What's coursing, you ask? I'd never heard of it either, and after watching the story, I wish I hadn't. It's a sick sport. No, it's not even sick, it's barbaric.

It goes something like this - the dog owners get together in some field, someone else walks around the field to flush out a rabbit, and then the dogs are released (to chase the rabbit). The dogs are judged/scored, based on things like how they turn, whether they catch the rabbit, and, I think, how many pieces they shred it into when they catch it. It was completely disgusting to see (if you're interested, the unedited video footage is here - it's really nasty!).

They interviewed a number of participants (the owners, not the dogs). When asked whether they thought it was barbaric, most replied with some witty comment like "well, I suppose for the rabbit." One commented that it was a better way for the rabbit to die (better than old age?), as sometimes when rabbits are shot, they only get wounded (yeah, ok, the rabbit can choose between being shot and potentially killed and torn apart by a dog. I'm not a rabbit, but I'm thinking most would choose the shooting).

I have an idea for a new sport - it's called "greyhound owner coursing" - take a person, put him or her in a large enclosed area with a couple of hungry lions. If it was good enough for the Romans, it's good enough for me.