eBay

When I first encountered eBay, oh 15 years ago I suppose, it seemed like a marvellous idea,and I took to it like the proverbial amphibian to water, buying unpainted toy soldiers, painting them up and selling them off (plus, adding to my own collections), all for a tiny charge, and with a global market - marvellous for a New Zealander used to being the back end of beyond.

However, with the progress of years, and the greater and greater knowledge of the Internet among the dim, the unwary, and - especially! - the sharps and con-men, it is one of the sites that seems to have deteriorated in value and virtue.

Fees for transactions have risen, repeatedly, but that is still a trifle. However, they seem to have done a deal with any and every professional purveyor of sharp practice, so that when you request a list of a type of object you want, the first 2, 5, or 30 pages of listings are all for -very- professional shops selling via eBay, and any actual 2nd hand or bargain items are buried way at the back.

If you should choose to list by price, lowest first, you get one of two responses - either the "premium products" get listed, lowest to highest, before anything else gets listed (ie same result), or else you get pages and pages of 'accessories' - be it buttons, bells, or batteries - to what you wanted all listed first, being marketed by the down-market compatriots of the premium product merchants, still trying to get your 'eyeballs' before you get to what you want to acquire.

On top of that, some of the purveyors of tat seem to feel they can ignore all classifications and stick their products into any and every category of business, the more irrelevant the better - this is how, while browsing for some SYW artillerymen, I came upon vibrating groin massagers, handpainted portraits of Jesus on velvet (autographed by him!) and the miracle dog-collar that will stop your dog ever barking*

Even more vexing, if such were possible, is that once you find something you want to buy, instead of doing the deal with eBay and relying on them, they whisk you off to the vendors own websire, where you have to spend -more- time just filling out some inane and over-intrusive questionairre about yourself, and then get presented with some tiny writing asserting your rights (none) and their rights (everything) and directed to tick a box to show you agree to these rights, otherwise the purchase cannot be completed. 


Well, being cranky, I've started reading these assertions, and as a result have declined to complete several purchases, for completely ludicrous conditions such as (a) absolutely no returns on anything no matter what - thats a popular one, (b) the vendor reserving the rights to charge 25% or 40% on top of estimated postage and packing, for reasons unspecified, (c) you agreeing to pay for any time spent in discussing errors in shipping and mislabelling, and (d) the vendor reserving the right to ship a different product to that purchased if he has business exigencies requiring this.


And eBay itself now seems massively disinterested in helping sort out any disputes, combining difficulty in initiating complaints with an extremely dismissive attitude and lassitude.


So, I've given up. I guess I bought or sold at least $50k worth of stuff through eBay, but those days are over - the girl has vomited on that train**



*If you tighten it enough, I'm assuming

** or if you prefer, Sick Transit, Gloria Munday

Third World Plumbing in a First World country

Cat actually asked me to write this one, as she's fairly terminally disgusted with the plumbing here, and I can see her point.

Of course, it's not Third World, we aren't talking holes in the ground, it's just kinda ... Second World, well intentioned, badly designed, appallingly constructed, which is how Russia has been described to me (often).

What really appalled her, in our last place, was having the toilets back up into the shower stall, while she was trying to have a shower. The underlying cause of that one was tree roots gradually crushing/lifting the combined outlet pipe, but she - well both of us really - were appalled that the toilet outlet pipe and the shower drain would be combined, rather than separately piped into the sewer mains.

Quite a bit of the plumbing, electrical and other basic infrastructure seems to be like that: just not well-thought-out, and often poorly implemented. For instance, some dimwit in the 60s thought it would be a good idea to wire houses with aluminium (sorry, aluminum haha) wire, which was cheaper, but has caused endless problems.

Another, and this still appalls me, is that the electrical plugs are largely just 2-prong, i.e. there is no earth! This is gradually being phased out (bad pun) but this stuff is still being sold and still installed in houses, despite the minimal savings and the truly lamentable lack of safety. Aside of anything else, it also means any appliances you have which have 3-prong power points, requires a converter plug in order to even fit (the plugs & sockets are also disastrously designed so that plugs are forever falling out of the wall - I have had it seriously recommended to me by electricians that you need to bend the prongs in order to alleviate this!)

Part of this is, I'm sure, because there are few or no regulations compared to NZ, England, or ... well, the civilised world*: and of course that varies state by state, as there are essentially NO federal regulations on anything like this. Part of it - and I'm sure a lot of Americans would say all of it - is that we're in Arkansas, which is regarded as relatively backward & third-worldish by most of the USA**. But a lot of it is just the cut-the-corners, minimise-everything attitude that has become more and more prevalent with the last 5 decades or so.

Bah, youngsters today! Standards are falling! Everything is worse!!

But seriously, I've had people I work with, supposedly educated and intelligent, tell me that many houses*** are, and should be, built to only last 30 years because they'll get pulled down and replaced after that anyway. Which (a) I doubt, and (b) results in insta-slums, because they look like crap after one year, and start literally falling apart after 2. Cost-efficient for the builder, I'm sure, not so much for the owner.

That, again, is a kind of tangent though, because the plumbing, electrical & stuff I am ranting about is in middle-class housing - pretty much all the houses we looked at buying, and at least the next tranche above, i.e. the ones we looked at but couldnt have afforded, all had these afflictions. I am assuming that the really affluent houses don't ... but when I stop to think about it, I'm probably wrong about that too: this is more a disease of the spirit than an absence of wealth: the shonky fly-by-night attitude of casual disregard.

Enough grumpy old rants for one day :)


*yes that's a bit harsh, I agree.
**except for Mississippi and Alabama which in the same boat
*** Many = poor peoples, i.e. black people and po' white trash

A nasty little trick

Well, I got a bit of an object lesson yesterday. A couple of weeks ago, I received an offer of a credit card through the mail, and as I still need to broaden & improve my credit history here, I thought it would be a good idea to take this up*, so I completed the application and sent it off, after reading through it fairly carefully.

Yesterday, I got my first statement for this through the mail (before I'd even received the card, which I thought was a bit keen in itself). For a card with a $250 credit limit, they were going to charge me $5.95 as a monthly fee, plus an initial $70 signing-up 'fee', so my brand-new credit card would have an actual initial credit limit of $175.

I went back and re-read the initial offer I'd been sent, to make sure there was no mention of monthly fees or of an initial signing fee, which - of course - there wasn't, and then phoned them to inform them that I hadn't agreed to this fee and that I did not wish to use this card & to close the account immediately.

The poor girl on the other end was obviously going through pre-written scripts, and first gave me the 'but this will help repair** your credit' line, then started telling me that I would still have to pay the fees as the account had been opened: but something I said*** must have triggered a different branch in the script, because she switched me to a guy who assured me the account would be closed and the fees reversed out (altho this may take up to 30 days).

Somehow I suspect if I'd sounded, ah, less educated, or female, the bullying to cough up the initial fee would have continued rather longer. Of course, now I'm going to have to both watch to see that they do reverse this, and to make sure that it doesn't appear on my credit history.

Parenthentically, until you've lived here it's hard to appreciate how important the credit score is, and how grotesquely powerful (and unsupervised) the credit ratings agencies are: there are endless horror stories of people getting identities stolen or just confused, and spending literally years and thousands of dollars in trying to get the agencies to recognise and amend their own errors (and of those errors repeatedly popping up every few years even after they are supposedly fixed). This may be just urban myth, but the extent of the stories makes me think that it's something that will - in a while - get addressed by the government in some way: at the very least, it is crying out for some legal remedy (a regulatory agency & appeals court would make the most sense, I think, but god knows what Congress will come up with).

Mind you, the whole financial services industry is absolutely rotten to the core: I'm not talking here about the financial whizkids that have invited the latest sturm-und-drang on all our heads - that is actually just the capitalist system going through it's usual spastic spasm, by and large, and those idiots will be with us always (see Jay Gould and many others). No, what I'm thinking of is the rotten stuff like:
* Credit card companies that will jump your interest rate from 18% to 39% if you are late in paying - not just if you're late in paying their bill, but if you're late in paying any bill, like the electricity bill. Oh, and then the interest rate doesn't go down again for 12 months, of course
* Banks that will always process all your cheques & withdrawals in a day, before considering any deposits, and if any of the withdrawals render you overdrawn, will bounce your payment and charge a $50 fee for this
* On top of that trick, when they have the opportunity, rather than reversing the largest withdrawal of the day, they will bounce the smallest payment first, continuing until the "overdraught" is eliminated - thus maximising the number of bounce fees they can charge. Of course, the bounce fees are also deducted, and can then cause more withdrawals/cheques to be bounced (if there are any), or the imposition of an extra $100 'unauthorised overdraught' charge.

I could go on - at some length, I might add - but why bother? you get the idea. The books are rigged, and unless you are scrupulously careful at all times, you are vulnerable: and they will rip you, every chance you can get. The ultimate Bastard society, I guess.

Well, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised: that's always been the reputation of the States, in the end: a wild west where the devil takes the hindmost.

sigh more tomorrow.





* As the credit ratings agencies consider the number of sources, and also the amount of uncommitted credit, in rating your score: so a couple of totally unused credit cards will actually boost the score substantially - just one way in which they prove their weakness to being gamed.
**ha!
*** I wish I could work out what exactly triggered this

Travelled!

Well, that was a fairly low-key trip, all things considered. I drove us to the edge of Memphis, then turned driving over to Cat - on the theory that she's more experienced at American city driving, and I'm better at reading maps - which I guess worked out, as we got to the places we aimed for with a minimum of confusion and no real delay.

The actual USCIS thing was short & very easy: fill out a form, wait a couple of minutes, get digitally fingerprinted (no ink, no mess! god bless technology), have your signature & picture taken, that's it. Not sure what comes next, I think it will be back to Memphis for an actual interview face to face... but as we did this twice with our L-visas (once in London plus again in DC on entering the States), then maybe that step gets skipped?

We stopped at a Bennigans (at last, somewhere where they haven't been shut down!), and had Monte Cristo sandwiches, I think the high point of the week for Cat - she had been really longing to try one again. Having had a bite of hers (cold) last time, I was quite keen to try one myself, but I have to say they are much nicer once lukewarm or cold - when new-cooked and hot, they are not so great.

Cat had been feeling pretty low and out of sorts all day, so we cancelled the tourist stuff for the day: after all, it's only a 2 hour drive, if we fancy a daytrip any weekend, it's an easy reach, so we drove back slow & easy.

The traffic was moderate going both ways (well, by UK motorway standards - very heavy by NZ standards!), and man, were there a lot of 18wheelers & lorries on the road. I must say, tho, that the US truckers seem a lot more professional and courteous than the ones you encounter in the UK (most of course being EU-based): they stick to the speed limits much more, give you space to pass & are quite happy to pull over a bit to help, and (most of all) dont play Block The Traffic by occupying all the lanes & travelling at the same speed, the way so many truckers in the UK always delight in doing. Given that the Interstate we were on is only 2lanes each way, that would have been quite easy to do, but while the truckers would overtake their slower brethren & caravans, (and the occasional slow car), they were fairly careful to pull over immediately after, and to not let a buildup of delayed cars occur at all.

Two other differences I noticed in the open-road driving: one was the recurrence, indeed almost prevalence, of enormous peels of rubber - blownout 18wheeler tires, I assume. This despite passing at least 3 workcrews at different points, tidying them up & collecting them. Compared to the UK/EU motorways, there seemed to be a huge number of them: I guess the profit margin thing here (or the less stringent inspection regime?) drives the truckers to try and eke out every
last mile from their tires.

The other big difference was the absence of the usual stream of broken-down or burnt-out cars dotting the side of the motorways. I think in the whole journey, we saw 2 breakdowns, and in both cases they were obviously being attended to (if not necessarily fixed). I would guess, driving a similar distance in the UK (say up to Birmingham and back, we would expect to see at least 20 breakdowns of various ages, plus another 6 or 8 burnt-out cars ... each way.

I think that this is caused by the American love for (and dependence on) their cars, in a way that has never even penetrated in the UK, where car maintenance seems to be considered optional - to the point that simple things like oil & filter changes are considered an unneeded expense, or an occasional opportunity to be robbed blind by the mechanics.

Of course the UK mechanics truly are a band of ruthless cowboys, and as a class are quite piratical and utterly untrustworthy (with quite a few honorable exceptions, I'll freely admit).

Even so, it was always an occasion for mirth on our parts over the sheer volume of breakdowns we would see on the English motorways, and we would speculate on the underlying thought processes, or lack thereof. It's not as tho cars are cheaper in the UK, after all - quite the reverse. Still, it was very pleasant to not see the same littering the sides of I40 yesterday.

Cat disagreed with my guess of the cause, pointing out the number of cars we see in Little Rock with astonishing dings and dents, and quite commonly missing windowscreens - replaced with clear plastic & duct tape: but I dredged up the analysis I'd read a few months ago, about the effects of poverty on car ownership in the US as the cause of this.

Briefly, the bottom slice (12%? 15? 18? I forget) has such poor creditworthiness that they cannot get car loans at anything like reasonable terms, so - as they still need cars, public transport being a bit of a joke in almost all of America - they are reduced to purchasing wrecks: played out cars at the end of their useful lives, costing $500-$1000 typically, i.e. the sort of amount they can buy for cash (or buy on horrible credit terms & afford the monthly payments) ... and expected to last only months, perhaps a year if you're lucky.

Of course, in straitened circumstances like that, it is essential to get every last possible mile out of their investments, to delay the next purchase as long as possible: hence driving them in quite unsafe conditions, provided they still actually can move, and don't get stopped/ticketed too often to make them financially viable (fortunately there are very few police assigned to traffic duties so that is a low risk).

The irony of it is that, between the repeated purchases, and the price of those repairs that seem worth the cost, they could in many cases afford the payments on a much better quality of used car, but having been judged and found wanting by the Creditworthiness Judges (ha), they aren't given that access. Makes you think it might be something the government could address .. like so many things involving the Credit Rating gestapo.

Enough rambling for the moment :)

AT&T Blues...... again

Well, that was interesting: my internet access disappeared on Saturday night, sometime between 10 and 11. Not that I did anything, y'understand, it just ... went away. So, I tried AT&T helpdesk, but they only operate til 7 p.m.

Sunday after breakfast, I tried again - after negotiating their very hostile voice-response program, I eventually got to talk to a technician, who took me through all his standard fixes, without any result. His conclusion? there was some problem with the setup of my PC, and I should either
(a) call Microsoft for support, or (b) call AT&T's out-of-scope helpline and pay for support. I did point out that this occurred without my intervention or changing anything on the PC, but this apparently did not matter.

So, I called Microsoft help, and they wanted $75 to help me. That seemed a bit silly, so I said no, and called the AT&T helpline. It turned out, they wanted $129 to help me! although, to be fair, that would let me call with other problems for free, for the next 6 months. Obviously they expect quite a few problems in any six month period.

I restrained my temper, declined the offer, and asked if they could tell me who to contact, to terminate my account with them. This, it turns out, is the Billing Department, who aren't open on Sundays, so I noted the phone number.

Ten minutes after this, again without my having taken any further action, my internet access was restored.

Nothing like a little revenue-gathering exercise, is there.

Cars

Well, perhaps there's fewer differences between the States and the UK than we thought. We picked up our new car yesterday, a leased Honda Accord. The arrangement we'd made with the salesman was that we'd pick the car up on Wednesday (when the rental was due to be renewed), or he'd provide a loaner until our car was ready.

Cat dropped the rental at Budget (where it had cost us an arm and a leg for rental), and caught a taxi to the Honda agency, where she'd been told the car would be ready at 3 o'clock. She was apparently sat down, and essentially ignored for a couple of hours, without being told what was going on or why the delay (or how long the delay would be), and no sign of any loaner. At that point she phoned me, fairly upset, & I arranged to catch a taxi out there and pick up her and the car, and deal with the car yard myself, as she was out of all patience with them.

She then called back shortly thereafter, having left the lot because one of the sales managers had approached her in an unpleasantly aggressive manner and, in the guise of apologising, tried to make her feel angry or bad (I guess as a way of feeling justified in the way they'd treated her). Fortunately rather than losing it with him, she just left the lot, and waited for me on the next sidestreet.

After I picked her up and went back to the yard (I had an internal debate about just telling them to stuff it & walking away from the deal - but the practical problems that that would have created were too great), I dealt with the salesman we'd originally dealt with, who was very apologetic, then got handed to a different sales manager to finish the financial details (and who seemed pretty adept at not listening to what the customers were saying, himself).

We then sat outside waiting for the final details, and the sales manager that had already ticked off Cat came over, and delivered what I'd have to say was one of the slimiest and most unpleasant performances I've seen in many years: under the guise of allegedly apologising, he strenuously and repeatedly made every effort to put all the blame for this on Cat, and tried to portray himself as put-upon and - of course - always in the right: the old politico's trick of the apology that is no apology ("I'm sorry you feel like I kicked you in the nuts").

I'm very proud to say that Cat kept her head, and was quite civil, without accepting an inch of this nonsense, and kept pushing back at him quite directly, without ever being unduly abusive or excessive. It's fortunate that the original salesman came over and finished the details off tho, as I was at the point of becoming confrontational with him - the way the 'apology' had deteriorated, he was essentially calling her a liar, which isn't something I'm going to sit still for.

As it is, I think we both somewhat regret that we hadn't just torn the whole deal up and walked away ... but at least the car is very pleasant, and should be large enough for the comfort of our future guests.

You can't get there from here, or AT&T blues

Just so we can be reassured that some UK traditions have passed on to the USA:

When I went to phone NZ on Saturday, I got a message saying the phone was tollbarred. I phone the number given and was informed that I'd exceeded my credit limit for toll calls (not that I knew I had one), and would have to pay the bill of $475 before they'd unbar it. I phoned the accounts department to do this, and they demanded my Customer Code, which is printed on the bill they send out - but, we've only had the phone a couple of weeks, so I don't have any bill & don't know what the Customer Code is: and they couldn't possibly take payment until I gave them the Customer Code.

After a full hour of whining, blustering & begging, I finally got them to look up on the computer, and tell me what the Customer Code will be .... so then I went back to accounts to pay the bill, but the first bill will only be for $175: I told them I needed to pay $475 according to the other department, but they refused to accept more than the bill amount of $175, so I paid that, then rang the other department again with the payment code, to get the tollbar lifted.

They checked the code, and then said it was insufficient to lift the tollbar, and I'd have to phone accounts again and pay the rest. I did that again, and ... of course they repeated that they couldn't accept any more payment as there was nothing owing, according to them.

Deadlock.

... and, BTW, wtf is with the $475 in tolls??? I know Cat has spent 2 or 3 hours on toll calls to the UK and NZ, but I haven't made a single call on the landline to date - what rate are they charging, $90/hour or more??? (that is, assuming Cat's spent twice as long as she thought, on the phone).
Oh well, should have this problem sorted next week, we're switching providers (&keeping the same phone number, thank ghu).