Facebook continues its all-out assault on its users’ privacy with the new Places feature, which is (of course) on by default, with no warning. Lifehacker has the lowdown, including how to turn it off. As I’ve said before, if you dig Facebook, I’m not going to give you a hard time about it, but I strongly encourage you to turn this feature off. The world doesn’t need to know where you live, and when you are (and aren’t) home. Also: Fuck you, Facebook, for turning this on by default and not warning your users about it. You’re one of the most profoundly immoral companies in the history of the Internet.

Yeah, reason 424 I’m not on Facebook.

Sincerely.

The unit shows up in a normal-ish amount of time, but sits in the garage for a few days waiting to be put in. The day comes to install it, and the grill is cracked all the way down. Well poo. No problem, contact them and they arrange a pickup and will send me a new one. They probably could have just sent a new grill, but that seem to be too much work for whoever was handling this.

It took almost 3 weeks to get a replacement.

They never told me when it would be picked up. The only way I knew is because UPS stuck one of their notes on the door saying they missed me. So of course they waited for it to get back and they inspected it or whatever they do, and they sent another. Number 2 shows up and the box is pretty much already destroyed. The driver noted the damage. I should have had him take it back right then. I opened it and sure enough, cracked grill, sides were bent in, it was in worse shape than the first. It mainly looked cosmetic, so I actually emailed their customer support and said I’d consider keeping it if worked and they made that worth my gamble. They offered a whopping $75 partial refund. I even countered that, assuming they would rather be done with it than spend another god-knows how much in shipping. I said that wasn’t really enough, give me more, extend the warranty, or come get it. They scheduled another pickup. That pickup took awhile to happen, but I will give them credit for this one thing – they sent a replacement out as soon as they verified that one was on its way back.

Third time’s the charm? Now it’s been almost 2 months since the original order. I’ve had to be home waiting on UPS for each drop off/pick-up. UPS shows up earlier this week. I see the driver get out a large brown box… “Oh good, they double boxed this one!” I think because the other 2 were the white boxes that the AC comes in. “Huh… he’s just carrying that up here on his own? That’s like 100 pounds! Oh… wait… why does the box say Whirlpool?”
It was an over-the-range microwave. Sigh.
Again an email to buy.com – just cancel it, I’m done, I found it cheaper somewhere else anyway (which is true, I can get it from amazon for $50 less and free 2 day shipping) I wanted a full refund and the interest on my $600 for the last 2 months if they ever expected to keep me as a customer. I knew they wouldn’t do it, but I at least thought I’d ask. I got another generic “Sorry for any inconvenience, we’ve processed your request” email. I would have loved to gotten someone on the phone, maybe they could have at least faked a little sincerity or admitted this was pathetic customer service. They already spent probably more than the AC was worth in shipping and pickups, don’t you think they’d at least try to keep the sale? Or at the very least the customer? I’m a difficult customer to lose and I’ve been shopping there probably since they started… not to mention the people I sent there over the years to shop. They managed to do it though.

Project Living Room is almost complete:

So I think I fixed my freezing pipe problem finally.  No pictures yet, I’ll get to that later.  In the meantime, what do you think?  I might keep it this way…

Odd…. the upload isn’t working any more.  Fixed it…. the Amazon Word Press plugin broke it.