The Softer Side of Sears

So, my fridge conked out on Monday. Have you ever realized just how much you need a fridge? I was going to blog on it, but I thought, "How could I bring it back to television?" Well... I'll use Cordelia's evil line to Willow as my title, and I'll also mention I was rewatching "Eggtown" the other day, which opens with Locke making breakfast for Ben, and I thought, "Dammit, Ben has a fridge on a freakin' ISLAND and I don't have a fridge." And I'll throw in a pic of my dream fridge repair guy. But enough preamble... on to bitching.

The fridge was bought at Sears when the guy who built the house we now live in bought it just before we moved in three years ago. In April, after a couple of months of the compressor making a loud noise and the freezer periodically just defrosting itself, we had a Sears guy come in and look at it, and he said it was definitely the compressor, and he'd have to come back to fix it the next day. (Every sales call, by the way, requires you to be in your house "between the times of 8 and 4" and they won't give you a more specific time. Also, they say the guy will call in advance... he NEVER does.) Next day he comes back, with head hanging, saying that the compressor is under warranty, the relay isn't. So Sears refused to let him get a compressor, and instead ordered him to try changing the relay so that we'd be forced to pay for the visit. He put on the relay, nothing. He apologized, made another appointment for the NEXT day, and left. Sigh. Finally he comes back with the compressor, which looked like it had last been used in the 1970s, in a box that had been taped all to hell like it had been used on various other fridges over the years and refurbished for future sales calls. He put it on, the freezer went back to normal.

This past Monday, I went to get something out of the freezer, and a bunch of water flowed out of it, all over the floor. I reached in, and the food was defrosting. No noise this time, no warning, just... melting. I grabbed everything that was still frozen (or mostly frozen) and rushed it out to the deep freeze in the garage. My husband got home shortly after and called Sears to set up an appointment, and their policy is to book for the next business day if it's a fridge warming up. Unfortunately, Tuesday was a holiday, so Wednesday was the earliest they could come. A few hours later we noticed things in the fridge were sweating, meaning it was warming up, too. My husband called Sears back and asked if there was any possibility of a Monday call, and they said no, sorry, they've got us booked for Wednesday. That was the second confirmation.

Wednesday I wanted to go out and get some things, so I called first thing in the morning and added my cell number to the service sheet, and the woman said I would get a call an hour in advance, and I would be called before 3 that day, since the service day ends at 4. I went out to grab lunch, and rushed back. And waited. And waited... At 3:05, I called them back. I got a pleasant woman (the first pleasant one, actually; the others acted like we were wasting their time by calling them) and she seemed confused when I asked her where the guy was. She kept asking questions, like she was putting off the inevitable, and finally said, "Um... on my computer? It says your call is booked for, um, NEXT Wednesday. Which is really strange because our policy is the next business day. But someone's marked it down wrong." I told her I needed someone out today, that I'd lost hundreds of dollars of food, and the few things I was able to salvage were in a cooler with ice and I couldn't wait for the next day. She said the business day ends at 4. I said I didn't care if someone had to work until 5 or 8, they were coming out TODAY. I told her that it was most likely the compressor THEY had put on my fridge that was making it not work. She said she would call and see what she could do. I thanked her profusely. And waited. And waited. Listening to some sort of Latin salsa music. Then she came back and said she couldn't do anything, she would put me up to a supervisor. Back on hold. Latin salsa music. Suddenly, a click, and I'm listening to bad pop, the same bad pop I'd been listening to when I first called. I'd been put back into general rotation! Argh. I waited. Finally someone picked up and said how can I help you? and I told her I was waiting for a supervisor. She said, "Oh... um... I'm a supervisor?" NICE TRY. I said, "Well, my details should have been forwarded to you, then." and she said no, they weren't, I'd have to start over again. I did. She put me back on hold and came back on, and she said that yes, this was completely their fault, yes, someone screwed up and put us in for next Wednesday, but there was nothing she could do, that service ends at 4. I said, "Look, I don't want to be rude, but should I be sending all my restaurant and take-out bills to you, too?? I CAN'T KEEP FOOD IN THE FRIDGE!!!!" I told her that I really needed this done today, that it had been a beautiful day, 30 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and I'd been sitting at home with a baby all day long rather than getting out to DO something. And I'm NOT about to do it again.

She said, "Look, the only thing to do is to put you through to the next business day..." and I said, "Fine, but I need it to be the first appointment of the day. Please don't make me wait around all day." "Well, ma'am, if you'd let me finish, I was going to say we're completely booked tomorrow, and I'll have to put you through to Friday." I lost it. "Okay, let me get this straight. We book the appointment for today, and the woman confirmed it was for today. We then called right back and asked if we could do it sooner, and she said no, it was for today. Then I called this morning to make sure he would call before coming, and that woman AGAIN said he would call before 3 TODAY. And now you're saying that somehow it got changed to next week after THREE confirmations that it was, in fact, today, and NOTHING will be done about it? You will NOT even try to make this any better?" "There's nothing I can do. Do you want the Friday appointment?" she said. "What else can I say?" I replied. "If I say no, I have no fridge, right? So OBVIOUSLY I have to take your Friday appointment!!!"

You know, if just one of the women had said, "I'm really sorry, a lot of people have A/C that's conking out and we're really stretched right now and I can't get another person in to see you earlier than Friday, but I'm really sorry this has happened. I have no idea how this could have happened, and it's terrible they booked it wrong and then confirmed it by mistake." or ANYTHING, it would have been different. But each woman just went, "Oh. Looks like someone screwed up" and wouldn't even say "sorry."

I called my husband and told him, and he thought he could do better, so he called back. He went through the same rigamarole I did, and when he finally told them we'd never buy from Sears again (exactly what I'd said) the woman simply said, "I'm sorry to hear that, sir." The first sorry we got was that they were sorry we were not patient enough to deal with their endless screwups.

But that's not the best part. As soon as my husband ended his phone call with them, they called back (I'd gone outside with my son for the first time that day so I missed the call) and the woman said, "Hello there, this is Charlotte from Sears. I was just talking to you about the fridge? I wanted to add that I've checked your account, and your fridge and compressor are no longer under any warranty, so you will be charged for the service call. Thank you." and hung up. It was like a giant F*** YOU!!! into our phone. Even down to her tone of voice, which was oozing with, "Nyah nyah nyah nyah NYAH NYAH!" My husband got home, called right back, and got ANOTHER customer service person who checked our account and said, "I have no idea why anyone made that call, because it says right here your compressor is under warranty still, so of course if it's the compressor then we'll be covering it." Sure enough, she found a note on the computer file of our account that said, "When you go to this address, CHARGE THEM."

So just in case you think customer service people don't take any revenge on you, they do. Luckily, the guy who came to fix it today was the same guy who'd mickeyed with it two months ago, and he didn't charge us for it (it was the relay he'd put on it, which he said was old and rusty... really? You put it on TWO MONTHS AGO.)

My favourite part? On the side of his truck it says, "24-Hour service for emergency heating and cooling needs." So if your air conditioning goes off, that's an emergency. If your fridge dies and you lose hundreds of dollars of food, well, that's not a priority.

The softer side of Sears? In Canada, it doesn't appear to exist. That's the last thing I buy from them. Oh, and by the way, our fridge is a Maytag. It's three years old and has been nothing but trouble. So why exactly does the Maytag repairman just sit there while his phone never rings? Either everyone has the wrong number, or no one is buying Maytag anymore. (I know I'm now in the latter group.)

NNNNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

'According to Jim' Resurrected
ABC renews long-running sitcom for next season

How could Veronica Mars be cancelled, and this be resurrected?? Where are the television gods? What sort of sacrifice do we have to leave for them to make this... go away?

Robbed at LaGuardia

This post has little to do with television, and more to do with the state of the world right now. On Friday and Saturday, I travelled to NYC on business with my boss. I've flown since the incident in the summer that forced all airlines into their stupid gels and liquids policies, but I've never been subjected to the sort of behaviour that I was on the weekend.

First, leaving Toronto from Pearson airport, the security guard took my boss's toothpaste. You're allowed 100mL of a substance, and his toothpaste tube was 125 or something. Because, as we all know, if a terrorist is going to smuggle a substance and hide it in a toothpaste, they will ONLY insert it into a tube that is over 100mL. They took my water bottle that I'd just gotten -- because they assumed there was some toxic substance, and apparently it wouldn't have been effective had I just taken a swig from it to prove it was OK. No, of course not. I had to turn it over, walk through the checkpoint, and right into a variety store where I bought the EXACT SAME BOTTLE. (I stood in line behind my boss, buying the same tube of toothpaste they'd just taken from him.) But that wasn't all they took. After the guy at the checkpoint took my lotion (it was a 200mL bottle that had maybe two squeezes of lotion left in it, but hey, it's all about the SIZE OF THE BOTTLE, despite the signs saying how much GEL you are allowed. You must get this straight, people.) and my bottled water, he looked through everything else -- with the sheet of guidelines sitting right in front of him -- and said it was all OK. He sheepishly admitted that he thought this was bordering on ridiculous, and said they'd definitely bumped up security to a level that was ludicrous. I went through and put my bag on the conveyer belt. Other end, another official stepped up and took it, and said he'd have to look through it. Great. So while I'm standing next to my BOSS, they open up my bag and pull out panties and other unmentionables (my boss was gracious enough to walk away at that point) and they find -- GASP, horror of horrors!! -- my shampoo and conditioner. Both had been put into 75mL bottles, and both were in a Ziploc bag, just like we'd been told to do. So what is the problem, you might ask? He pulled out both and said, "nope, can't have these. See, these are unmarked containers that you've filled with shampoo and conditioner; if they'd been from the manufacturer, they'd have been fine." SERIOUSLY. Because, as we all know, if you buy the travel size of Pantene shampoo from your local pharmacy and it gets used up, you can't possibly refill it. I looked at him like he was insane, but said nothing. I assumed there would be shampoo and conditioner at the hotel, and it wasn't any big deal. I was pissed, but not furious or anything. My boss muttered that this was a conspiracy by toothpaste companies. I said the airports were in cahoots with Ziploc.

So off I went to NY where I stayed in Queens (or, in my world, the land of Ugly Betty and Entourage), and the conference was right downtown. I met my pal Fionna for lunch, and she came with her friend Shar, who instantly became my friend when we wandered into Times Square and I said, "I suddenly have an urge to throw my hands up in the air and yell, 'I DID IT!'" and then Shar not only DID do that, but in Japanese. Instant love. ;) NY was awesome, finding a cab back to the airport was impossible, but we managed, and that's when I had to go through Round 2. Now, my bag had been searched, x-rayed, and parts of it confiscated, but the guys had opened everything and explained to me why they were letting other things through. But apparently, at LaGuardia, the rules don't matter. It's whatever the gals feel like confiscating that particular night. This time, I was ANGRY.

My boss made it through, no problem, but once again he had to stand by a wall while they stopped me at the end of the conveyer belt again. This time we had 4 women, all in the middle of a VERY IMPORTANT CONVERSATION about some woman named Charlene who was dating the wrong guy (to the point where my boss, standing before the metal detector, finally shouted, "CAN I WALK THROUGH NOW??!!" to get their attention). This woman opens up my suitcase without the formalities (no, "is this yours, ma'am? I'm going to have to open it" like the other guy did), and immediately pulls out my bath gel. It's in a 75mL bottle, less than 1/3 full. "You can't have this." "Why not, it's less than 100mL" I say. She just looks at me. "You can't have it." Then pulls out a second one. "You can't have this one, neithuh." I just stand there, beginning to fume, but they were both small bottles, easily replaceable. Whatever. Then she takes out a moisturizer. Doesn't say anything, just tosses it to the side. My blood pressure is rising, and finally, just as it seems she won't take anything else, she grabs my hair sculpting stuff. Not a word, tosses it. I finally say something. "That's not a gel. It's not a liquid. It's solid." She's so busy talking to her friends she doesn't even answer. I speak up. "EXCUSE ME, that's not a gel!" I point. She stops, cocks her head at me in mid-word, mouth still open, turns and grabs the stuff. "This? Do you use this in your hair?" "Yes, and it's not a gel. Can I show you?" She opens it herself. "See?" I say. "It's a mud. That's solid, it doesn't fall under the category of gels or liquids. Not to mention, the card there says I'm allowed a maximum of 100mL, that's less than 50, and you've confiscated everything else I have. That stuff is more expensive, and I'd like to keep it." "Nyuh-uh" she says as she tosses it, "Gel."

WTF?!! What's with the "you can have a maximum of blah blah blah" if chickie here thinks she can take whatever she wants? Here, you want a sweater? How about a hairdryer? They're not a gel, either, but hey, hasn't stopped you yet!

"So ANYWAY," she continues to the other 3 women, "I said to Charlene, 'Girl! If you go back to the guy I swear to GOD I will never talk to you again,' and she did! So I'm all up in her face about it, and..."

"I got on a plane just last night with all of the things you have sitting right there, and they said they were fine."

"...she said she loved him, and I said, whatevuh, and so whatevuh. I'm just not talking to that ho no more."

I stood there, decided to give up (I'm Canadian after all, not to mention my boss was standing nearby with that worried look he gets when he thinks I'm about to stir shit up and we're going to be late for our plane), and in my head thought, "Good for you, Charlene. Stick with the guy. If it means you never have to deal with this bitch again, it'll be worth it." I walked away.

And by the way, they had a bin where they were tossing the confiscated material. They tossed two of my things in it, but I had a nearly full container of moisturizer, and my hair sculpting stuff, and she set those onto the shelf where the girls were sitting. I have no doubt she just popped both of them in her purse to take home with her. Maybe I should be thankful she didn't need a winter coat that day.

Yeah, I know I sound like one of those people who accepts the way things are until they happen to her, but I've actually never thought all of this insane crap made any sense, even when I wasn't flying. Look, if a terrorist is going to smuggle something onto the plane, they will KNOW about the stupid strictures they have on everything. They will hide the chemical in a toothpaste tube that is 75mL. They will go to the doctor and get some prescription meds and hide it in there (by the way, I had a whole bottle of tylenol in my purse that they didn't touch on either end. So why did they think a terrorist couldn't put it in pill form, walk through security, and then go buy his bottled water on the other side and pop the chemical into it there?!) They will find a way to get past all of this idiocy at the checkpoints.

And in the meantime, at the airport, the old adage "innocent until proven guilty" has fallen by the wayside. You are Guilty. Period. There's no jury where you can plead your innocence. If you don't hand over your stuff, you don't get on the plane. Simple. You are guilty. All of us are criminals. Honest, hard-working citizens by day, terrorists the moment we step into the airports. Somehow the airports have become areas that are separate from the rest of the country, where the laws of privacy don't apply, where your personal belongings can be taken from you, where martial law has been declared. I was only going overnight, but what if I was going on a weeklong vacation? I'd have to bring nothing, and buy it all in the stores in the airport. It's a scam, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Now, you might say to yourself, Yeah, yeah, I hear ya, but in the end, I feel much safer knowing that they're taking these precautions. Well... think again. See, after we passed through these checkpoints and had half our stuff stolen, we got onto the plane and sat there. And sat there. The flight attendant (only one, small plane) looked perplexed, and kept calling someone on the phone. The pilot came out a couple of times and looked at us and went back into the cockpit. The flight attendant made another call, and looked ticked, and finally said "I'll need to see all of your boarding passes." We pulled them out. He walked up and checked all names off on the manifest, and then, OH! Found someone who didn't have a boarding pass, and had managed to just slip by all the checkpoints and was sitting on the plane. But they realized she'd been booked, she just didn't know she had to actually get a pass or anything, so they LET HER STAY ON.

So yeah, they took my boss's toothpaste, my shampoos and conditioners and hair stuff and moisturizers, but managed to let a HUMAN BEING onto the plane that had made it past them all. Awesome.

I believe somewhere in the future, someone will uncover this period of history and look at us the way we look at people in the medieval period who believed in the vapours and cured illnesses with leeches. They'll wonder what the hell was wrong with us.

Apology is Lost on Me
Last Sunday Conan O'Brien hosted the 2006 Emmy Awards, in which Lost wasn't nominated, so I didn't bother watching. (For years I watched my favorite shows -- most notably, Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- be constantly overlooked at the Emmys when anyone who knows television could tell you that it was by far the best thing on. Then Lost came along, and it WON the major award last year, and I thought finally, someone at the Emmys has finally woken up and thought, "Hey, let's not give awards to shows just for longevity; let's actually base it on how good it is!" And then they went and overlooked it entirely, despite Lost turning in a killer second season. So... whatever.

That's not actually what I'm blogging about today, though. What has overshadowed the awards show is not who won or lost, but a skit that Conan O'Brien did that opened the show. I've since watched the skit on YouTube (I tried to post the actual video here, but after 10 minutes of listening to it clicking while it tried to find my blog, I realized on a Saturday this site will be slow as molasses) and it's brilliant. It opens with Conan on a plane, sipping champagne and saying, "What could possibly go wrong?" before the plane hits some major turbulence, throwing Conan around the cabin before he hides in the overhead luggage compartment. He crashes to an island, where Hurley is standing, and they run through the jungle to get back to the Emmys. Conan finds a hatch and says he's going in. (He invites Hurley to come along, but Hurley hilarious retorts, "We weren't exactly invited.") In the hatch is . . . The Office, where Conan lands on Dwight Schrute's desk. From there we watch sendups of 24, House, South Park, and DateLine, all using the actual cast and filming techniques unique to each program. It was brilliantly done.

But the only thing that mattered to the people out there who need something to bitch and complain about every day was the segment devoted to Lost. Why? Because a commuter plane had tragically gone down earlier that same day in Lexington, Kentucky, killing all but one of the 50 people on board. Almost immediately, people were yammering about how insulting and disgusting and immoral and thoughtless it was that NBC had run a sequence where a plane went down on the SAME DAY FOR GOD'S SAKES that this tragedy occurred. Tim Gilbert, the manager of the Lexington, Kentucky, NBC affiliate, was SHOCKED by the Emmys opening like this, and said he couldn't believe NBC had done it, and had no time to actually censor it from the Lexington broadcast: “It was a live telecast — we were completely helpless. By the time we began to react, it was over. At the station, we were as horrified as they were at home.”

The following day, the media reported on NBC issuing an apology, saying they'd never meant to hurt anyone, and that it was meant to spoof a television show, not hurt people.

Exactly. They were doing a send-up of a fictional television show. Not only that, but it was LIVE. How could they have possibly pulled that opening, especially when they probably only heard about the crash a couple of hours before it aired? Maybe they gave people a little more credit, and assumed their skins were paper-thin.

If the Emmys had aired the following day, and they'd still run the footage, I would understand people being upset. Twenty-four hours would have given the station enough time to have re-edited the thing, removed the actual crash, and started the opening with Conan falling off a boat or something and crawling out of the water. But they didn't have that kind of time. A few days after Columbine happened, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was about to air an episode where a student was about a shoot up the school (or so she thought), and they made the wise decision to pull it, and air it several months later. The episode actually would have been better had it aired -- when Buffy realizes that the student wasn't going to kill anyone, but was going to kill himself because he felt like an invisible loser to the world, so she tells him everyone feels pain, it's just a different kind, whether it's a jock or a beauty queen or the school geek, and everyone's pain will feel like the worst pain in the world. Isn't that the sort of show people NEEDED to see right after a horrific event such as Columbine? But the WB's decision was the right one, because they knew 90% of the people would have a knee-jerk reaction to the subject matter, not taking into account what was being discussed. Of that 90%, 2% would have actually watched the show, while the other 88 would have just argued endlessly about a show they'd never heard of prior to it. The WB knew that, and pulled it, thereby avoiding major controversy.

But what if the episode had been slated to air two hours after Columbine? Would they have been able to pull it? Could they have contacted all of the affiliates in time? Probably not, and then there would have been hell to pay from the public that would have roared, I DON'T CARE IF THERE WAS NOTHING YOU COULD HAVE DONE, I NEED TO BLAME SOMEONE, SO I'LL BLAME YOU.

The same thing is happening here. What happened in Lexington was a terrible, terrible thing. But NBC is not the entity to blame. What's next, should we pull Lost from the schedule altogether because they keep referring to a plane crash?