The Random Thoughts Review

There are several things that science current sees as a “best guess” that don’t make much sense to me, from a cause & effect standpoint..

The Inflationary Period. Shortly after the big bang, the universe expanded rapidly and then, for no apparent reason that anyone has given me, stopped expanding so rapidly. Why did this occur? Well, that’s the wrong question. The right question is, “What magical event do we need to have to make the big bang numbers work out?” They don’t work without this inflationary period.
(more…)

Today I had a message in my email InBox telling me that I had a new bill waiting for me from AT&T.

This particular bill was for my home telephone and DSL service. When I first got DSL, it was $15 a month. My home phone and DSL bill was around $30, and I was happy with that. Over the past couple of years, my bill has slowly crept up in price. The DSL price was an introductory price… A year or so after that went away, they decided to raise the price of DSL again.. So, my bill has been getting more and more expensive.

Today’s bill was for $44.xx. I thought that seemed annoying, so I went to their website to check it out. I noticed that last month’s bill was for $42.xx, and I decided to investigate.

It turns out that the difference was the long distance bill. I use my cell phone to make my calls. I don’t see any reason to do anything else. EXCEPT, in one very special case: When I need to send a fax. I was checking out a prospective tenant last month, and the previous landlord’s needed a fax of the authorization sheet. So, I had to send it to them. I ended up sending 3 different faxes for this. Each one was 1 minute long, and I was billed 12 cents for each minute. 36 cents, right?

WRONG!!!

My long distance bill was $2.34. The extra $1.98 was for fees and taxes. Let’s get one thing straight. I’m all for giving people what they need to survive. I understand infrastructure costs and all that jazz. But, when I spend 3 minutes on the phone at an advertised cost of 12 cents a minute, it annoys me to see a bill of $2.34.

When we look at the bill in more detail, we can quickly see that the majority of the cost is for AT&T’s Carrier Cost Recovery Fee, which is $1.49. Seriously, AT&T? Did my 3 one minute phone calls really cause you to need to recover $1.49 in carrier costs?

Anyway, if you’ve ever had issues with this sort of corporate capitalism, feel free to post below. I feel slightly better now, but I’m still $2.34 poorer for 3 tiny phone calls.

This morning I woke up at 5:38 after a rousing Genghis Khan type dream.

What’s it mean? You tell me.

The dream wasn’t a long one. It started out before a battle. I was looking down into a small-ish valley, and the enemy was (apparently) on the other side of the valley on the hills there, even though I couldn’t see the enemy. My comrades and I made our way into the bottom of the valley and were looking up the other side. The other side was filled with trees (or something tree-like, I guess). So it was us, the trees, and then the apparent enemy. At that point, the enemy started up with their artillery. A couple of things to note at this point. This was apparently a battle in the 1200s or so. No guns or anything. And the “trees” were really, really thick.

In fact, it’s really a stretch for me to even call them trees. It was more like a wall. Amazingly enough, this wall looked incredibly like the back of my couch. When the bad stuff started coming in, I dove below the edge of the wall/couch so that the incoming projectiles were being blocked by the couch-type thingy. The projectiles were like pikes. They were round, straight sticks about an inch and half in diameter with a pointed end. Probably 6-8 feet long. They came flying in in large numbers. I was briefly reminded of the scene in Braveheart when the arrows come in and go through the guy’s shield and kill him. These pikes came flying in, killing people behind me that weren’t behind the wall (probably 3 feet high). So I was laying there. These pikes were coming in. When they would impact the “wall” they would go through it far enough to poke out the fabric on the backside (next to where I was laying) but didn’t actually come through and cut me.

Not a pleasant situation, and my future clearly wasn’t that bright.

This continued for a little while. We were very pinned down. At this point, I saw some hands reaching out over the wall above me. They were hold red flexible sacks (probably about a foot high) that were “pooched” out a little bit in the bottom, as though full of liquid. The sack said “OIL” on it in big white letters. My guess is that it was hot. The hands turned the sack over…

…

and that’s when I woke up at 5:38 this morning.

It’s incredibly rare for me to have a dream. So rare that I decided to blog about this one. Let’s see. Background information from yesterday… Nothing exciting happened. Didn’t watch any war movies, don’t remember reading about anything like this. I have no idea where the thoughts came from.

Interesting thing, dreams.. Joseph, where are you?

After what many would say was “too long”, the Qdoba matter is finally resolved. Read the whole story at

Problems With The Local Qdoba

My dear, precious, Scratchy cat turned 13 yesterday.

Pictures of him are here.

And, his home page, (albeit not updated for a while) is also available.

Yesterday morning I removed most of his food. He still had enough to live on, but my little Scratch really likes having a food bowl that is at least half full. If it falls to the point where he can see the bottom (at all!) he gets really paranoid and starts thinking he’s going to fall over dead right there.

So, in anticipation of last night’s events, I removed most of his food yesterday morning. You see, Scratchy’s yearly treat is a can of tuna. He gets it on his birthday each year, and he really, really enjoys it.

Last night, after an appropriate amount of waiting, Scratch finally got his food. Wasn’t tuna, though. I had a can of fancy feast that I had gotten somewhere, and thought that I’d give him that instead. So, he had a can of Chicken with Cheese fancy feast. (exact name will be put in once I go home and get it). He really liked it. He sat there and ate and ate and ate.

All things considered, a great birthday for the little guy.

Pictures that Mariya took of the food festivities are forthcoming.

I sometimes need to look at a cookies.txt file and figure out what the entries mean.

Basically, you have a line in the file that looks like:

www.someURL.com FALSE / FALSE 0 VNAME v,value,and,more

• www.someURL.com - The domain that the cookie applies to
• FALSE - can other webservers within www.someURL.com access this cookie? If there was a webserver at blah.www.someURL.com, could it see this cookie?
• / - more restrictions on what paths on www.someURL.com can see this cookie. Anything here and under can see the cookie. / is the least restrictive, meaning that any (and all) requests from www.someURL.com get the cookie header sent.
• FALSE - Do we have to be coming in on https to send the cookie?
• 0 - expiration time. zero probably means that it never expires, or that it is good for as long as this session lasts. A number like 928934729 would correspond to a number of seconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970).
• VNAME - The name of the cookie variable that will be send to the server.
• v,value,and,more - cookie value that will be sent. Might be comma separated list of terms, or could just be a word.. Hard to say. Depends on the server.

I just sent this email to Qdoba corporate. We’ll see how things end up.

Hello,

I am writing to complain about a Qdoba restaurant visit earlier today.

On January 25, we purchased 4 $25 Qdoba gift certificates from this website:

http://wcia.frugal-fridays.com/index.php?index_type=promo-detail&pid=31017

You can see in the right column that it says that the denomination is $25. I’m not sure when the red text at the top was added that says you get five $10 certificates. In January, it said 2 $25 gift certificates per “deal”. We purchased two deals, therefore we got 4 $25 gift certificates.

A week or so back (on March 8th) we went to Qdoba for the first time to eat. You can see on that webpage that each certificate can be used for multiple visits. The way this normally works with these certificates is that the person at the store makes a note on the back of how much foot was purchased, and how much is remaining on the certificate.

We were told in the store that we couldn’t use the certificate for multiple visits. We explained that it said very clearly on the website that the certificates could be used for multiple visits. The manager went in the back, and called a higher up manager and came back out front and said that they were wrong, we could use it, there was some confusion, but everything was OK, and the manager made a note on the back of the certificate about the price of the food, and everything was OK.

We were a bit annoyed that we were being told that we were wrong when we knew we were right, but we were satisfied at the outcome.

Today we had a decidedly different experience when we visited about 1pm. We didn’t expect any difficulty regarding the gift certificate, but the manager on duty today absolutely refused to believe us and would not let us use a portion of the gift certificate. She told us we were wrong and that the certificates could only be used twice, which makes no sense and isn’t mentioned anywhere.

I had thought that the customer was always right, but at this store we were definitely told we were wrong, even though the above URL clearly shows that we were, in fact, right.

Since we had no desire to waste close to $20 in remaining gift certificate on a single burrito, we left the store and decided to approach this more rationally by getting the web page proof, since our word was clearly not good enough.

So, we are now stuck with about $94 in gift certificates and a store that has apparently decided to change its policy from what was stated on the webpage where we bought our gift certificates.

Please advise on how I can best get this resolved. I don’t feel like I can make any progress with the managers at the store, and I’d hate to have to get a lawyer involved over this.

When we left today, the manager was saying that she’d get in trouble if she let us use a portion of the gift certificate. Oh well… their loss. They had already made our burrito and we were checking out when we decided to just leave and eat somewhere else.

On an unrelated note, I’d recommend the Pad Thai at Basil Thai on Green Street.

---

March 24th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

This morning, March 24, I got a voice mail from Qdoba corporate.

It was Guest relations, and they wanted me to call them back. At 2:17 this afternoon, I called them back. I gave them my report number and they escalated the call to a different person, Emily, who I talked with for several minutes.

Her computer was running slow, and I told her the story. We agreed that this probably wasn’t a ‘corporate’ thing, but she decided to call the franchise operator and verify with them the situation, and she said that she’d be getting back with me later this afternoon or tomorrow about this situation. We’ll see what ends up happening.

---

March 25th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

Next day, 4:35pm. Got a call back from Emily. She has been in contact with the franchise operator here in Champaign, and the franchise operator doesn’t have any awareness of this promotion at all. So, she is still working with them to figure out what is going on. She said that the franchise operator was OK with accepting the coupons once the franchise operator figures out what is going on, but they are still trying to figure that part out.

This is, by the way, for the Qdoba on Green Street here in Champaign.

She said that she just wanted to call me and let me know what the current status is, and she’ll get back with me as soon as she finds out more information.

---

March 27th, 2008 at 3:51 pm

Two days later, 4:10pm. Got a call back from Emily. She said that the franchise operators didn’t want the employees to have to keep track of the running totals on the back of the certificates. I didn’t decide to press this issue.

She asked me if I was a member of the Qdoba loyalty club. I said no. She said she could sign me up. She said that they would credit my loyalty card with an amount equivalent to the credit that I had left, which, if it was around $94 would amount to about 17 entrees.

She said that she could send me an “empty” card, and when I give proof of the gift certificates, that they would then “load” the loyalty card. We determined that she could mail me the loyalty card via snail mail, and I could mail her the certificates via snail mail, and all would be good.

I asked for more details on the loyalty card. She said that it was a card for frequent visitors and after they purchase/etc a certain amount, their card is credited with something, like an entree. So, she was proposing to credit my loyalty card with 17 entrees. I asked her if I could just get one of the credit-card style gift certificates instead. I might, as I told her, want to just run in there sometime and get a beverage or something. The loyalty card would be useless for that.

She said that she didn’t think a gift card could be loaded with that much money, and I asked her about multiple cards. She said she’d have to check. So, she put me on hold, and came back a little later saying that she’d gotten the voice mail of who she was looking for.

We exchanged email addresses so that we could send each other snail mail addresses.. The contents of my email:

———————-
Emily,

My US mail address is:

Kirby Vandivort
etc.

I don’t have the exact amount that I used from the one cert handy, but
I’ll let you know as soon as I get that information.

As we discussed on the phone, the “credit card style” gift
certificates would be a fine substitution for the paper certificates
that we had before. Thanks for your time and efforts in helping me
get this resolved. It was disturbing for us to be told we were wrong
by the workers there, and, frankly, I’m still not happy about that,
but I’ve been quite pleased with how you have represented “corporate”.
———————-

So, the saga continues. Isn’t life fun!?

---

March 28th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

Next day, early afternoon. Got a voice mail from Emily. I called her back at the Qdoba customer satisfaction number. Got “Exavier” and told him I wanted to talk to Emily about a specific case number. He said rapidly, ‘Oh ok. Let me put you in the Senior Queue’. A few seconds later, Mariam answered. She said she worked with Emily and could help me out. Put me on hold for a minute or so and came back on the line and said that Emily had a note in the file that she wanted to talk to me directly.

So, when Emily finished helping another customer, she got on the phone with me. Said that her colleagues said that they could preload a gift certificate with the amount, but that they need the gift certs before they will send out the preloaded card. So, she said she’d email me with the address to mail things to. We ended up finishing our phone call and a few minutes later I got the following email:

———-
Dear Kirby,

Thank you for contacting us regarding your recent visit to Qdoba Mexican
Grill. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience you experienced, and can
assure you we are following up with appropriate management.

The mailing address for Qdoba Mexican Grill is:

I will call you once I receive the certificates just to let you know they
have arrived, and we will have the gift card sent out, also via certified
mail, that same day. I appreciate your continued patience and your
flexibility in resolving this matter. If you have any further questions or
concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,

Emily
Senior Guest Specialist
Qdoba Mexican Grill
———-

So.. here’s the rub… Last week, when this whole thing started, I thought it a good idea to have a scanned copy of the partially used gift certificate. This cert seems to have been left in the scanner and taken by someone else.

So, it looks like I’m only going to have $75 in gift certs to mail them, and it completely destroys the testimony that I’ve given so far, etc etc.

But, my plan is to tell her in the mail exactly what happened and explain that the cert wouldn’t even have been scanned in the first place if this whole thing hadn’t happened. In addition, I can include (hopefully) the receipt from the original purchase, if that is still lying around. Stay tuned. We aren’t in the clear yet…

---

April 1st, 2008 at 9:23 pm

After a delay, we found the other certificate! So, I have all of the gift certs. I’ve written a letter and I’ll be mailing the certs to Emily tomorrow morning. PDFs and pictures will be posted regarding this as soon as I get a chance.

---

April 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm

This is the letter that I sent to Emily. The letter went out certified mail earlier today.

==============================
April 1, 2008

Qdoba Mexican Grill Guest Relations
Attn: Emily Hoch

Re: Qdoba Gift Certificate issue.

Emily:

As we had discussed on the phone, I am enclosing the four gift certificates from the Frugal Friday promotion that the Qdoba on Green Street in Champaign, IL was affiliated with. Three of the $25 gift certificates haven’t been used at all, and the fourth one (as can be seen from the back of it) has $18.71 remaining after a single purchase on March 8th.

This really has been a big hassle for me. On March 8 when the manager on duty had to call another manager for confirmation it was unsettling, but on the March 20 visit, it was downright offensive for my date and myself to be told that we were wrong and that we didn’t know what we were talking about. I can fully understand that a business might decide to change terms to simplify bookkeeping for future promotions, but I find it incomprehensible that they think that they can retroactively change the terms of promotions. I am hopeful that procedures are being put into place to prevent things of this nature from happening to other unsuspecting guests of your restaurant.

While you have been extremely helpful and courteous, it has been really disheartening to have spent so much time jumping through hoops just so I can use the gift certificates that I purchased with the full expectation that I wouldn’t have to spend additional hours just to be able to redeem them under the terms that they were offered. In fact, I thought that I was getting a pretty good deal with the Frugal Friday promotion, but when I add in the value of my time, the postage, and the mental anguish, I think I might have been better off just paying the normal rate for each restaurant visit.

Based on the business relationship that we’ve built, I fully trust and expect that you will send me back a gift card with an appropriate balance. In the event that this letter somehow gets lost on the mail I have made copies of the gift certificates and scanned them into the computer to be added to my blog page at:

http://blog.omnux.com/index.php/2008/03/20/problems-with-the-local-qdoba/

Thank you for your time and effort in helping get this issue resolved.

Kirby Vandivort
==============================

---

April 2nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm

Pictures of the gift certificates, ready to be mailed.

---

April 3rd, 2008 at 9:39 am

Track the package as it heads to San Diego!

USPS Tracking

---

April 4th, 2008 at 7:07 am

Is it odd that I scanned in and uploaded the tracking receipt so that everyone out there in internet land could look at it?

USPS Certified Mail Receipt

---

April 4th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Package delivered, this morning at 10:28 am.

---

April 8th, 2008 at 3:51 pm

No update as of this afternoon. Emily said that she’d contact me the day that she got the letter and the gift cards would be mailed out that same day. Nothing yet. I’ll send an email tomorrow morning.

In other news, the blog is starting to get websearch hits.

A few of the things that people are searching for on Google to find this blog:

Qdoba how much does a manager makes
qdoba problems
qdoba corporate profits

Hopefully this will get resolved soon.

---

April 9th, 2008 at 9:38 am

Just sent the following email:

——————
Emily,

I hope that things are going well for you. From the US post office website, the certified letter that I sent you with the gift certificates arrived last Friday am, and I hadn’t heard anything from you, so I thought that I would check up on things and see what’s going on.

Thanks for your help,

Kirby
—————

---

April 10th, 2008 at 10:50 am

Update from Emily. She called a couple of minutes ago.

Said she had gotten my email and that they had received the certificates. She said that she was waiting for confirmation from the qcard rep to make sure that the card had been loaded with the proper balance.

She said that it might be as late as next Tuesday before they get the confirmation and she’ll let me know when she’s sending it out, as well as give me the certified mail tracking number when that happens.

Other than this minor delay in getting back with me since last Friday, I’ve been quite pleased with how Emily has handled this situation, and, to be honest, because of how she’d done up until that point, I really wasn’t worried about how things would proceed.

Looks like this will hopefully be taken care of within the next week or so.

---

April 16th, 2008 at 9:41 am

Yes, friends. It is Wednesday, and I haven’t heard back from Emily. Rather disappointing.

Just to keep everyone informed.. After I mentioned that random websearchers had been finding this blog from doing searches, a couple of you apparently decided to have to some fun (you know who you are). So, to give you props, here are a few more searches that showed up. Not all of these appear to be from blog readers. A mix of that as well as random web searches.

qdoba - (Multiple times. Actually a search via the pictures)
Guys named Kirby who have problems with Qdoba - again, from pics
Qdoba certificates - from pics
problems with local qdoba
how much does a Qdoba manager make

Kirby talks to Emily about his problem with Qdoba

I’ll get ahold of Emily later today.

---

April 16th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Just sent this to Emily

—————-
Emily,

Tuesday has come and gone and I haven’t heard anything (maybe the email got lost!), so I’m just wanting to find out what is going on with the problem that I had with the local Qdoba in Champaign, IL.

I must admit, I’m a bit disheartened. I feel like we’ve had a nice, responsive transaction up until a couple of weeks ago. However, I haven’t had what I feel to be very good response time since then. This is unfortunate, because that change just happened to coincide with me sending my actual paper gift certificates to your location. Hopefully you can understand my concern: While I had the proof in hand, things were going well. Since I have, on good faith, mailed my paper gift certificates to you, things seem to have stalled, or at least haven’t been proceeding in any concrete way that I can discern. Though I’m confident this isn’t the case, my more paranoid side is wanting me to think that I shouldn’t ever have agreed to mail the paper copies in!

The most recent update that I have from you was on the morning of April 10th when you said that you were verifying that the money had been put on the “q card”, and that you would know something, at the latest, by yesterday. It seemed to me at the time that verifying an account balance on the qcard should be as simple as calling the 1-800 number on the back, but I assumed that the process that you were having to go through was more complicated than that, and I’m sure it has been.

If there are other delays, I can handle that, as long as I know what is going on. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

—————-

---

April 17th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Got a voice mail from Emily this morning at 10:12 am. She apologized for not getting back with me. Said that the card had been mailed out late Tuesday or early Wednesday, and that I should have it in a few days. Now, I can say that hopefully this will be over soon.

---

April 20th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

Resolution!!!!!!!

Snail Mail received on Saturday, April 19.

I won’t belabor things. $100 dollar gift certificate, and 3 coupons for a free burrito. The letter that was attached said that I had 4 coupons, but only three were in the envelope. And, there was a typo in the letter, but I guess I can’t complain too much.

Am I happy with the outcome? Well, I am. It cost me a lot of time, and, to be honest, the time spent probably wasn’t properly compensated. But, I have a gift card now that I won’t have to worry about using. It didn’t feel good to be treated like a common liar, and I shouldn’t need to worry about that with this.

---

So I just got this via email. I’m saying that it will work, because, for whatever reason, stuff like this never does.. But it was amusing. I don’t buy from Exxon or Mobile anyway, so I’m automatically on board!

*ATTENTION:** THIS IS NOT THE ‘DON’T BUY’ GAS FOR ONE DAY APPROACH, BUT IT WILL SHOW YOU HOW WE CAN GET GAS BACK DOWN TO $1.30 PER GALLON. *

This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. If you are tired of the gas prices going up AND they will continue to rise this summer, take time to read this, please. *

Phillip Hollsworth offered this good idea. This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the “don’t buy gas on a certain day” campaign that was going around last April or May! It’s worth your consideration. Join the resistance!!!!

I hear we are going to hit close to $4.00 PER gallon by next summer and it might go higher!! Want gasoline prices to come down?

We need to take some intelligent, united action. The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn’t continue to “hurt” ourselves by refusing to buy gas.

It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT,this is a **plan that can **really work**. Please read on and join with us!

By now you’re probably thinking gasoline priced at about $2.00 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $3.19 for regular unleaded in my town.*

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 - $1.75, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace..not sellers. **(OPEC announced this week that it would not increase production, thereby insuring that oil continues to sell for $104 per barrel and higher.)

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action.

The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.

How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can’t just stop buying gas.

But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.

Here’s the idea: For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), **EXXON* *and **MOBIL.

If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. **(But, when they lower prices, you must resist rushing to their pumps in order to buy their gas. You have to avoid buying their gas completely, knowing that other service stations will follow suit in a matter of days. So hang on! Eventually prices WILL fall.)

To have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers. It’s really simple to do! Now, don’t bug out on me at this point…keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) … and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x **10 = 3,000)…** and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers. If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

If it goes one level further, you guessed it….. THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!! (And that’s more than every gas buyer in the USA .)

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That’s all! Well, and, of course, stop buying gas from just one company.

How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!!

I’ll bet you didn’t think you and I had that much potential, did you! Acting together we can make a difference.

There is nothing wrong with corporations making a reasonable profit. But $40.6 billion in just 13 weeks is a little over the top, don’t you think? With millions of Americans losing their homes and with taxes going through the roof, we need some relief somewhere and there is no sign in sight that any politician will help us. So, this is up to us. Either hang together on this one or hang separately–one at a time.

If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $2.00 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

Please Keep This Moving, and, Thank you!