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2月28日
Let's say I break into your house
A lady wrote the best letter in the Editorials in ages!!! It explains things better than all the baloney you hear on TV.
Her point:
Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing
the issue of illegal immigration.
 Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely.
 Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests. Let's say I break into your house. Let's say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave.
 But I say, "I've made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors. I've done all the things you don't like to do. I'm hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).
According to the protesters:
 You are Required to let me stay in your house
You are Required to add me to your family's insurance plan
You are Required to Educate my kids
You are Required to Provide other benefits to me & to my family (my husband will do all of your yard work because
he is also hard-working and honest, except for that
breaking in part).
 If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my RIGHT to be there. It's only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I'm just trying to better myself. I'm a hard-working and honest, person, except for well, you know, I did break into your house. And oh yeah, I get a free education, where you have to pay your own way through college.
And what a deal it is for me!!!
 I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of cold,  uncaring, selfish, prejudiced, and bigoted behavior.
 Oh yeah, I DEMAND that you learn MY LANGUAGE!!! so you can communicate with me. And don't forget to make sure your forms are in MY LANGUAGE....SPANISH - I need to understand them..
 Why can't people see how ridiculous this is?!
if you agree, pass it on ( in English ). Share it if you see the value of it.
If not blow it off......... along with your future Social Security funds, and a lot of other things!
Cathryne Stone
Richardson, Texas
The Customer Service Hall of Shame
Four 'winners' from MSN Money's inaugural list are back -- 3 with scores even worse than last year's. See the 10 companies Americans love to hate.
By Karen Aho
The economy's in the tank. Corporate profits are down. Business owners are having just as hard a time getting loans as wannabe homeowners.
So you'd think that businesses would be treating their patrons like royalty, right? That this would be exactly the right time for businesses to coddle their customers?
Wrong. When the economic going gets tough, some companies apparently get tough-minded about customer service, squeezing out the last dime of profit by cutting back on critical customer-facing positions such as phone personnel.
"We've seen a fall in customer service as we've gone into a recession," said Richard D. Hanks, the president of Mindshare Technologies, a customer-service consulting company. "As the cost cutting occurs . . . they start to cut the wrong things."
That reality is borne out in the results of MSN Money's second annual Customer Service Hall of Shame, a ranking of companies with the worst customer service, based on a nationwide survey commissioned by MSN Money and conducted by Zogby International. The scores for our Hall of Shame companies are, on average, down from a year ago.
And the 'winner' is . . . The company at the bottom of the customer-service heap is Time Warner's AOL. A remarkable 47% of people who had an opinion of AOL's customer service said it was "poor." Analysts said that rating may have something to do with its effort to transition from an Internet service provider -- where it still has more than 9.3 million paying subscribers -- to an ad-supported Web portal.
"I don't know what to attribute that to," AOL spokeswoman Dori Salcido said. "I just do know that we continue to improve customer service."
AOL fits squarely in the category of company that dominates our list: communications companies and banks that provide complex and at times highly technical products. Tens of millions of customers rely on those products almost hourly. And, should something go wrong, those customers get anxious and demand a fix -- now.
That's still no excuse, analysts say. In their zest for quarterly profits, these companies tend to favor acquisitions over beefed-up service staffs. They also lean toward confusing fees over straightforward price increases -- strategies that don't play well for the long haul.
"Most of these companies actually aren't thriving," said Michael Shames, the executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, a California nonprofit that monitors business practices. People don't look at companies with poor customer-service scores and say, "Here's where I should invest," he said.
For the survey, conducted online in March, Zogby asked more than 7,000 people across the country to rate their customer experiences with 140 leading companies in 14 industries, including airlines, hotels, insurance companies and big-box stores such as Wal-Mart. Respondents could answer "excellent," "good," "fair," "poor," "not familiar" or "not sure."
The companies in the Hall of Shame were ranked by the percentage of people familiar with a company who answered "poor."
Although AOL didn't get ranked last year, corporate sibling Time Warner Cable did, and it made the top 10 then and now, receiving a 29% and 31% "poor" response, respectively. Time Warner Cable was one of four companies -- along with Comcast, Sprint Nextel and Bank of America -- to make a repeat showing.
The Hall of Shame 1. AOL's response. Post your experiences here.
2. Comcast's response. Post your experiences here.
3. Sprint Nextel's response. Post your experiences here.
4. Abercrombie & Fitch's response. Post your experiences here.
5. Qwest's response. Post your experiences here.
6. Capital One's response. Post your experiences here.
7. Bank of America's response. Post your experiences here.
8. Time Warner Cable's response. Post your experiences here.
9. HSBC Finance's response. Post your experiences here.
10. Cox Communications' response. Post your experiences here.
Click here to see the full list of companies. 2月20日 Honestly, now that I have spent the past two years of my life being involved in a lawsuit and a dozen different attorneys, I can truly say that the court system from my vantage point is totally screwed up. You have to spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to just get to court, and anyone can sue you for anything if they have the money to continue paying their attorneys. OR, if one or two of the firms that you are defending yourself against, are on contingency, then they can create a paperwork mountain and produce no evidence and kill you by draining your finances down to nothing. I feel hopelessly let down by our legal system and it was a system I used to proclaim was the best in the world. I did nothing wroong, they have produced not one piece of paper as evidence of their accusations and I am still heading to court. My hope is that once in front of a jury, that 12 of my peers will clearly see thru the BS stroies that my dead partners wife was sold by a bunch of egotistical greedy sales people. Her fault though in the end and should I prevail, she will pay, not them, but she listened to and believed the stories, that is her fault. I ahve contemplated that should I win, and then be able to collect, I will donate as much as I can to charity, so that the life insurance payments she received when my partner died, will not have gone totally to waste. It is the least I can do. This suit has been the most challenging thing of my life, but I am young and will overcome. I have learned a ton about how the court works and how easy it is to manipulate the system by creating mounds of paperwork. I am down but not out, and like in the field of dreams movie, I AM GOING THE DISTANCE. LAWYERS, the only group that Jesus blanketed as A BROOD OF VIPERS! 2月19日 My heart and mind is reeling this day. I am tired of lukewarm
Christianity in myself, and in the church. I know better than this. I
know better than to compromise with sin and things contrary to God's
Word; I know better than to walk so near to a hot stove trying to find
out how close I can get until getting burned. Paul told the Romans
(1:32) that there are some that sin simply by approving what the evil
do and to the Ephesians he said that is shameful to even talk about
what the evil do in secret. I am so disappointed in the compromise I
see in the church today; and the frequent silence of my own tongue.
Homosexuality has become something to be discussed instead of something
to call repentance to. The whole idea of repentance seems to be a "bad
sermon" in the ears of Laodicia today. The church looks for peace in
compromise instead of finding true peace with God in deliverance. Sin
is has become a bad word; divorce is no longer uncommon; parenting
skills are foreign; greed is overlooked; pride resides arrogantly in
our silence as we condone the actions of others, or even harbor our own
filth from onlookers. Christianity has become so weak that it thinks it
is only one spoke on the wheel that leads to truth. Jesus, Paul, and
Peter would be religious fanatics and put out of most of our churches
today. Where is the Holy Spirit? Without holiness, no one will see the
Lord. The more I read of Menno Simons the more I like him, but the
further I see his stance from the church that would wear his name
today. We have left off loving the sinner and hating the sin, and
traded it for accepting the sinner as is and embracing the sin. The
church is feeble; and I am shamed as I too am guilty.
"Tell me, dearly beloved, where and when did you read in the
Scriptures, the true witness of the Holy Ghost and criterion of our
consciences, that the unbelieving, disobedient, carnal man, the
adulterous, immoral, drunken, avaricious, idolatrous, and the pompous
man has one single promise of the kingdom of Christ and His church,
yes, part or communion in His merits, death, and blood? I tell you te
truth, nowhere and never do we read it in the Scriptures. But thus it
is written by Paul: For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die.
Adulterers, whoremongers, perverts, effeminate, unclean, idolaters,
drunkards, proud, avaricious, hateful persons, betayers, and those who
shed innocent blood; thieves, murderers, and those who know no mercy,
those disobedient to God and Christ, will not inherit the kingdom of
God unless they repent."
Ahh! Give me such friends that would preach to me like this! Well said
Menno, but we live in a so called smarter age, and understand more, and
such words would not be flattering today! We twist the Greek, tweek the
words, and reinvent a Biblical culture to match our own-- making
culture God and the way of the multitudes right. And if we have not
swallowed believing in our newly invented heresies, many of us are too
cowardly to call them out.
Thats where I am at.... on the brink of I know not what. Where do I run
to?
I never signed up for half-hearted Christianity. All or none. 2月13日 A suggestion for all those brilliant ones telling people they need to default on their payments and get three months behind before a "bailout" can be proposed for the individual homeowners. To me that sounds REALLY stupid. The consumer must stop paying for three months and go into a foreclosure porceeding before a bank will work with them... all I can say is Durrrrrrrrrrrh. How about something simple like this, A LENDER EQUITY PARTICIPATION PROGRAM. It looks something like this. The lender discounts the notes or payments to an affordable level and for all the funds "given" to the homeowners, it is added on in the distance to the equity gain when the economy comes back and they sell the home. If the lenders wanted to even add the traditional greed factor, they can charge a little interest similar to a reverse mortgage. Downturns and upturns are cyclical, we all know this, it is just a matter of time and the right agreement to sign! Nicer, friendlier, more neighborly and would help neighborhood values instead of destroying them like they are. So many folks who have struggled and pay are now being affected due to the diminishing values primarily NOW CAUSED by the banks and lending insititutions and outdated models of lending. Just a thought from Mike. 2月12日 Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented immigrant' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist' -
I call them future American Citizens, we see them standing everywhere near every home depot or lowes that exists... I passed one Home Depot the other day that had even put a one of those tarp tents for them with a TV under it and bleachers to sit on. I guess it is good for business at Home Depots.
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