Paleck.com

In honor of my friend Peridyd’s latest post on getting into Legend of the Green Dragon, I have taken it upon myself to install my own copy of LOTGD on this server. It’s always been on the list of things to do, fortunately Peridyd just provided me with the excuse I needed.

Back before the internet was the internet a lot of geeks, including myself, would spend hours dialed(yes through a modem, a 14.4kbps modem actually) into text based bulletin board systems. On these BBSes there would be a few games that were very popular, one of the most popular games was The Legend of the Red Dragon or LORD. To sum it all up Legend of the Green Dragon is actually based off of Legend of the Red Dragon, unfortunately the original author & copyright owner has not converted this game to the web or released the copyrighted source code. Thankfully smarter and more creative people than me went to the trouble of recreating the game for all of us to enjoy when we are bored.

So without further ado I present Paleck’s LOTGD

You heard me right the first time. I don’t mean any disrespect to the supermarket cashiers and/or baggers, but you must understand a lot of time and effort goes into selecting my bread. OK so maybe not a lot of time. Although it does take time to find the bread I’m looking for, sometimes there are only a few left and sometimes there are a lot of loaves. After finding my bread, then I have to look for one that doesn’t look like it has been mangled, stepped on or half missing. The last piece of work that goes into finding my loaf of bread is the freshness/expiration date. It’s not that I need to have one that will won’t expire for two weeks, but past experience and my close personal relation ship with Murphy’s Law has taught me that it is better safe than sorry. So maybe all of it happens in a few minutes, but there is a lot of effort and thought that goes into this.

All of that brings me back to the original point of this entry. I know all of you cashiers/baggers handle many many loaves of bread in an daily basis. But please try to understand all of the work we go through. When you pick up that loaf by squeezing it’s sides in look at us cringing….trying not to show it. Or when you put the bread in the bag and then promptly drop 2 or 3 soup cans on top of it, please notice the anguish on our faces. Above all there is absolutely no reason to continually grope and reposition that loaf of bread, it’s just wrong!

It finally happened……….OK OK so it happened at the end of July. So sue me I’ve been busy. I officially moved into my Condo on July 29th, a day that will live in infamy oops wrong decade, but seriously I know what you really want PICTURES!!! I took these the day before I actually moved in, so no furniture, just miscellaneous junk that had managed to make its way there so far.

The most important of these pictures of course is the gorgeous view.

I promise I will take more pictures once I have gotten things put away and given the condo a thorough cleaning.

Just an update to my housing situation. I’ve finally had an offer accepted and am now going through all the hoops to get a mortgage and all the other fun stuff that needs to be done. So for now I won’t say that I am have a place!!! At least not til I have a key in my hand and my furniture moved in. It’s not that I’m entirely superstitious, but with something this big I won’t risk jinxing what is going on. I promise once I am all moved in there will be pictures of everything including the gorgeous view.

Until then I am keeping my fingers, toes and anything else crossed….just to be on the safe side.

For this story I have waited a year from it’s start, so as to give my former cell phone company a chance to respond to me. If anyone who reads this blog uses Cingular I recommend that you run the other way and find another cell phone company as fast as you can. Do you think I am overreacting? I don’t, read on for why.

Originally I was with AT&T Wireless for three years. During that time I never had any real problems other than a few minor billing issues. The service was great and the customer service was pretty good. Then in 2004 Cingular and AT&T Wireless announced their doomed merger and impending downfall. At first I had no problems with merger, since it allowed me to save up minutes using Cingular’s rollover minutes. As I look back on it the service went down hill as well. I started having more problems being able to make a call and more dropped calls. Since Cingular and AT&T Wireless used different types of phones and networks I assumed maybe it was their way of phasing out the AT&T Wireless network.

Fast forward to December 2004, I decided it was time to upgrade my phone and switch over to the Cingular network completely. The phone I chose was the Motorola MPX220, a windows based smart phone and the biggest POS on the face of the planet. Of course I didn’t know that at the time, but back to my story. For about 4 months everything worked great, until about mid april on a business trip my phone started rebooting itself into a ROM programming mode. It would reboot just fine and the phone would work until it decided to reboot into ROM mode again. Imagine waiting for an important call only to find out you missed it because your phone decided it wanted to be in a programming mode rather than in a calling mode.

Once I returned back from my trip then the real fun began. It took an hour and a half on hold and only 10 minutes actually talking to a live person to be told that my phone was malfunctioning, but the fun didn’t stop there. The customer service representatives have no actual power to actually get a replacement(even within a warranty) from there the only department that can handle replacements is the RMA department. After 4 failed transfers I finally got the direct number, not that it helps much. It took about 4 hours in total to actually talk to a live person, once I did I was informed that my phone was on backorder and it wouldn’t be available for at least a week or so. When I finally received the replacement phone I sent my old one back immediately thinking nothing of it. The next morning I received…or at least attempted to receive a phone call. It was then that I discovered that my new phone didn’t work. I could hear people just fine, but no one could hear me.

Luckily I had a second phone for work that I could use in order to get ahold of Cingular once again. First I had to get ahold of customer service again and then the RMA department. Except this time my phone was backordered for a minimum of two weeks(is this starting to sound like a broken record yet?). Towards the end of the second week I called the RMA department again and was told that my phone was still backordered and that nothing could be done about it. I wasn’t about to stand for that at all, so I asked to speak with a supervisor who after arguing with him for a few minutes he finally offered to send me a different phone temporarily until my phone came into stock. I received that phone a week later and at least had service.

Once I actually had a working phone I called customer service again and asked for a credit for the time that I was unable to use my service. Now keep in mind my airtime only charges averaged about $79 dollars a month. Customer service decided that I was only entitled to an $18 credit with nearly 3 weeks without service. A few days later my replacement for my original phone showed up, but this time I decided to test it first. It’s probably a good thing that I did, since this new phone refused to power-up. At this point it was mutually agreed upon between myself and Cingular that we should give up on my phone and have it replaced by a comparable phone both in price and features.

Unfortunately I don’t remember what phone the attempted to replace mine with. I only remember that it cost less than half as much as I had originally spent months ago and it was missing major features that I had originally chosen that phone for. They did this not once, twice or even three times, but five times. During this time I talked to multiple agents who agreed that I should be getting a different phone, but every time I received the “replacement,” I still got the same phone. Around mid-July I called Cingular and informed them that I would be moving my service elsewhere, however, when I told them this they offered me a month’s free service. This flabbergasts me because when I didn’t have phone service for 3 weeks I only got $18, but when I threaten to cancel they offer me a full month’s bill. On July 22, 2005 I moved my service to Verizon Wireless and haven’t had any problems since.

Epilogue: Shortly after transferring my number to Verizon, I also sent a letter to Cingular’s corporate office describing all of my problems. In it I asked that they waive they cancellation fee since I couldn’t get a working cell phone, or a cell phone that was at least comparable to the one I had and because I had been dealing with this issue for over two and a half months. I never received any response Verizon when they decided to send me to collections in September. I payed the bill before it went to the collections agency and affected my credit. Next I wrote Cingular another letter and once again have never heard from them.

What is with all the letter writing you may ask? Well in order for any kind of a complaint or dispute to be worked on you must write to Cingular’s corporate office. Nothing can be done or tracked by the customer service reps, so there is no way to know if anyone even received it. Unless of course you send the letter registered mail so that you receive confirmation. I neglected that step so it’s my own fault on that part, so learn from my mistake if you ever need to deal with this yourself.