Adventures in Jewelry Repair, Oddly Worded Advertisements, and Flaming Lean Pockets!

When I sat down to start writing this entry, I looked back over my posts from the past because I thought I had begun using a specific title for submissions like this one which are a big bag of randomness with no real cohesive core topic other than that they're all my personal life experiences or observations made during said experiences. Low and behold, I apparently never came up with a recurring title for this sort of thing. I need to work on that - I have my Movie Review Round-Up series (which is more than likely MIA for the time being seeing as how the Summer movie season is over), and I know I'm going to have future publications that fall into this category of being completely disjointed in nature, so it only makes sense to try and develop a moniker to label them as such. They would seem to play into the title of this here blog, Redbeard's Rambling. Rambling for the Sake of Rambling? Random Rambles/Rambling? I like both of those but I'm going to see what else I can come up with; if you, my dear reader, have any suggestions feel free to contact me with them. But for now, on with the show!

Adventures in Jewelry Repair

When I purchased my wife's engagement ring and wedding band from Reeds Jewelers, I popped for an optional extended warranty plan along with it. I figured if I was already paying close to $2,000 for a piece of jewelry I might as well take a few extra steps to take special care of the thing seeing as how it's a big investment in my eyes, albeit one that is physically very small. The warranty covers more or less everything under the sun when it comes to repairs, however it does nothing for us regarding replacement were it to be lost or stolen. The way it was described to me, the warranty is so thorough that if the rings were shattered into pieces so long as we could return the stones and metal they would be able to make the ring whole. (Trust me, I'm in no rush to test that claim.) Other items also included on the coverage were resizing, rhodium plating, cleaning, and the like. General maintenance, in other words, all things geared towards keeping that rock on my wife's finger shining like it were brand new.

And it's a good thing that I did choose to purchase this warranty because my wife managed to dislodge one of the stones from the setting of her engagement ring not long after I'd given it to her. How, I have no idea - I just remember the day it happened as being full of tears (for her) and thoughts along the lines of (earmuffs, kids) "Well, what the f#&^ am I supposed to do now?" from me. Fortunately, by the grace of the good Lord above, she found the stone and we were able to get it repaired. What's more, the jeweler at Reeds who did the repairs went so far as to modify the ring so that the stones were, as he put it, "sitting in a basket".

My wife's ring, prior to getting its "basket" modification

"Basket" sounds better in this context as opposed to cage or box, I guess, right?

The one oddity to the warranty is that it requires us to bring the rings into a Reeds location once every six months so that it can be inspected for any potential issues. They even gave us a little pamphlet to keep up with as the clerk performing the inspection notates their having seen the ring in it. My wife and I have been married for more than 3 years now and we've been faithful to that requirement as every six months I find myself having to wander into a store that is essentially a mine field. "We're just here to get the rings checked", I say to myself while we're there. "Keep her on track and don't let her wander around, lest you find yourself dropping another couple grand on overpriced baubles..." Don't get me wrong - it's not that I don't want my wife to have nice things, I just know that there are a lot more useful things in this world than jewelry that could be purchased with that same money (this logical approach to spending brought to you by my overwhelming sense of buyer's remorse).

Low and behold, we were due to bring the ring in this month so the wife and I made our way to the nearest Reeds Jewelers, that being the one within Columbiana Centre near the Harbison Boulevard area of Columbia, South Carolina. (Side note: A fascist was clearly involved in the organization of this mall, else "center" would've been spelled correctly.) It's an okay mall as malls go (very glamorous, lots of white and tile surfaces and plenty of shops smelling of wretched colognes with EDM blaring over their sound systems) but I haven't had much use for shopping malls since video arcades went the way of the Dodo bird. Nevertheless, the mall serves a purpose, and for us on this evening it was to facilitate the continued brilliance of one piece of jewelry.

We entered the store (which is conveniently located near one of the entrances to the mall) and my wife handed over her rings to the nearest clerk who was a young Caucasian woman, more than likely in her early 20s, with brown hair just past her shoulders. She looked like your typical college-aged girl, one who'd probably played sports at some point in her life. She was wearing a low-cut, somewhat tight-fitting dress with white, yellow, and blue stripes that ended just where it would have to in order to defend her modesty.

Why did I go into such detail in describing this clerk? Because quite honestly I'm old enough and wise enough to know a gimmicky retail trap when I see one. Stores like this don't hire girls like her because of their abilities in salesmanship, they hire them because they know some poor schmuck is going to buy something he can't afford because the pretty girl behind the counter told him it looks nice. I saw it happen myself when my wife and I were shopping for her ring. We were in a different store but it was the same set up; attractive girl leaning over jewelry displays showing ample amounts of cleavage gets a guy to buy, you guessed it, a high-end engagement ring and all the while he's staring at her chest like his life depended on it. It's hilarious while it's also demeaning - such is life.

My wife has passed off her ring and the clerk has taken it into the repair shop area of the store for inspection. A few minutes later the clerk returns. Much to my wife's dismay, she informs us that one of the stones is loose and the ring will need to be serviced. Wifey doesn't like to be without her bling, you see, and I don't blame her. Be that as it may, I'm not worried because we've done what we were supposed to and this is exactly the sort of thing that the warranty is supposed to catch. Then the clerk says something along the lines of "There will be a charge for this kind of service..."

Despite what Tits McShortdress believed to be accurate, there would be no charge for tightening the setting. It took a few extra minutes and the assistance of an older, more experienced member of the sales staff (who was a guy - I point that out just because) to verify what my wife and I already knew. I somewhat had the impression that they thought they might be able to get one over on us - no dice, I'm afraid. As it stands, we'll be able to pick the ring up soon and I'm sure it will be immaculate. If it isn't, lets just say I've been playing enough Grand Theft Auto 5 lately to know how to handle the matter.

Oddly Worded Advertisements

Generally speaking, I loathe advertisements. As in to a point where while I'm watching TV I will change the channel from a program I enjoy just to go to another channel with a show I have little to no interest in for the mere fact that they aren't running an ad at the time. This strategy doesn't work consistently, though, because those sneaky networks are in cahoots with one another in that nowadays they all seem to go to commercial at the same time. Hence the reason why I keep my phone or tablet nearby so that I can browse Facebook or Twitter - where I get a completely different set of ads, which I can at least scroll past with haste.

Speaking of online ads, YouTube and Hulu Plus present their own set of annoyances when it comes to the forced consumption of advertising. Hulu Plus is a paid subscription-based service, yet users are still subjected to ads and I have no idea why; you would think since people are paying to get to their content the need for ads would've been eliminated, but no, you still get ads. What's unique about Hulu Plus is the fact that when you're watching via their website and an ad comes on you have the ability to tell Hulu Plus whether or not the ad is pertinent to you. I find this hilarious because I click "no" every time purely out of spite - it hasn't yielded any real change in things, but it does make me feel better, if only for a moment, about having potentially influenced their system.

I tend to watch a fair amount of random videos via the YouTube app on one of my mobile devices. Typically there will be one or two ads per session that get tacked onto the opening of whatever clip it is I happen to be watching. These ads are usually short in length but they are incredibly redundant. I am not kidding when I say that I have been served with the same Booking.com ad no less than 50 times here lately. I would never in my life use Booking.com, simply because of having been inundated with their crappy ad.

I'm going to assume that my brain is an advancement in the continued evolution of our species seeing as how I have the innate ability to not permit advertising to influence my buying habits. I've searched my recent memory and the only product for which I've willfully submitted to allowing its corresponding ad to influence me is that of Dollar Shave Club, which is a product line I actually recommend highly. Great razors at a low cost shipped to your home every month - what's not to love about that?

I've turned my dislike for advertising into an opportunity for humor here recently as I've begun noticing that companies are using adjectives in their scripts that strike me as being too odd to ignore. For example, why is it that suddenly so many fast food chains are obsessed with making sure that you know they're using "real" ingredients? I guess recent revelations that "beef" from eateries like Taco Bell and McDonald's is more akin to Soylent Green than legitimate beef has made them paranoid. As if that's supposed to make customers feel better about eating a highly processed food product loaded with preservatives and additives. What's funnier to me are the ads for products like iced cream or breakfast bars - they contain "real iced cream", "real oats", and "real fruit". As opposed to what, exactly? Fake iced cream? Fake oats? Fake fruit? Have things gotten so bad in our culture that we now have to be convinced as consumers that we're not ingesting flavored plastics or something?

Flaming Lean Pockets

I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've eaten a Hot Pocket over the course of my life. I've eaten plenty of food items that have had the distinction of being nuked in a microwave instead of cooked by more traditional means, but Hot Pockets were never one of those go-to things that ranked high up on my list of instant eats. For one, they aren't exactly appetizing to me - the dough is nothing like a pizza crust and the contents are so hot your palette can't process what their flavor is. I'm not one to eat something merely because of convenience, so just the fact that they can be ready in a hurry does nothing for me. Does that make me a snob? Maybe, but at least I can say with satisfaction that I'm unwilling to compromise certain things, one of them being what I decide to shove into my pie hole.

That said, earlier this month prior to heading out to attend a local independent professional wrestling card (see blog entry "WrestleForce Presents Fall Brawl 4 - A Date with Fate") I wanted to get a bite to eat but I didn't want fast food and I didn't want to engage in a full sit down meal. We tend to keep a fairly well stocked pantry at home but there wasn't a whole lot therein this day that struck my fancy either. I remembered that my wife had recently picked up a box of Lean Pockets (pepperoni pizza flavored, I believe) and I figured "Why not?"

I retrieved one of the Lean Pockets from the box in the freezer of our refrigerator. I put the box away then realized that there were no instructions on how to revive the thing from its cryogenic slumber printed on its individual packaging. I will fully admit that I didn't want to have to dig the box back out of the freezer - it wasn't that I was in a hurry or that the box was buried deep within the chill chest, I was just too lazy to go look at the instructions on the box myself. So what did I do? I asked my wife, "Hey, baby - how long do you have to put these Lean Pockets in the microwave?" She's cooked several of them since buying that box so I expected her to have that information.

"I don't know...", she said. "7 minutes, maybe? Look at the box!"

In hindsight, I should've known better than to go along with anything she said that followed "I don't know". Not doing so was the first mistake I made that day. Nevertheless, I put the Lean Pocket into the microwave, set the timer for 7 minutes, and turned it on then walked back to our bedroom to chat with my wife while it was warming up. That was the second mistake I made that day.

I was in our bedroom maybe 3 or 4 minutes before I went to walk back towards the kitchen. Our home is laid out in such a way that there's a hallway which leads from the front of the house where the living room/kitchen are to the back of the house where all the bedrooms are. When I came out of our bedroom and looked towards the kitchen, all I could see was a plume of smoke pouring out of the kitchen and into the living room...

I run to the kitchen and immediately open the door to the microwave. There was so much smoke that I couldn't tell when I got near it whether the light inside was from the bulb that illuminates the interior of the device or if the Lean Pocket was on fire. Fortunately, the pastry wasn't ablaze however it had been cooked to the point of being not much more than a charcoal briquette shaped like a Lean Pocket.

The aftermath of this incident has been lingering for more than a week now as the smoke got into every room of the house but especially the kitchen and living room. We attempted to air out the space as much as possible by opening up the windows and back door as well as turning on all the fans, including that of our air conditioner. I was trying to aid matters by using a beach towel to fan the smoke out the windows - I don't know how much good it did but the haze did eventually go away. The smell has dissipated with time and a lot of air freshener but we get treated to a less than subtle reminder of my folly whenever we use the microwave as the exhaust fan belches out air that's scented with smoke.

I learned two things from this experience.

1) Never walk away from food that you are in the process of cooking, regardless of whether you're using a stove, microwave, or any other implement of food preparation
2) Never rely on your wife when it comes to accurate information regarding cooking times for microwavable products

I'm sorry, honey - it's going to take a lot for you to re-earn my trust, because of course this wasn't my fault.

Snow Cones Now Being Served in Hell (A Blog about Time Warner Cable)

If I were to attempt to log the issues I've encountered with Time Warner Cable's various services since the point in time that I became a customer of theirs almost three and a half years ago (not mentioning the two years I was with them while in college during which my signal was stolen by other tenants in the apartment complex I was renting from), I'd wind up writing an entry to this here site of mine that might rival the length of your average senior thesis and be layered with so much piss & venom that it would rank high in the pantheon of all-time rage inspired blogs.  I don't want to do that, odd as it may seem given my usual rhetoric, because quite frankly I'm bored with the concept of hating them.  It's a bit like a sports team that's so persistently bad that the concept of their massive ineptitude has gone from being a resource of resentment to that of comic relief.

Just to prove my point, I'll describe a situation from roughly a year and a half ago.  I'd just purchased a beautiful Sony Bravia LCD television for our living room and was looking forward to finally enjoying HD programming.  I get my new TV home, plug it in, and almost immediately I begin noticing issues with picture quality on the digital and HD tiers (of course the problem would be with the channels that are supposed to be better with higher-end TVs like the one I'd just bought instead of the analog channels).  The images would become distorted, almost like some kind of absurd cubist artwork - apparently this symptom is referred to as "tiling" to the Time Warner folks as I heard the term used at several points during conversations I had with their technicians.  In the process of attempting to remedy the situation, I went through the following steps:

• Manually reset my receiver myself (I unplugged it, in other words)
• Had my receiver reset by customer service (just for the sake of being redundant, I guess)
• Swapped out the receiver twice
• Changed out the lines coming into the house from the routing box
• Went from an aerial drop to a buried drop

Allow me to expound on that last bullet point.  The phrase "aerial drop" refers to how the cable line feeding our home came off of a telephone pole, traveled through the air (hence the usage of the word "aerial"), and was terminated when it reached the house.  In converting to a buried drop, that aerial cable was removed and replaced with a piece of wire running down the telephone pole, underneath a road, and through the backyard, buried just beneath the surface.  Why do this?  Technically speaking, it's more idealistic because you eliminate the possibility of the line being snapped by way of environmental hazards, some idiot driving an 18-wheeler through a residential neighborhood, or from all the obese pigeons in the neighborhood converging to roost on that one line at the same time. (Fat pigeons - loveable creatures or the newest terror threat?  Film at 11...)

When it came time to perform this conversion, Time Warner (which makes use of independent contractors to handle grunt work like this) dispatched the crew that was to handle attaching the new line to the routing box on the house before they'd sent out the crew to bury the line.  This delayed the process by several days, but it was finally completed and all parties involved hoped that this would be the end of the story.

As ESPN college football analyst Lee Corso would say, "NOT SO FAST, MY FRIEND!"

The tiling continued despite these efforts.  I made more calls to customer support and they sent out yet another technician.  This particular technician did something the others hadn't in accessing a diagnostic screen by way of the receiver attached to my beloved TV.  He took one look at the readout and exclaimed, "Oh man, that's HUGE!", in reference to a value corresponding to something called video heap.  As I understand it, the issue was that the receiver was getting more data than it knew how to process (buffering gone bad, as it were).  He left the house, went out and checked a transponder in the area and spotted that it was malfunctioning.  It was subsequently replaced and the issue resolved, albeit nearly 2 months after the initial request for service.

[SIDE NOTE: I can't not also mention the fact that at several points over the last few months our services have gone out completely - no TV, no phone, no Internet.  I would call to report an outage and TWC's customer service wouldn't be able to locate any interruptions in their system.  Then, low and behold, a day or so later we'd receive an automated call stating that an outage in our area may have interrupted our service...Really?  You don't say!  Here I'd convinced myself I'd just imagined the whole thing.]

You see what I mean now when I look back on my experiences with Time Warner and how I think of them as a horrible comedy of errors?  A company this large that spends so much effort in promoting the benefits of their wares and yet it takes 2 months and almost a dozen technicians to recognize the root of an issue like this.

I'm sure by now you may be asking, "If this guy dislikes their service so much, why does he still have it?"  Two reasons: 1) Back before I purchased my TV and things were fine I signed up for what TWC referred to as a "Price Lock Guarantee" which amounted to a two year service contract similar to what you see offered by most cellular companies in that there is a fairly high early termination fee involved, and 2) at this point I feel like I kind of have to keep it.  Think of it as if you were building a house.  You encounter issues after construction has begun that require you to go back to the drawing board and re-think parts of your design.  Do you tear down the house and start over?  No, you keep moving forward, onward, and (hopefully) upward with the project.  I'd hate to essentially undo all that's been done by going to another provider because as of this moment our services through TWC are running about as well as they ever have, quite honestly.

A couple weeks after the most recent set of service calls (2 in two weeks for the same issue; it was something relating to the wiring at the pole, and from the way the technician spoke I almost want to believe someone had attempted to steal our signal), I received a piece of mail from TWC that looked unlike any other correspondence I'd ever gotten from them.  I knew immediately it wasn't a bill because of its shape which lead me to assume it might be an advertisement or promotional gimmick.  As I opened it I realized the weight of the paper from which the envelope was made had a decent heft to it, making it feel like it had a certain level of poignancy.  Intrigued, I finished opening the envelope and could then see that the inside of the pocket had been printed purple and emblazoned with their logo, furthering the sensation that this wasn't just another mailer.  Finally, I extracted the contents of the envelope and found this.

"Well if that doesn't beat all...", I thought to myself.  The concept of TWC actually apologizing for the woes of having to deal with their ineptitude was startling.  While I appreciate the sentiment I couldn't help but add this to the pile of unfortunately amusing things they've put into my life.  For starters, a sympathy card is nice however an offer to give us service credits or (Heaven forbid) a discounted rate on our services would've been more appropriate albeit very unlikely.  I have a better chance at being chosen to play cowbell for Metallica than I do at ever seeing money back from Time Warner.

Notice the part in the text about how we'll have access to their elite service teams - they have their equivalent of Navy SEAL Team 6, apparently.  Okay, that's great, but you mean to tell me that up until now I've been dealing with the Gomer Pyle-level service teams?  You've just informed me that you've got a set of guys roaming around out there who are supposedly great at what they do, which is an inadvertent admission that there are others who - either by directive or thanks to their own stupidity, having lost out on the genetic lottery - just kind of half-ass their way through assignments.  For that matter, why doesn't everyone have access to these elite operators?  We're all paying customers, so why should certain of us get preferential treatment when it comes to maintenance issues?

What this whole thing boils down to is persistent frustration.  Not the kind you seek medical-grade pharmacology to treat, mind you - rather the kind that you almost learn to put up with because the root of the matter is something we want to appreciate but can't in some situations.  I think everyone has had a frustrating relationship here or there throughout their lifetime.  A girlfriend you love but refuses to ever see a movie you'd like to watch, a relative who's alright so long as their favorite sports team doesn't let them down in a big game, or even a dog who only ever seems to take a dump exactly where you don't want him/her to do it.  Unfortunately, putting up with fussy technology is oftentimes worse than dealing with similar issues involving carbon-based lifeforms.  For the money we pay, we expect these gadgets to work 100% of the time, and they should because ultimately it's important that we be able to watch new episodes of Big Bang Theory or play Call of Duty via XBOX Live.  What else is there to life, after all, than the content we crave so dearly?