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How to Complain – The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

: Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever been screwed by a company? Have they sent you the wrong item, or an empty box, or left your order backordered for so long that you can’t even dispute it with your credit card company any more?

What can you do?

I know you’ve heard the phrase, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” That means, he whines loudest, gets the most. The thing is, you have to whine effectively, or you’ll just get round-filed.

Targeting Subsystems On

Who you complain to matters more than what you complain about. The clerk at your local big-box retailer isn’t going to refund your online purchase. You need to complain to someone who can make a decision to help you. First, find the customer service email address. Next, if you are complaining about a recurring service, find the retention department’s email address. Finally, find the email address for absolutely everybody Vice-President or above for that company, including the board of directors. Go to their website, find the email for some PR drone and figure out the format. First.Last@Company.com or FirstInitial.LastName@Company.com or whatever. Look up the company in Google Finance and translate everyone’s name into the email format. You might not have the perfect list, but it should be close.

Target Locked On

Now that you know who you are about to blast, what are you going to say? A few things to include are:

Your contact information. If they can’t get back to you, they can’t make it up to you.
Details of the problem. Include the date of purchase, date of delivery, and a detailed description of what actually went wrong.
Scanned copies of receipts.
Any names of anybody you’ve had to deal with, either in the original transaction or when the problem occurred, if you have the names.

Engage!

What to say, what to say?

Don’t be abusive. It’s okay to be angry, and it’s okay to let them know your are angry, but swearing or threatening their lives will–at best–only get you ignored. Worst case, threats are illegal and they can pass your email along to the police.
Stay brief. It doesn’t matter that your daddy took you to Starbucks to use their free wi-fi when you were just three years old. Don’t talk about that time the aliens abducted you or how sad you are that they never call like they promised they would. Keep to the point. “This is who I am. This is what happened. This is what I want you to do about it.”

Send that sucker out. If you feeling particularly perturbed, send a CC to your state’s Attorney General and any possibly related regulatory agencies. I tend to save this step for round 2.

You’re Gonna Die, Part 1

Life

Death of a surrealist soldier — Image by funadium via Flickr

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do today? How would you spend your last hours? Would you go skydiving before the chance evaporated forever, or would you spend the day talking with your loved ones?

If you knew you would die in a month, what would you do? Would you plan a trip to the one place in the world you’ve always wanted to see? Would you look up all the friends you’ve been too busy to see?

What would you regret? Is there something you have always wished you’d done, but have put off for some reason or another? Do you want to write a novel, or backpack Europe, or watch a shuttle launch? Far more people regret opportunities missed than those they’ve taken. If there is something that you could do that would let you die happy, take steps today to make that a reality. Remember that you are probably not going to die in a day or a month, but don’t let your entire life slip away without doing the things that matter most to you.

Our lives are short. Far too short to waste time on the things that add no value. Everything you do should advance your happiness, either short-term or long. That doesn’t mean you should waste your life pursuing hedonism. Lives need meaning. Chase that meaning.

Find out what gives your life meaning. What do you do that lets you go to bed with a smile on your face? Those are the activities that you should maximize. What is wasting your time? You can probably shut off the news and never miss it. It’s just too much information that doesn’t add anything to your life. Does obsessing over Charlie Sheen’s latest antics ad any value to your life? Take that time and write a screenplay, take a walk, smell a flower, hug your kids, anything that provides actual value for you. Don’t waste your life on meaningless activities that do nothing more than kill time. Time is the one thing we have that we will not get back.

Many people go to their deathbeds thinking, “I wish I had X.” What is your X? What would you wish you had done?

Selling Your Car

Finance

: English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money. Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value. Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”

When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:

Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well. Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.” It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.

When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.

Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses. Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept. Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time. Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car. That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car. “Officer, Sumdood took my car. He was wearing jeans.” That won’t get your car back.
Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer. A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars. It’s well worth the expense.

Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.

Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?

This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.

Do you find the cloud in every silver lining? Is the glass not only half empty, but evaporating? Do you start every day thinking

Smiley head happy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

about how the effects of entropy on the universe make everything you do ultimately pointless?

You may be a pessimist.

Pessimism gets a bad rap. Without pessimists, we wouldn’t have insurance plans, missile defense systems, or Eeyore, and what would the world be without those things?

The thing you have to ask yourself is “Does the negativity make you happy?”

The next thing you have to ask yourself is whether or not you were lying with your previous answer.

If you have a negative outlook on everything, I have good news for you: it’s possible to defeat it. No matter how long you’ve been looking at the world through coffin-colored glasses, no matter how ingrained your negative slant is, it’s possible to change it.

You have to want to change it, because, as the saying goes, old habits die hard. Yippee kai yay.

You need a happy butt.

Little known fact: language shapes the way you think. If your language has no words for a concept, you will have a difficult time thinking about that concept, or even understanding it. Statistically, Asians are better at math than their western-world counterparts. Why? It’s not genetic. When a family moves to the US, the edge is lost within 2 generations. It’s not the amount of school they get. Even in backwaters with limited school access demonstrate the same abilities.

It’s the language. Euro-based languages are horrible. They are a clumsy mish-mash of crap from around the world, and the numbering system makes no sense. 11, 12, 13, huh? Spoken, that’s not a progression, it’s something we have to learn by rote. Why is 13 pronounce “thirteen”, with the ones place first, but 23 is pronounced with the tens place first, the way it is written? Where did the word “twenty” even come from? It’s obviously a horrible bastardization of “two” and “ten”, but is it self-evident? Does the progression through the decades follow some kind of rule? Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Nope.

The Asian languages (most of them) differ. The numeric progression is spoken in a rules-based progression that makes sense. 23 is literally “two tens three”, making learning math less about rote memorization and more about masters some simple rules.

In the western world, we are handicapped by our language, at least when it comes to math.

The rest of our thoughts are formed by language, too. Learn a language with different roots than the one your were born with and see how your perceptions change.

One of the signs of negative thinking is qualifying everything you say negatively. For example, one person might say “It’s a beautiful day, today” while Mr. Negativebritches would say “It’s a beautiful day, but it’s probably going to rain.” That’s a sad butt, err, but. Every time you qualify a sentence with a sad butt, you are reinforcing your negative view of the world.

The solution? Drop your drawers and paint on a smiley face. You need a happy but(t). You can rephrase the sentence into a happy thought without changing the sentiment or meaning in any way. Try this: “It’s probably going to rain, but it’s a beautiful day, now.” That’s a happy butt, and it reinforces the positive in your mind.

It sounds stupid, but it works. Your language shapes your life. Put a positive spin on what you say, and you will eventually start to think about life in a positive way.

Give it a shot. For the next week, every time you say something negative, qualify it with a happy butt. At the end of the week, come back here and tell me how it’s working and if you can sense a change in your mindset.