Ben’s Blog

This past weekend Holly and I traveled to Chicago for the Bayes-McGee wedding…not just a wedding, a rock wedding.  Holly and I made the trip down Friday morning with our friends Mark and Dauvan and decided mid-trip that we were going to drive all the way into the city rather than taking the south shore train in as previously planned.  Aside from the normal traffic this wasn’t such a bad plan - we ended up getting into the hotel a couple hours earlier than planned which gave us plenty of time to walk around the Miracle Mile.  We walked everywhere and then some, by the end of the day we all had very sore feet when we returned to the hotel.  We shopped a bit and found the ipod vending machine at Macy’s - pretty cool.

We stayed at the Affinia Hotel - a very nice place but a little over-priced in my opinion.  The location was great (right off Michigan Ave.) but the place looks like a work in progress, like mid-renovation.  The lobby and lobby restaurant/bar were great but the rooms were a bit run down.  The best part of the stay was the “pillow menu,” when you get there you can select from a number of different pillows ranging from the ipod pillow to the Swedish memory foam pillow.

The rock wedding was fun; leave it to Corey and Alisa to plan such a fun and non-traditional event.  The ceremony was held at an art gallery with a great open bar before and afterwards - this was the first wedding I’ve sat through while sipping a beer.  No traditional music either - Corey controlled (remotely) the soundtrack with a custom playlist on his iphone.  Alisa walked down the “aisle” to Bryan Adam’s Heaven and the ceremony wrapped up with some Van Halen.  After the ceremony we dined on some very eclectic food that was catered in and then finally moved the party over the W hotel / Whiskey Sky bar on the 33rd floor over looking Navy Pier.  We spent the rest of the evening imbibing only the finest spirits while enjoying  a fun night out with friends.  Many thanks to Corey and Alisa for giving such a great reason to get together and celebrate.

My sister Kristin hounded me for another post so here is a general update.

My last couple weeks were consumed with planning an annual meeting for our neighborhood association - one of the joys of being president.  After inviting a number of guests to address the “crowd” including the two men running for House of Representatives, a police lieutenant, and a local business I was really concerned that an audience wouldn’t show up.  I had 2500 fliers printed up and distributed to other board members to hand out but I am not sure to what extent that was done.  All said and done we had a crowd of about 15 people, including the guest speakers.  Not great, but our average crowd is about 25 so this wasn’t terrible considering the fact that nothing exciting happens on our side of town.

I spent this past weekend up north with my brother, Matt, at the cabin - we winterized the garage, pulled the snowmobile out of storage and put in wood flooring in one of the bedrooms.  It was a cold weekend but a good time - we got a lot done.  The flooring is really nice and was pretty easy to install.  Matt did most of the install work; my supporting role was limited to running outside every 5 minutes to make cuts for the next row.  Here are a couple pics of the process.  Check out the sweet linoleum we covered up!

All said and done the flooring project took about 5 hours.  We ran to the lumber yard and picked up some nice trim which will be installed sometime soon.  An upcoming project will also be to paint the paneling in the room to see if we can improve the look at all.  The original plan was to drywall but that project is being put off for the time being.

Here is a shot of the snowmobile - it currently only goes straight as the steering is seized up.  Hopefully this is an easy fix but I am not banking on it.

As seen on cnn.com…breaking news

Is it just me or is Obama going in for a kiss?

20 minutes into the debate I think I’ve heard about 90 seconds of new material.  I wish both McCain and Obama would come up with something new…

I really like Bob Schieffer though so I am hanging in there.

In the past week I’ve had a couple run-ins with customer service that I thought I would share - give credit where credit is due and warn my fellow consumers about the others.

First, the good…Jonathan Stevens Mattress Company

I bought a mattress about 6 years ago from Jonathan Steven’s for the cabin and have been really happy with it - it’s comfortable and has held up really well.

While changing the sheets during our last trip I noticed that some of the threads in the mattress covering were starting to pull a little - this was very subtle and purely cosmetic.  I remembered the sales person telling me there was a ten year warranty on the mattress so I called their HQ in Grand Rapids and was told that the fabric warranty was only one year but they would be happy to help me out if I brought the mattress back to the warehouse.

They left the offer open ended so I waited until a convenient time to bring the mattress home (towards the end of the summer season) and drove it over to the factory location.  I dropped it off in the morning and picked it up later that day - it looks/feels like a new mattress; I really can’t tell if they gave me a new mattress or if they completely rebuilt/re-stuffed and re-stitched the entire deal.

Bottom line: Jonathan Stevens Mattress went well beyond my wildest expectations to help me and for that reason they have earned another loyal customer.

Next, the bad…surveymonkey.com

I guess in the grand scheme of things this isn’t a big deal, but it represents my greater frustration with sites/companies that won’t put a phone number on their site to contact a human for more information.  I was exploring enterprise wide survey solutions to distract me from my to-do list which included creating a ton of surveys in zoomerang.com - I want to let others do this on their own and our internal solution isn’t ready yet.

So, I go to surveymonkey.com spend 1/2 hour looking for enterprise or corporate pricing to no avail.  Next I start to look for a phone number and can’t find anything but a form to submit support related questions.  At this point I’m frustrated, going on crazy, and resort to anywho.com to look up the corporate phone number in Portland, OR - I quickly dial the number only to find that it is a fax/data line.

I resort to the form for submitting support related questions and ask them to please have a sales person call me - I get a response back telling me to email someone else in the company (at least they gave me an address).  After emailing Chris Finley (chrisf@surveymonkey.com for anyone else looking for a contact) I learn that they don’t offer an enterprise version - only discounted pricing based on volume.  Great…fine…not what I was looking for but at least I got an answer.

I determined that if I had to work that hard to have them sell me something I didn’t want to deal with them at all. Hopefully they read this and consider helping consumers spend money with them!

Finally, the ugly…sharebuilder.com

I wanted to help spur the economy by taking advantage of the super low stock prices so I venture over to sharebuilder.com, as I am a loyal ING customer, only to find that their site is incredibly slow and intermittently down.  Being late in the day on Friday I said “no big whoop” and decide to wait until Monday to follow through.  Meanwhile, I find the stock that I wanted to buy on Friday (GM and Ford) both shot up about 30+% in yesterday’s rally - not so happy at this point.  Committed to buying stock I try again and find that while I can log in to my account now the site fails when I try to transfer money from other accounts to actually buy the stock.

In this instance I was able to find a customer service number and gave them a call; apparently they were having a bad day as I was disconnected twice and when I was able to talk to a person they assured me they were working on it and referenced their stellar previous network performance to demonstrate that they would be better in the future.  Seriously…why would anyone want to get to their accounts to dump or scoop up stock in this crazy time - no rush - you guys take your time fixing your site.

Needless to say, I advise that you avoid sharebuilder.com like the plague and go with a company you’re sure can help you when the market is good or bad.  Having completely failed to help me over the phone or make the situation right I think I am just going to pull all my ING related accounts and go back to my local bank.

OK, there it is - thanks for letting me vent and have this customer service catharsis!

So I have a laundry list of things that I really needbut don’t want to part with money to acquire…the list looks like this:

• A late model used snowmobile (anything better than the one that I have now)
• A late model used four-wheeler/quad
• A trailer to cart the above mentioned items
• The list goes on and on and on

In an attempt to acquire these items without spending a ton of money I put an offer on Craigslist.com in the barter section to trade web oriented work for anything on my list.  To be honest, I didn’t expect to get anywhere but within a week I got the following offer:

I need a website would you trade for a miniature horse that is registered

The horse wasn’t on my wish list but think of the fun I could have; I would need to get a mini-horse trailer specially painted like the one in MTV’s Rob & Big show.  I’m in negotiations now, but maybe I can get the horse, rent it out for kid’s birthday parties and use the proceeds for new toys.