Category: What Were They Thinking

FedEx Office Charges $40 An Hour For Dirty Unheated Meeting Room

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

When you rent a meeting space, should it have heat? Chairs that are clean and not broken? We think so! Reader Mark does too. FedEx Office doesn’t.

Mark writes:

I work from home, and when I meet with clients it is usually at their place of business. Today I needed to meet with a client who doesn’t have an office, so it was my job to determine a professional place for us to meet for a few hours in a quiet office environment. I knew Kinko’s used to offer such a service and I contacted my nearest Chicago FedEx Office and reserved a conference room for $40 an hour.

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Verizon Tried A TV Service Bait-And-Switch On My Parents

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Photo by Felix Pomerantz

Corey, who is trying to help his Brooklyn parents improve their TV setup, feels his folks were baited and switched by Verizon, displaying a cheap deal on its site that went away after he entered his parents’ address.

He writes:

Verizon just wired my parents’ apartment building in Brooklyn with FIOS and they were looking to switch from Cablevision because FIOS seemingly offers more channels at a similar price and plus my mom is really angry with Cablevision because of the Food Network dispute.
So I figured I would help them out with setting up FIOS, since they do not use the internet and I figured they had a better offer online. I went to the FIOS website and clicked over to the “FIOS TV Plans” page, which can be found here.

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Hungry McDonald’s Customer Throws Mop Water At Cashiers

Posted by Nexus – 06/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

A bucket of dirty mop water is nobody’s friend, which is exactly why you shouldn’t leave it out where customers can reach it. Because eventually someone will get angry over an order and feel a need to throw something, and oh look, mop water.

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Oh no she di’n't

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Best Buy: We won’t replace your broken netbook, but we will “service” it

Posted by Nexus – 05/01/2010

[via consumerist.com]

Photo by Ian Muttoo

The anonymous Best Buy Netbook buyer who says was thrown out of the store twice when he tried to get the store to honor his protection plan checked in with an update: Best Buy won’t replace his netbook as a CSR originally promised, it will only service it.

He writes:

Here’s what’s happened so far: the representative in customer service who gave me the $25 gift card also assured me that I could “exchange my computer at any Best Buy.” It turns out he misspoke, and that I can merely get my computer serviced, not replaced. I’m back to square one, resorting to the manufacturer’s warranty. I also called the executive switchboard, but I did not receive any help besides a general “we’re sorry for any inconvenience.”

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TSA Threatens Blogger Who Posted New Screening Directive

Posted by Digital Vendetta – 04/01/2010

[via Wired.com, originally written by Kim Zetter]

In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled the legal action and apologized for the strong-arm tactics agents used.

Travel writer and photographer Steven Frischling, who was served with a subpoena by two TSA agents on Tuesday, told Threat Level that he received a phone call Thursday evening from John Drennan, deputy chief counsel for enforcement at TSA, telling him the administration was withdrawing its subpoena.

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No Clean Feed

Posted by Nexus – 04/01/2010

[via nocleanfeed.com]

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and will not make anyone safer.

The filter will do almost nothing to prevent the people who are willfully making, trading, and accessing child sexual abuse material. This type of material is not distributed in the open and we need to fund police to continue to infiltrate and prosecute the groups of people responsible for creating and distributing such material.

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FYE loses customer through uses of relentless upselling

Posted by Nexus – 03/01/2010

[via consumerist.com, originally written by Laura Northrup]

Holly visited her local FYE store to purchase a DVD. She writes that she was met with such relentless upselling when all she wanted was to buy a single DVD that she is no longer interested in shopping at FYE at all.

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Sweden culls its resurgent wolves

Posted by Nexus – 02/01/2010

[via bbc.co.uk]

Grey wolves have made a comeback since hunting was banned

Swedish hunters have begun culling wolves for the first time in 45 years after parliament ruled that numbers needed to be reduced again.

Nine animals were shot dead in the county of Dalarna on the first day of the cull – a third of the total number to be killed, Swedish radio reports.

Hunters have until 15 February to fill the quota of 27, which will leave Sweden with an estimated 210 wolves.

Some 10,000 hunters were reported to be planning to take part in the hunt.

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