It’s so crazy, it just might be possible!
Weaving Your Band-Aids Keeps Your Booboos Clean, apparently.
I’m going to go home right now and slice up my hands just to try it!
Categories: Check this out!, Health, Video
Comments (2)
I’m always impressed to see people squeeze a good deal out of a faceless corporation. Others are far better than me at this, but I still know the principles involved. A friend of mine lives and breathes Fatwallet, a site that I find all the more exciting because the Big Guys hate it. Said friend was recently rewarded with a free home theater system just for paying attention. (And by following up with the Rebate Police over and over.)
I pride myself on being able to stand up to everyone from shady car and mattress salesmen to cable company CSRs, and walk away feeling like I got a good deal. One arena where this is exceedingly straightforward is the cell phone companies. Even with the deck so stacked against the consumer in the U.S. via suffocatingly long-term contracts and confusing fees, there’s still a power play you can make when the time is right.
After Heather and I picked out the phones we wanted, I went to the store alone to try to really hammer home a deal that made sense. I was able to get a great price by negotiating the post-rebate price in-store, then printing the rebates at home and submitting them for a double-dip. I didn’t back down, and I saved about $200 just by being willing to walk away at any time. Being willing to walk away is a tried and true technique for buying a car or other high-ticket item, which are generally more ephemeral processes, but less people consider it when it comes to their cell phones, cable service, etc.
It’s indeed possible to save a lot of money by negotiating exactly what you want from the carriers once you’re out of your contract. I remember when Clark Howard used to advise people “Don’t sign a contract for a cell phone.” Now it’s “Try to sign only a 1-year contract for a cell phone.” Times have changed.
Categories: Money
Comments (4)
Is it just me, or are we past the point where you’re allowed to complain about the complexity of the process at Starbucks? Not only are the sentiments “OMG Starbucks is teh confusing” and “Small = Tall? What a country!” incredibly overused and flat out not funny, but people usually talk about their confusion as if they’re the first coffee novice to ever experience this problem.
There is no tolerance for novices who do have enough respect for the fancy-coffee place to study and learn the culture. I could feel the cold stares of the experienced customers who were full of heavy-syllable words spelling caffeine relief ending in “o” and I was requiring them to dam up this river of syllables until I could babble, in layman’s garble, a pitiful attempt to order something that may not even end in “o.”
I could feel the hostile text-messaging going on around me.
I didn’t want to be here now. I now wanted to be somewhere else, maybe drinking a cup of coffee in the English language.
It’s not like Detective Rose strolled into the Starbucks at 7th and Broadway in Manhattan. He’s probably talking about the location on Roswell Rd. near Hammond, around the corner from a big-ass Kroger, and across the street from a McDonald’s. I’ve been there many times. You generally encounter soccer moms and landscapers here just as often as you see graphic designers and music critics. The big difference, apparently, is that said soccer moms actually figured out what kind of coffee they sell years ago.
“What size would you like that in sir?” said the coffee technician.
“Small.”
“Tall?”
“No, small.”
“Small is tall sir.”
“Tall sounds big. Small sounds like what I want. Is tall the same size as small?”
“All I know is tall is small so small must be tall.”
I’m in a Dr. Seuss cartoon.
[from this week’s View From The Cop, an AJC blog written by a Sandy Springs police officer]
Yes, sir, you’re in a Dr. Seuss cartoon. Welcome to 1996, when everyone else made the same observation and then got over it.
Categories: Quick Thoughts, Food, Weird
Comments (2)
Here’s some funny links that have been rolling around in my browser this week…
I often try to brainstorm good, consistent topics for blogging that would provide for a lot of easy material. This is not to say that I “need more readers” or anything silly like that. It’s more of a thought exercise, much like the “come up with wildly complicated inventions or building plans in my head” game that my dad taught me as a kid (and which I still use) to help me fall asleep. The reason I bring this up is that I came across such a “low hanging fruit” type of subject matter that is absolutely ripe for witty discussion: the comics. I just added The Comics Curmudgeon to my feeds because it’s one of those concepts that I wish I had thought up. Daily (snarky) commentary on the funnies… It’s like TVWOP for comic strips.
And from another very funny site I just found, here’s a great list detailing How To Tell You’re A Superhero.
Your nickname in high school was “That weird kid who jumped nine stories to put out an apartment fire with his ice breath.”
OK, one more, because it made me laugh out loud at work.
Most of your romantic relationships end in plummets.
OK, one more link, and it’s back to work for me.
The Perry Bible Fellowship -This well-drawn strip is riotously funny, at least to me. I thus wasted at least an hour reading the entire archive, one by one.
Categories: Check this out!, Weird
Comments (5)
