I recently bought a Mercury Mariner Hybrid. I selected the Mariner over Ford's Escape because Mercury is known for slightly higher luxury and more amenities. I opted for their $1,200 navigation system because I need help getting to emergency calls (I'm a first responder with the local EMS agency), especially in the middle of the night in my rural location. I thought if it's a Mercury, it's got to be good. Not!

I love my new car. Except for the navigation system.

I'm posting this minutes after my sites came back online. As I was writing this, most of my web sites were offline, thanks to proactive (that is, on purpose) action by enom, the huge domain registrar which provides registration for the "domain names" for more than 8 million web sites. The registrar, of course, I (used to?) use. And here's the unbelivably scary thing I learned while struggling to get them back up: any web site, including yours, can be knocked off the 'net without warning and without notice, and for the most mundane of reasons, by the people you pay for your most basic online service: your domain registration. Even if it's not enom.

Your site is your sole source of income? Too bad. Your site is depended upon by thousands of people for critical information? Tough. You're expecting an urgent e-mail? Shrug. The weekend is coming up? They may or may not be able to help you until Monday -- check back later. We'll see -- the only guy who can help has a long lunch planned.

I just about tore out most of my hair trying to ship a package via FedEx, and it should have been a piece of cake.

First, since the last time I logged in to my account, they changed something and wanted me to add some information. No problem: I did that. Then I had to "confirm" my address. It showed me the address it had on file. It was correct, so I clicked "Continue". Bzzzt! "Information doesn't match what we have on file." Huh? And it wouldn't let me "update" my address info without typing in what they had! How can I possibly do that if they have an error and won't show me what the erroneous info was!

I couldn't go forward and thus had to call FedEx. The agent who answered couldn't help and I was transferred to "tech support". But they couldn't figure it out either! So I was transferred to the billing department. After I explained the problem for the third time, the clerk there found the problem: they had my Zip Code wrong in their system -- they had the Zip for the local FedEx office, which is in the next town (and the next county), rather than mine.

I've had a checking account at a Compass Bank branch since November 2004. The branch's staff have always been rather cold and indifferent (except for a young puppy named Christopher). But I never had any real problems until this May.

Then I ran afoul of a classic bank trick: post debits before deposits on the same day, and ding the customer for multiple "Non-Sufficient Funds" fees (at $36 each!) on trifling debit card transactions. Four debits totalling less than $10 resulted in $144 worth of NSF fees.

I regularly pass a different Compass branch. I got in the habit of making my deposits there, and found the staff much more congenial. So I thought I might have better luck negotiating my way out of these NSF fees in there. I was right.

Hello, my name is Chris, and I am addicted to oil. But there was a time I tried to do something about it: I had the opportunity to drive a much more environmentally friendly vehicle.

For six glorious years my wife and I had an electric car -- a General Motors EV1. Driving the EV1 always put a smile on my face. It always felt fresh and 'new'. It was fast and fun to drive (a little too fast -- I managed to get my only speeding ticket of the last 20 years having fun in it).

Driving the EV1 was like flying some kind of space ship: With no shifting transmission, and a faint jet-like whine in the gearset, when you dropped the accelerator peddle to the floor it felt like you were about to take off. The gauges were all digital, the glass radically curved, and you were seated low next to a tall center console.

My office had used a Pitney Bowes postage machine to help us more efficiently handle our business mail. It worked well, though it did have the inconvenience of requiring a trip to the post office to refill the postage. Also, we were told that it was legally required that they "inspect" the machine twice a year -- presumably to ensure we had not tampered with it. It was definitely a bother to have the guy come by every six months, but it was better than standing in line at the post office every day.

When postage systems became available through the Internet, we shifted to one of those systems and cancelled our account with Pitney Bowes. One odd thing we suddenly realized was that the "inspector" hadn't shown up in quite awhile -- maybe a couple of years. But that didn't matter anymore: having cancelled our account meant Pitney Bowes had to retrieve their machine, and we'd be done with it once and for all. We had a home office, so we made it clear they needed to call first so that we would be there for them. We never heard from them, and the postage machine became a nuisance in the office because of the space it consumed.

The hospitality industry is incredibly wasteful of natural resources. According to the ecology in hospitality web site ECOnomically Sound, the "average hotel (150 guestrooms) uses as many resources in one week as 100 families do in one year."

Some hotels really try to be more "green". Some say they're green but aren't, and it seems to me hypocrisy about being good is far worse than just not being good.

It's almost unfair to single out a single hotel on this one, since I've seen it so many places, but the Fiesta Inn Resort really takes the cake: this Tempe, Arizona, (read: crowded dry desert) hotel didn't buy "promise cards" from some hotel supply catalog, but instead, they printed their own card:

The Cranky Customer web site has (at least, at the time of this posting*), ads on it from Yahoo. They're a hybrid between trying to match the content of the pages and an attempt to match the more general interests of the reader. I got into a big argument over the latter part with Yahoo not too long ago, regarding the ads on the crank on this site against "Hello Direct": all the ads were for -- you guessed it -- Hello Direct!

This has significant implications for any ad-supported web site, and the entire "pay per click" ad industry.

I told the Yahoo customer support people that it was entirely inappropriate for there to be Hello Direct ads on a rant about how much Hello Direct sucks! Why would anyone want to immediately do business with them after reading such a horrible cautionary tale? No, any clicks on such ads would be much more likely to be an attempt by the readers to punish the company for being so lousy, and how does that serve their customers, who were (in this case) Hello Direct and its affiliates? It doesn't; inappropriate clicks just hurts the pay-per-click industry, which in the long run hurts the web sites that depend on it for revenue to keep the sites going.

In February I rented a car from Alamo at Burbank Airport in California. I normally go with Avis, but Alamo was offering a much cheaper rate and I was stupid enough to take the bait.

When we've travelled with our infant son in the past, Avis has always had a well-trained, state-certified installer make sure the infant seat was properly seated and secured in the back seat of the vehicle.

As we rolled our baggage cart to our assigned space, an Alamo employee dumped an infant seat on our cart. We asked if the installation person would meet us at the car and were told that we had to install it ourselves.

Upon inspection of the seat, we found it to be filthy.

Expedia just lost me as a customer. And it really hurts me to walk away. Unlike most customers, who'd probably have walked away long ago, I have an emotional attachment. I was one of the engineers who helped create Expedia.

When it first went live, I was the guy who installed the "final bits" in the MSN datacenter where it was housed at the time. My account is one of the first on Expedia. Somewhere within the bowels of Expedia, it's quite possible that some of my code remains.

And yet, no matter how hard I try, Expedia refuses to take my money.

Being homeowners, from time to time we suffer the slings and arrows of home ownership, namely something breaks and needs to be fixed -- now!

Such was the case with our main sewer line, which, as confirmed by two independent authorities, really needed to be replaced if we wanted the brown, foul-smelling slurry to stop backing up into our shower and bathtub, and onto our floors.

The work completed, and water turned back on, we joyfully put our new plumbing to the test. And the master toilet promptly backed up, venting its spleen and bile, as it were, all over the bathroom floor.

Some packaging really makes me ...well... cranky.

Take these two packages of socks, for instance, that I bought from the same store on the same day. Both are packages of six pairs, and both are the same size. One is easy to get into, the other is not.

Far from it.

I spend most of every day researching and writing, and the rest of the time I'm either taking care of the back end of my business, or sleeping. Most of the time, I keep the ringer on the phone off, because interruptions can be costly. I go to bed late and get up late because it's easier to write at night, so I don't want calls from the office forwarding through in the morning hours anyway. We have 24/7 voicemail if any of our customers find that e-mail really won't do.

Back in October, I started getting phone calls from some out of area number. The name was something spammy, like "marketing" or "research". The callers never left voicemail, and usually called between 9AM and 10AM every day, before my reliable waking hours (most days, I go to bed at 4AM). Sometimes I'd get 2-3 of these calls per day. Sometimes I'd get calls I'd have to answer before I'd be at work, so I'd have to forward calls to ring at home -- and then it would be these annoying mystery callers. I'd hear the phone ring at 8:30 or so in the morning, so I'd wake up but couldn't get to it before voicemail picked up and they'd hang up.

A lot of public relations professionals are just that -- professional. Sometimes, though, an inept practititioner -- a "flack" as they're often known -- tries to intervene and ends up doing more harm than good.

In my column This is True, which reports on strange-but-true articles from newspapers (with a usually funny "tagline" added on after the story, as a comment), I wrote this item about a criminal's attempt to steal from Home Depot. It was in the 30 April 2000 issue:

This is a condensed version of my original "Dell Hell" story, which is still at its original location on the This is True Dell Hell page (opens in a new window). The version here has the basics, but if you "need" more info, including the all important "lessons learned" (and some reader horror stories), you should read the longer version there.

- - -

I've recommended Dell computers for many years, but my confidence in them was shaken when I got a new laptop in Fall 2004. I run my computers pretty hard since I work 10-14 hours/day, seven days a week to publish on my many web sites, so I get a new one every three years or so. This time I decided to switch to a full-time laptop; I gave my desktop to my new assistant and ordered up a new Dell Inspiron laptop.

After finally getting it all set up the way I wanted, all was well for a few days until I came into the office, pushed the power button to get started ...and nothing happened. It was the Tuesday before I was to leave the country -- early the next Monday. "No problem," I thought: the one time I needed service Dell was there for me, and I did pay extra to upgrade my service contract on the laptop.