rhymes with cheepy's

B and I have been talking about buying a new bed for years, due to the interesting and ever-more-prominent topography of our not-so-old mattress. On New Year's Day, we went to the establishment mentioned in the title of this post, and the amount of cliches-made-reality was both astounding and sort of hilarious. (Well, it WOULD have been hilarious if B hadn't had to spend, like 20 hours on the phone getting back the ripoffs into our bank account.)

First off - the salesman. Not only was he wearing a wrinkled, stained white shirt and no tie, with a snowstorm of dandruff covering the shoulders of his cheap jacket, he proceeded with an amazing set of lies:

1.He used to work for the competitor (rhymes with Nob's) due to a family connection, and their comparable products (we purchased a memory-foam mattress with a 20-year guarantee) are complete shit and will barely last a year. Hm, wonder what he told customers at Nob's, when he worked there, about Cheepy's products? I surmised that he used to be married into the Nob family, and after the divorce, they fired his sorry ass.

2.After some dickering about the price, he agreed to match the Nob's price, but then, oh wait, the computer wouldn't "let" him enter that price, so he "had to" charge us $30 more, so he "threw in" a mattress pad, retail value $100, so we actually "saved" $100. When Brian pointed out that the "savings" was actually net $70, he seemed really confused. But wait, it gets even better: the next day we saw the Cheepy's ad for this mattress that promised a) FREE mattress pad; and b) beating any competitor's price by 20%.

3. He told us that Cheepy's charged $15 for taking away the old stuff. This turned out to be $15 PER PIECE and since we had a king bed with the split box springs, that was actually $45.

It took some time on the phone, as aforementioned, but the regional and corporate guys ultimately threw this guy under the bus ("oh, he's not one of our regular salesmen") and made good on the $30 and the mattress pad and the 20%. And then Brian finished off the poor SOB by calling back the online help dude at Cheepy's (who ALSO works on commission) and giving him the purchase info so that he could claim his 50%.

Moral of the story: don't take any shit from Cheepy's. You might as well walk out during the sale writeup if they are doing it wrong. It'll save considerable time post-sale, and you'll ultimately (I think) get all you're entitled to. (Or you can just go to Nob's.)

The bed is deeply, deeply comfortable. No more lower back pain (well, except after the shoveling. But that is a whine for a different day).

Curmudgeon Girl: memo to the Scott Brown campaign

Not that I would have voted for your candidate anyways (although I am not a huge fan of Martha Coakley due primarily what I perceive as the political expediency, bend-with-the-wind, nature of her positions this fall) but for the LOVE OF GOD, Scott, did you really believe your handlers were giving you sound advice when they pitched the call-unenrolled-voters-seventeen-times-a-day-with-recorded-messages idea? Wtf???

This strategy makes you sound either desperate or wack. And since we have WAY too many wackjobs in Congress already, I'm going with the Coakley option. Did you really think voters would vote for you if you harassed them with incessant calls? Really? REALLY?

Curmudgeon Girl says: happiness is no late grading

What is making me happy right now is that for next semester, I'm gonna put a drop-dead deadline in my syllabi that 1-2 weeks after the assignment is due, I won't accept late assignments anymore. Period.

There is a little wave right now of LATE LATE work propelled by whiney, pleading students who feel that their life stories are so very exceptional that they should be exempt from the rule that EVERYTHING (no exceptions) was due last Friday. Oh, my car. Oh, my disk (back) problem. Oh, oh, oh.

And I would bend, in the holiday spirit - but how fair is that to students who actually took the deadline seriously and are adult enough to conclude that they fucked up, move on?

You can just imagine the QUALITY of this late work, right? Yeah, overall, it sucks bigtime. Take the 50% reduction for late work that thankfully my syllabi already incorporate, and you wonder why these students even bothered. But then again, math is seriously not their strong point, so it's no surprise that they are overoptimistic about what this work will do for their final grade. Why let algebra intrude on their "feeling" about what grade they've earned?

Bottom line: classes ended yesterday. If they haven't talked to me about their "issues" by now, they are out of luck.

curmudgeon girl and her fantastical electronics

I have, at various times, imagined some useful electronic devices:

1.The one that, when pointed at some jerk's boombox on the subway, really does cause the boombox to boom, exploding all over the jerk and then settling into plastic fragments of silence after a gentle rain of applause from the other passengers.

2.The one that, when pointed at some idiot driver on his/her cell phone, would terminate the call. (The deluxe model would render the cell phone permanently unusable.)

3.The one that, when pointed at some slacker student's cell phone while they were secretly texting in class, would cause the phone to terminate the texting and then play a silly song like the Chicken Dance. There would be no way for them to silence it, and I would make them stand up in front of the entire class and do the dance.

See? Electronics COULD be our friends! Bwah-hah-hah!!!!

Curmudgeon Girl asks...

...since when did it become ok for service industry people (pumping your gas - and yes, the RP is too delicate a flower to do it herself - serving your takeout coffee, ringing up your groceries) to text or chat on their cell phones WHILE THEY ARE HELPING YOU? And then you are a bee-atch if you return to the counter because the coffee is all wrong?? Or if you sigh loudly when the cell phone gas station dude takes 2x as long to pump the gas because he only has one free hand?

What, I ask you, is this world coming to??