Category: Life with Pratts

Nifty gifts

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly good gift giver, but a couple of my sisters can have a knack for finding fun and/or unusual presents. For Christmas my sister Jean gave me a Peanuts wall clock that plays the “Linus and Lucy” theme on the hour, but not when it’s dark. It’s hanging in my office now.

My sister Marianne found some cool things this Christmas. 3D Holiday Specs look like 3D glasses, but when you look at Christmas tree lights with them you see them transformed into Santa’s face, or snowflakes, or stars, etc. It’s fun seeing which patterns give the best effects.

Something else Marianne found, that’s both fun and practical, is a type of wallet I’d never seen before, made of a folded sheet of Tyvek. Mighty Wallets come in all sorts of designs, including some with Star Trek themes. Highly recommended!

Ho, ho, ho Nöelco

One of the Christmas gifts for my son this year is a Norelco rechargeable razor. Norelco is a unit of Philips in Holland, the company that introduced Compact Cassettes, LaserDisc video, and co-developed Compact Discs with Sony.

In the 1960’s Norelco started to advertise using a stop-motion animated Santa in their holiday TV commercials. When I was a kid I looked forward to seeing the Norelco Santa. Here’s a video survey of his appearances through the years. The first voice you’ll hear is one the all-time great announcers, Peter Thomas, born in 1924 and, from what I can tell, still working.

Norelco’s Santa disappeared in the 1990’s, but this year he made a digital comeback.

Christmas Eve!

This is me, Christmas 1976, shortly after I had my first paying radio station gig. My brother-in-law Marc is in the background…

… and this was what I was reacting to. A beautiful, old Zenith console tube radio that my brother Jeff gave me. He traded an enlarger for it. (Back in the age of analog photography there were these little things called negatives and to make a print you had to… oh, never mind.) Years later, I had it refinished and restored.

The radio was one of the last made before war production took over, so it was 35 years old on that Christmas Day, which was… 35 years ago?? Yike! I’m not going to think about that and instead I’ll go get some ‘nog.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

House mouse

In other exciting weekend news from home, after the Comcast salesmen left I caught a mouse in my office, in the finished half of the basement. I used one of these Victor live traps. They work well and I recommend them. I let the little guy go in the woods near the house, and if a deer mouse can look scared, he looked scared.

Sunday follow-up: OK, let’s make that two mice.
Monday follow-up: Looks like Mr. and Mrs. Mouse were it. Trap still set with bait intact.

Xfinity by any other name is Comcast

Comcast is going door-to-door today, trying to get Verizon FiOS customers to switch to Xfinity. Ha! Fat chance. I gave the two sales guys a real earful, not that they deserved it personally, telling them how, in 2005, Comcast left me without Internet service for a month. A MONTH! The only thing that was working was e-mail, because it came from their own domain. Finally, after I’d pushed and complained almost every day, a technician called from a van, on his way to a substation, and I used traceroute to help him find the dead gateway.

Comcast offered no credit for the loss of service, so I asked for an adjustment and the request was denied. Sporatic outages continued after that, the same as they’d been previously. I got tired of resetting the cable modem, and I knew FiOS was coming to town. That was when I vowed to switch the moment FiOS was available. March, 2006, I saw the fiber optic cable being installed on the street, and I called Verizon to order service.

Since then I’ve had essentially no problems. Oh, a few times when I happened to be online at midnight the router went offline for 3-5 minutes, undoubtedly for some scheduled work, but that’s been it. As confirmed by the FCC, Verizon FiOS is not only the fastest home Internet service, it is also the only one that is perfectly consistent throughout the day.

As I told the Comcast/Xfinity reps at the door today when I refused the discount they were offering, there is NO WAY, AT ALL, I will EVER switch back to Comcast, as long as I can get FiOS in this house. Period.

P.S. By the way, my Comcast e-mail address still works. For whatever reason, it was never deleted. It’s dougpratt5 on comcast dot net. Everything sent to it is automatically forwarded to one of my dograt mailboxes.

Black Friday blues

No, I didn’t wait in the dark and cold, hoping to grab a door-buster special at 4 AM. Earlier this week we bought a new refrigerator. My defrost fix on our Frigidaire was temporary, because the coils iced over again. I’m a terrible fatalist about some things, and having never had success with refrigerator repairs in the past I didn’t want to bother seeing if it could be fixed. We’ve never liked the thing anyway, so I told Carol let’s just buy a new one. Delivery of a new Kenmore side-by-side, model 5102, is scheduled for today, and from a check of appliances at Best Buy it appears the manufacturer of this particular Kenmore is GE.

Today the same refrigerator is on sale for $60 less than what I paid. So, hoping there might be a price matching deal, and wanting to avoid driving to the mall on Black Friday, I pulled out my receipt and called the phone number for the store at the mall. Doing that put me through the usual voice system nightmare that we all know well. Several attempts to reach the appliance department ended up dumping me to a national call center, where I was asked if I had the store’s phone number. “Uh, yes, I did, and that was how I got you.” They were unable to give me a direct-dial number of the appliance department at the local store.

I went online and dug up a local, direct number for automotive. Close enough, because it worked. I said I was trying to reach the appliance department, and the gruff sounding but nice guy who answered the phoned transferred me.

Once I was speaking to a person on the floor where had I spent an hour or two a few days ago, she really was helpful. She looked up my order and said, “Yeah, it’s sixty dollars less, but we won’t include free delivery at that price, and that would be seventy dollars, so you’re doing better with the deal you have.” I went online to check, which was what I should have done to begin with, and, sure enough, delivery “starts at $70,” plus another ten bucks for hauling away the old one.

With all of the lip service that large retail corporations give to customer satisfaction, it’s hilarious and frustrating how often they intentionally fail to deliver it. Voice systems that dump customers to national call centers just get in the way. The good news is that when I reached the appliance department I was given a straight, quick explanation. So, once you get past the corporate nonsense, old-fashioned customer service still exists at Sears.

Follow-up: The old refrigerator, when it was working, held the freezer at -10F, the optimal temperature. When it broke the best it could do was +10F. The new refrigerator has been running for ten hours, and so far the best it can do in the freezer compartment is… +10F.

Follow follow-up: Whatta difference a day makes. I’ve never seen a refrigerator take so long to find its temperatures, but by setting the fridge one level warmer it’s now below 35F and the freezer is at -10F.