Crazy News - Strange Stuff - Rants and Raves

be the first woman in history to not have a purse, I mean how do guys do it?

wear half the make-up of other women or none even, women who cake on tons of make-up don’t look more attractive, they look worse.

be very happy I don’t have a prostate, especially now that I am in my 40’s.

attempt to drive better, I would make turns on time and use my signals and would not apply said make-up while driving.

bring a porta-potty to concerts, movies and everywhere else you have those crazy lineups.

Tell me yours and win a great prize?

So here is my little rant about the local Future Shop store in Richmond Hill, Ontario - Canada.  I went in a few weeks ago with my two kids to check out a digital SLR camera.  I was deciding between the Canon XTI and the new Canon XSI.  I was asking a few questions at the camera counter about having them give a free memory card with the purchase (because they were offering that deal online) and the guy was checking with a ‘manager’ if he could do it.  While waiting for him and browsing the xbox360 games with the kids I noticed a couple of titles they had there were the same two I purchased at EBGames earlier on that day for $9.99 each, they were are $50 at Future Shop.  I decided while waiting for the camera fellow to come back I would ask for a price match on the games (it would work out to around $5.90 per game) I would purchase them at Future Shop and because I had the others in the car still new in the package I could return them to EBGames.  I would only save about $8 but it was more on principal.  I took the two copies of the game to the service desk and asked for the price match.  They said they would have to contact EBGames to see if they were new games or clearance, used games.  I told them they were new and factory sealed, I offered to go out to the car and get them.  They told me they still had to contact EBGames.

A few minutes later the person said they contacted EBGames and could not honor the price match because it was only for new games.  I told them the games were new and I had them in the car if they wanted to see them.  I asked to speak with the store manager.  Instead the brought out a guy named Oscar and he told me the price match was only on new games, I said that is ”bull” and I had the games in the car, brand-new factory sealed.  He said I should not swear at him, especially in front of my kids and he could not price match used games.  After seeing that I was angry he called over a fellow employee and asked him to help throw me out of the store because I was causing a scene (I did raise my voice but I was far from causing a ’scene’).

To make a long story a little shorter I asked if he was the store manager and he wasn’t, all the managers were off-site at a meeting.  I asked for the store managers name and they told me it was French and they were not sure how to spell it.  I asked for the number to  head office so I could contact the regional manager, they gave me the call center number.  I called and was told regional managers no longer accepted direct calls but they would fill out an incident report and someone would contact me in a few days.  After around 20 minutes on the phone, case #108845 was complete and I was to expect a call from Laiq Siddiqui (the store manager) or the regional manager.

Well as you might guess, that was over 3 weeks ago and no call.  I tried to find out what was going on last week but they said I would have to wait for them to contact me.  I was upset and did not purchase my camera and will probably end up ordering it from a US retailer online.  I am sure this happens a lot because I have read about similar problems at various forums online and it seems to occur at Future Shop stores across Canada.  I don’t understand why they would bother to put a price matching policy in effect and then do everything in their power to screw people over when they try and use it???  I was there to purchase a camera package for $1000+ and instead of making a sale, they pissed me off by treating me so poorly.

Update: I sent an email to customer service after writing this post (with a link to the post) and I got this reply after a few hours:

Please include the following line in all replies.
Tracking number: CT20080525_0000000702

Dear Jay:

We can understand your frustration with case number 108845.

Please contact us at 1-800-663-2275 and a representative will be able to assist you in receiving a response. We will be able to transfer you to a manager to provide a immediate resolution.

Thank you for visiting Futureshop.ca.

Sincerely,

Amy
Customer Care
Future Shop

I am going to call now and I will update this thread with any resolution I get.

Update: I contacted customer service but the person I got told me that only temporary managers are there on the weekends so I should call back on Monday.

Monday morning I got a message from Bobby Maharaj who is the operations manager at the Future Shop in Richmond Hill.  I just called him back and after 35 rings someone at switch-board picked up and told me he is busy with a customer so I am waiting for a call back now.

An Iranian court has ordered a man to buy his wife 124,000 roses after she filed a complaint against her “stingy” husband to claim her dowry, a press report said on Monday. “After 10 years of marriage Hengameh had decided to claim her dowry of 124,000 red roses to punish her very stingy husband,” the Etemad newspaper said. “Shortly after marriage I realised that Shahin was very cheap. He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant,” said the woman, identified only by her first name Hengameh. But Shahin told the court he could only afford five roses a day and complained that it was “her billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head.”

The court has seized his apartment worth 600 million rials (64,000 dollars) until he has bought her the entire 124,000 roses. A long stemmed red rose costs 20,000 rials (about two dollars) in Tehran. Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry or mahr, which is a gift pledged by the man at the time of marriage, at any time during married life or when getting a divorce.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins, or property as mahr and the number of gold coins (worth about 260 dollars) could vary from 14 to even hundreds or thousands. An Iranian man can end up in jail over dowry debts and there has been a judicial debate whether it should be adjusted according to the man’s financial status. This story is yet another reason to fear the ‘logic’ of Iran.

All you double-dippers, back away from the chip dip bowl - Now.!  Seems the famous Seinfeld episode was right - double-dipping does transfer mouth microbes from bitten chips or vegetables into the dip. After multiple double-dippers, what might look like an enticing snack may actually be a microbial soup, a new study suggests.

The research, by food science students at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C., found that for every time a bitten cracker went back into the bowl, hundreds, even thousands of bacterial cells went in with it.  The research was done under Clemson’s creative inquiry program, which teaches undergraduates how to conduct research while encouraging outside-the-box thinking.

Teams made up of students at various points in an undergraduate degree set out to explore interesting ideas, often producing scientific journal-worthy results in the process.  An earlier effort by Dawson’s students tested the five-second theory - the notion that no significant transfer of germs occurs if dropped food is retrieved immediately. Their conclusion? You may move fast, but microbes move faster.

This latest project was inspired by the famous Seinfeld double-dipping episode, where George blithely turns a chip dip into a Petri dish, to the revulsion of a fellow party-goer.  Not quite, maybe, but the research Dawson’s students performed suggests a dip bowl will acquire much more than salsa chip crumbs as a social event progresses.
The average human mouth is teeming with bacteria, though to be honest that’s not as nasty as it sounds.  Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t unpleasant germs you might pick up from fellow dippers who break party etiquette and go back for seconds with a bitten chip.  While it might seem that the more acidic salsa would harbour fewer bacteria, in actual fact it contained more in the double-dipping experiment the Clemson students conducted.

However, when the students let inoculated dips sit at room temperature for a couple of hours to see whether passage of time influenced concentration of microbes, they found the salsa’s bacterial count declined, putting it on about a par with the chocolate and cheese.  The double-dipped dips contained about 400 to 500 bacterial cells per millilitre - which is a tiny amount of dip, far less than would coat the average dipped chip. The team did not type the bacteria, so they don’t know what dippers were leaving behind.

The students also didn’t test heated dips. But Dawson suggests hot dips might provide ideal conditions for microbial growth. And he notes that as a party goes on and the amount of dip in a bowl declines, the microbe content of what remains would be expected to rise.

All this new-found knowledge has made Dawson approach the practice of dipping with a new level of caution. He might share a dip in a restaurant, where he can keep an eye on the people he’s eating with. But at a party? That’s another matter.

This guy is definately not PC but funny as heck!

So let’s take a peek at what folks are searching for today, the first day of September.

-BioShock, is this some sort of world wide disease?  NO it is the hottest new XBox360 game and is a unique game that mixes a spine-chilling setting illustrated with art deco art and architecture, sci-fi themes of bio-genetic mutation and self-modification, a deep storyline with open-choice freedom to interact with the world as you choose, and first-person action that requires you to think every time you pull the trigger.

-Giant spider web, no this is not a trailer for Spiderman 4, it is the real think.  Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in a North Texas park.

-the Cullinan Diamond, or Star of Africa is a pear shaped diamond weighing 530.20 carats!  Holy crapy that must be worth a fortune, well it is valued at a mere 400 million pounds!