The Chattel Saga Continues

Well, I've managed to make my way to two paychecks under this new plan, whereby the company I work for decided to borrow two weeks' pay from everyone in the company, for the term of employment, without interest (see last post).

But the saga continues. You see, I have this really good deal, whereby this contracting company is given 11% over my paycheck, and has to deposit it into my 401K account. But two weeks ago, when this money was supposed to be deposited, it wasn't. You see, they sent a list of names and amounts to the 401K company, but "somebody forgot to send the money." That's a direct quote. This was a couple of weeks ago. Since then, apparently, they've been looking for the money. Under cushions, in pillow cases, in the mason jars they have buried in the backyard. Nothing.

The money still hasn't been deposited. The latest news is that it's supposed to go in today. Here's my question: Who makes interest off of this money? My 401K is supposed to be generating interest for me. But this money is in their account.

I can't even think of a clever quip to close with. I'm just very, very unhappy...

Life Sucks at the Labs, Too

I've been working at a national laboratory in [deleted] as a contractor for just over 11 years. In July, the lab took me away from the company that issues me my paycheck, and put me and 199 others into a new company. We were told that we have a choice: To continue working at this lab, or to go find a new job somewhere else. But if we wanted to stay where we were, we were going to have to "voluntarily" change companies.

We weren't given much advance warning. We weren't given the chance to state our disapproval with the way things were headed. Nobody called us into a meeting and said, "You are our chattle, and this is what we are going to do. What do you think?"

Naturally, I grumbled. But I went with the program because the alternatives didn't have much real appeal: Not working, finding a new job at less pay, being unemployed until I lost my house, etc.

A couple of months later, I was given a contract by this new company and told to sign it. I found a number of things I didn't like. Namely, that they could change the terms of employment at will. I tried to call my Ombudsman, but there was nobody to call. The "new way" didn't call for an Ombudsman. I mean, does chattle even need one? I called the HR person at my new company, who told me to sign the document or find another job. I talked to the contract manager at the lab, who told me that there's nothing he could tell me, nothing I could do, and nobody to talk to.

So the contract sat in my bag, unsigned, for several weeks. Two weeks ago, I got an email, "We need your signed contract." Having no other option, I signed it and dropped it off.

Then today, I received an email stating that I would not be paid this Friday. Today's Tuesday, and Friday is three days from now. Instead, payday was moved to two weeks hence and from now on, paydays would be two weeks after the actual work was performed (time card due on Friday, get paid two weeks later). This would be ok if it was a term of my employment. But I've been there for 11 years. This amounts to an interest-free loan for the complete term of mine (and 199 others') employment.

The excuse for this, aside from something lame about the economy, was that we were going from being paid every two weeks, to being paid twice a month. Then they sent out a spreadsheet that they claimed showed that we weren't actually losing any money, with simulated totals before such loss actually took place, conveniently lacking such totals after the loss occurred. I'm a software developer. A dog food salesman could tell 200 people were each losing two weeks' work, payable upon leaving the company.

This company recently signed a $150m/5 year contract with the Lab. That's $750K per employee it acquired. Yet, it suddenly can't make payroll without screwing its employees?

I don't know what I'm going to do about this. I love my work. I like the people I work with. But this company sucks. I have no recourse. So maybe I'll just take some advice from Jim Carrey:

"But what I'm probably going to do, is piss and moan like an impotent jerk. Then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!"

Then again, maybe I'll just go somewhere I'll feel appreciated.

Alienware: A fast gaming box that takes forever...

I just bought an Alienware. Great machine! But it was supposed to ship in 5 days, and ended up taking a month to ship. This was after very poor communication from Alienware about scheduling difficulties.

It finally did arrive, the day before Thanksgiving, 2008. I set up the computer. Then I opened up the monitor and noticed it was cracked. I hooked it up anyway, but it didn't work. I get Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, so I didn't call them until Monday morning. I wasn't too worried -- I'd just get an RMA and everything would be ok.

But it wasn't. The customer service agent (in India) started giving me crap about not reporting it in time. Then he said, "We can't do anything until we've seen pictures of the monitor." So I had to wait until I got home from work, and send pictures. Monday I forgot, but I managed to send them on Tuesday.

You know how you usually get an autogenerated email back from a system after you send an email? I didn't get squat. Here's the email. Read on afterwards, because there's more:

Dear Fulfillment Person,

First off, my order information:

Account #: 000000000
PO#: 0000000000

I received my system late Wednesday afternoon. I didn't get it set up until Wednesday night. I didn't notice any damage to the box the monitor was in, but upon unpacking the monitor, I noticed the upper-right corner was cracked (see attached pictures). I hooked it up to the computer anyway, but it didn't work. Turning it on allows the display to show for about a second, then it goes black.

Monday morning (yesterday), I called Alienware and spoke to Rob. He asked me why I didn't call earlier. Here is my answer, repeated for anyone else who wants to know: I got the monitor hooked up Wednesday night and assumed you were closed. Thursday I also assumed you were closed. It was a holiday. Friday was the first business day, but for me it was still a holiday and I had family to attend to. The weekend followed Friday. I called first thing Monday morning. After you guys took a month to send me my system, I think that should be acceptable.

Bob said to send you pictures of the monitor, so that you can decide what to do. I'm not sure how this will help, but those pictures are attached. I'm sorry I didn't send these yesterday when I got home from work, but I forgot to. There are three pictures--one of the entire monitor, one as close as I could get to the crack, and a third I took after I realized that the box was damaged.

When I received the box from FedEx, I didn't notice a minor dent on the corner (see picture), or I would have mentioned it. I only noticed it after being asked by Bob if the box was damaged. This dent certainly wouldn't have caused the monitor to be damaged if it had better packing. The packing appears to be original manufacturer packing.

Please send me an RMA so that I can return this monitor and get one that works.

As I said, I didn't hear anything back. So 2 days later, I called Customer Service. The customer service person in India told me that images had to be less than 640K or they would be refused by the server. I resent the email, with reduced images. I pasted in the original email, and prepended it with:

RESEND #2 -----------------------
This is the second time I've sent this request. I first sent it on December 2, but apparently it was ignored because the pictures were too large. After talking to a CSR today (Dec 4), I reduced the image sizes and am resending it.

I didn't get anything back. So I sent it again, assuming that the sum of all image sizes had to be under 640K. So I sent three messages, the first one prepended with:

RESEND #3 ----------------------------
This is the third send. I didn't receive anything back from your system as I was told to expect, so I'm assuming that the TOTAL size of all jpegs is too large. So I'm resending each jpg in a separate message. I'll send two messages after this with the other files.

So I called again, and was told that I should use an image hosting service, and just send the link. So I did:

Reference Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

This is my fourth resend. I've been trying to get an RMA from you since December second!!! Please let me know that you are taking me serious as a customer. I'm starting to get nervous that you don't plan to make this right, and that makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Today I spoke to Annie, who told me to use an online hosting service for sending you pictures of this damaged monitor. The pictures that are referenced below can be seen at [URL DELETED].

Big surprise -- I didn't hear anything back. On December 12 (10 days after my first attempt to get an RMA), I called again. I was told that I needed to log into Alienware's site and submit the images that way. Never mind that the other CSRs should have known that. I did as I was asked:

I'm pasting in an email that I've sent to you guys 4 times (after initially calling support). The gist is that I need an RMA for a monitor that was damaged. It's 12/10 -- I've been trying to get an RMA from you people since 12/2.

Today (12/12) I called and talked to Lorraine. She was helpful and apologetic, which I appreciate, but I still don't have my RMA. The thread is pasted below.

I finally got an email back from their system. But that's after their online submission form locked up twice, without telling me why. Turns out -- my images were still too big.

This story is not over. I still don't have my RMA. I'm not going to tell you what to do. The Alienware box is a really nice computer. But the customer service isn't worth it.

Finally - Decent Broadband!!

I work in Albuquerque, but live in the mountains east of Albuquerque, in a place named creatively, in ignorant New Mexico fashion, the East Mountains. I've been out here for about six years. Until very recently, there was no broadband out here, and really no usable internet of any sort.

I tried dial-up (I got from 7-14Kbps). Then satellite. What a joke. Bandwidth throttling (FAP anyone?), high latency and poor reliability. Then I got a cell-phone connection. I spent a small fortune on equipment, including a YAGI directional antenna that I mounted about 70' in the air. What a joke. Bandwidth throttling, high latency and poor reliability.

Finally, I was notified by QWest that they were bringing DSL out here. 1 Mbps. Not bad -- it seems to deliver on its promise. Fairly reliable - only requires a modem reset once a week or so. So I'm pretty happy.

Here's the thing: I've lived about 1/2 mile from a fiber optic line that was laid just before I moved out here. Why the delay?

I think it's the fact that it will be possible to deliver wireless, non line-of-sight internet in February due to the fact that the U.S. Government sold off all the traditional television bands, and that QWest is trying to penetrate a market they know will disappear in a year. Thousands of people have been begging for broadband out here for years, and QWest doesn't care about penetrating the market until they realize someone else is about to.

I wonder what it's going to take to get electricity that doesn't go out every time the wind blows?

Guitar Hero II

This Thanksgiving, my wife and I went to our daughter's house for Thanksgiving. It was fun not having to cook much more than pies. After eating, a friend of my daughter brought over a game called Guitar Hero II. If you've never played this game, it's a blast!

Not that I won, of course. I lost almost every game. But I had a blast playing it. Almost everyone in the house enjoyed it as well, whether they were playing, waiting to play, or making fun of the people who were playing. I play guitar myself, along with a couple of other instruments, and was hoping it would give me an advantage. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

It motivated me to start playing again, so the next day I bought some new guitar strings. My axe has been sitting in my garage for five years without being played, so I figured I should get it in working order first.

But I found that my axe had disappeared sometime in the past couple of years. So I went back to the guitar store and returned the strings. While I was there, I bought a brand-new, wood-grain, hollow electric guitar and a distortion pedal. I'm also going to get an amp soon, so I don't have to play on this crappy practice amp any longer.

After playing a couple of hours a day over the weekend, I found I'm actually better at playing than I ever have been. I'm not saying that I'm a guitar hero. Just that I'm improving already.

I'm going to try to practice for one hour a day and see how things go. Maybe I'll start up a band called Mild Violence.

Save April! Find Her....Save Her....

You'd think with all these blogs I'd have a lot to say. Lately, I guess I haven't.

I'm listening to Blondie sing "One Way or Another" on the free satellite radio I get with my crap TiVo service, thinking about how much time and money I wasted on the Dreamfall game I bought last Friday, and how good Debbie Harry still is. Isn't it weird that you can't rewind songs on the TiVo?

Anyway, speaking of Tivo, here's my Dreamfall review:

The game seemed pretty cool at first. After all, any game that starts out with a good-looking college chick in her underwear can't be all bad. You seem pretty young to be searching for that kind of fun. Does your mother know that you're out?

It took me awhile to get the UI to work properly. Its default set-up is extremely difficult to use. It took me awhile longer to get used to working with the still-odd user-interface. What's wrong with the tried-and-true Quake/Doom/Unreal UI, anyway? Do these developers have a new thing that they want to foist on us? Are they really smarter than the boys at Id were?

But I did get used to the UI, and I did enjoy the first half of the game immensely. Just when I started thinking "this is getting tedious," there were a couple of really cool plot changes. Then the game took over....

It turned into a game where you got to solve a puzzle, then watch a bunch of long cut-scenes. Then another puzzle. Then a lot of long cut-scenes. I was watching a cut-scene when it hit me: "I don't know why I'm playing this game. I don't have any control over the plot."

And that's it. When you talk to someone, you can choose how you start the conversation. But it always ends the same way. This is like an interactive soap opera. It ain't bad, but you don't get to control anything. It's like watching TiVo. You get to pause it when you want. You can rewind, and fast-forward through the commercials. But you can't change what happens on the screen. This game does have one thing TiVo doesn't--at least in the package I bought. It came with all the music on a separate CD so you can listen to it over and over if you want to. Too bad that I don't listen to that kind of music often.

Spoiler Start...
You get to control three characters. One of them is April's enemy, who was contracted to kill her. But early on in the course of playing him, you get the feeling that he's going to come around to the good side, and that you're going to assist him in his voyage of discovery. Alas, that is not to be the case. Instead, you have to either use him to kill the good guys, or not be able to progress in the plot.

Then in the last few chapters, it starts to get mysterious. Things happen that you expect to find out about before the end. But when you reach the end, your questions aren't answered. Faith spends the whole game telling you in a spooky voice, "Find April. Save April." But at the very end, when you expect to somehow save April, you find out that April really did die. When you expect to save Faith, you find out that you don't have a choice: Faith has to die. I like to feel good when I've finished a game. It's bad enough to know the game is over. It's worse knowing all the bad guys are still alive and the good guys are dead.
...End of spoiler.

When you win this game, you lose it. And you don't have a choice. There are many places in the game that choice and chance are mentioned. But by the end, you find out that in the world created within this game, there is only fate for its player. No chance, and no choice. They could have improved this game by allowing you to win it. They could have improved the game by allowing you to control the plot by what you do. Instead, they took a reasonable short-story with a bad ending, and put some puzzles between the chapters to give you something to do.

In games, both the journey and the destination are important to me. I think I play them just to get immersed into a fantasy world for awhile. I did find this game very immersive for awhile, but its ending left me feeling empty. I realize the end was supposed to make me buy the sequel. But after it left me feeling so flat, I think I'll pass. Sorry if I spoiled the game for you. But if it's any consolation, it's spoiled for me, too.

And now on TiVo radio: Well his sister grew up and she married a man. She gave him a son, oh yes, a lovely son. They dressed him up warmly and they sent him to school. They taught him how to fight to be nobody's fool. Oh what a lonely boy...

Come to think of it, maybe no rewind is a blessing in disguise.


Here's another review that I liked and agreed with.