spugbrap’s blog

I’m having an annoyance right now from some evil marketing company, possible in Maine, or maybe the UK. I don’t really know. They call my grandcentral.com number, and since I’m getting fed up with it, I sent a message to grandcentral support today. Here is that message, which describes the problem I’m having:

I’ve received this call from 5 different numbers over the past 2 weeks. They show up on my grandcentral.com account as coming from the United Kingdom, with a +44 prefix. Here are the numbers:
+44 2074225790
+44 2088082763
+44 2088981403
+44 2088093629
+44 2074413433

When I pick up, the recording is in mid-sentence, and says something like “This is your final notice for an interest rate reduction. Press 1 to speak to a live operator.”

The first couple times, I just hung up.

The second and third times, I tried pressing 1, and got put on hold, but I was on the road and my call got dropped.

The next time, when I pressed 1, I got put on hold for over 6 minutes (all the while planning to place THEM on hold as soon as they picked up), then finally the hold music stopped and the call ended quietly. Nobody ever answered.

The last time, today (2/15/2008) at 1:46pm, I answered quickly, and hit 0 which made the greeting message repeat. It said something like “Hello, this is Heather with Account Services! This is your final notice regarding an interest rate reduction on your credit card! Press 1 to speak to a live operator, or press 2 to stop receiving these notices. Since I’d already shown them that I’m alive by pressing 1 on previous calls, I pressed it again this time. I was on hold for less than a minute, then someone answered, saying “Do you have a balance of $3000 or more on one of your credit cards?” (or something like that). I said “Please hold for the next available operator” and put her on hold. She hung up before I got around to picking back up (I was going to wait at least 2-3 minutes, if possible).

Anyways, I’ve marked all 5 of these numbers as spam on my grandcentral account, and changed my preferences so spam numbers get BLOCKED rather than going to spam voicemail

The problem is, they call from a different phone number each time! I’d like to block ALL numbers that start with +44, or even starting with +4420. I do not expect or care about any legitimate calls coming from numbers that match those prefixes.

So, do I need to just let them keep calling me, and just send them to voicemail, and deal with the fact that they’re going to keep calling me? Or can you block them all somehow?

Every time I get a call where they just hang up, or from a company that’s annoying me, I go to whocalled.us and look up the number/post info about it. Usually the numbers are not listed there, yet, but I’m mentioning this site because if we all report evil spammer companies there, as a community, it will become a more valuable resource over time.

The only reason I ever pressed 1 at all is because I wanted to find out what company was behind this evil automated phone call crap. Since they mentioned credit card interest rate reduction, that narrowed down the possibilities to 2. If I could find out which company was responsible for this, I would cancel my card, and complain publicly about their horrible marketing scheme. At this point, though, after hearing that live operator ask a stupid question, I know that it’s not from any of my credit card companies. It’s just some evil marketing company, and/or scammers. I hope grandcentral is able to help me out with preventing future calls like this!

Well, I lived up to the promise I made when I posted about the 7-Eleven + The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart promotion — I visited the Kwik-E-Mart in Bladensburg, MD on 7/27/2007.

I almost didn’t get around to it, but I really wanted to go! Earlier in the month, I even tried to get my team, at work, to go as a combination weekly status meeting / team building exercise. But, I wasn’t able to get everyone on board with the plan. The main drawback was that it was over an hour away, under normal traffic conditions.

It was getting towards the end of the month, so Lacey and I drove up there with our 3 kids (Matthew, Skylar, Nikki), our friend Jena, and her son Xander. We didn’t even think about the fact that it happened to be opening day for The Simpsons Movie, until we were about half-way there. We were wondering if there would be anything special happening at the Kwik-E-Mart that day. As it turned out, there was…

When we got there, we took a bunch of pictures outside, then went in and took pictures of everything Simpsons-related that we saw. It was fun taking pictures of some of us standing next to the life-size Simpsons characters. There were lots of other people there, doing the exact same thing, too. It’s a good thing they had extra staff working during the Kwik-E-Mart promotion, because it enabled them to handle the high volume of customers pretty smoothly. We bought a few Squishees, half a dozen pink sprinkly donuts, and a bunch of hot dogs for lunch.

While we were taking pictures of everything, we ran across a man holding a large video camera, who was recording all kinds of things. We talked to him, at one point, and found out that he was recording video for Fox 5 News! He recorded us in several places, including Matthew and Xander getting their Squishees, Skylar and Nikki looking cute (I don’t remember exactly what they were doing), and me getting my 6 donuts out of the display case.

When we got home, I programmed the Tivo to record the 10 o’clock news, and the 11 o’clock news on Fox Channel 5. We actually watched the 10 o’clock news in realtime, hoping to see ourselves on TV. At around 10:55pm, they finally did a Simpsons segment, which was about 5 minutes long. We didn’t quite get the face time that I’d kinda hoped for, considering how much he actually recorded of us, but I know they had to condense their footage to fit within the 5 minute segment.

In any case, it was fun for us to see ourselves on the news on TV! I was looking into ways to get the video clip from my Tivo to my computer, but ended up finding it posted on the Fox 5 DC website. Woohoo! To watch it, yourself, see the links below.

Pictures:
Pictures from our trip to the Kwik-E-Mart

Video:

There are two ways to watch the Fox 5 News coverage of the Simpsons Movie opening/Kwik-E-Mart promo (in which we made brief appearances):

1. Download the 10MB .flv file to your computer (to view with your favorite media player application, if you’ve got the right codecs)

OR

2. View it in your web browser (from its original location, on myfoxdc.com)

If you look carefully, and especially if you pause at just the right moment, you can see all of us in this video clip. I have yet to find an easy way to extract just those frames from the .flv file, but hopefully I will get that done at some point.

Anyways, my hands getting donuts out of the display case, and my bright green shirt, can be seen at around 1:20 into the video (NOTE: if you’re watching it on the myfoxdc website, start timing *after* the horrible local advertisement).

From 1:27-1:31, you can see me, all 3 of my kids, Lacey, Jena, and Xander; we’re in the background, behind the kid who’s talking.

This post is kind of a stream-of-consciousness, with very little editing. I usually put a lot of effort into my writing, and re-read things over and over, editing the hell out of it. This is why I sometimes go so long without posting anything — because I over-analyze it and make it a lot more work than it, perhaps, needs to be. I also tend to avoid posting too much about my guilty pleasure TV shows. I also went a bit link-happy, but that’s mainly for people who don’t watch the show, if they care to see who/what the hell I’m talking about.

Last night, all of the 10 finalists had to dance the same solo (choreographed by Wade Robson). Hearing that same song, over and over, was very obnoxious. If I liked that song at all before (don’t think so), I am sick of it now. It’s almost as if they read what I said last week, and took it to a whole new level. I’d like to say that it backfired, because I am totally sick of that song. But, I must confess, that damn song has been going through my head all day. Ugh! Isn’t that always how it works, though? The songs that get stuck in your head the most are the ones you dislike, and you want to stop replaying them in your head (but you can’t).

I think the judges were excessively harsh on Dominic. After he and Jaimie danced, all 3 judges went to town, ragging on him. I can definitely see where they were coming from, as he didn’t do so great in that routine, but all 3 judges basically threw him under the bus. Then, when they critiqued his solo (which was actually my favorite, out of all of them), they drove that bus right on over him, and backed up over him again. He’s toast. There must be something more behind the scenes, for them to all want him gone so badly. They didn’t treat ANY of the other dancers anywhere near that harshly.

I liked Sara’s solo second best, for the same reason I liked Dominic’s. They both showed a little of their b-boy/b-girl style, with all of the moves being very short and quick (the words stacatto and violent also come to mind). The judges had a little bit of negativity to say about her solo, which made it look slightly less like they were just out to get Dominic. But really, they were way too light on her, compared to him, so I think they just had it in for him.

I was not as impressed with Lacey (Schwimmer) last night, as I have been on every other performance show. But, I still enjoyed watching her, and think she’ll be there for at least a few more weeks, if she doesn’t win the whole thing. Before Hok got sent home last week (which I’m bummed about!), he and Lacey were my favorites to make it to the last round of the finals.

I like Pasha, and I’ve got a lot of respect for him, especially after hearing about how he stayed with Jessi in the hospital, and danced with the scary substitute lady (Speaking of which, my Lacey pointed out that he didn’t do [m]any of the lifts with her, because she’s rather heavy. Also, that substitute lady acted all pretentious and didn’t look like she was trying at all.. It didn’t look good. But when he danced with Jessie the next night, they did an amazing job, and it was actually a hot/sexy performance). Last night, I thought he did great in the hip-hop routine with Lauren, but his solo was not so good. He was out of his element, though, as he’s a ballroom guy, and that was a stupid contemporary routine (I think).

Well, I’ll tune in tonight, and expect to see Dominic go home. Not sure which girl will go, but I don’t have too much of an opinion on that right now.

We recently had a new Harris Teeter grocery store open near us, and they sent us an invitation to a special promotional event. The promo was nothing to get excited about. It was something along the lines of, “Take 10-15% off of 6 bottles of wine, on June 26 between 12-6pm!”

This was a really lame promo for several reasons:

1. Most grocery stores around here already give you a 10% discount when you buy 6 bottles of wine in one visit.
2. The prices of wine are generally marked up so much at grocery stores, that a 10-15% discount only brings the price down to a normal sale price.
3. The time window to get the discount was extraordinarily small (6 hours!).
4. The quantity required to get the discount was too large (6 bottles).

The promo excludes what I assume to be the majority of households. Not everybody drinks. But, among those that do, not everybody drinks wine. But, among those who do, not everybody would want to hurry in to buy 6 bottles! I would think that a very small percentage of households would actually care about this type of promo.

The only good thing about this promo was the name: “Taste of Teeter”. You just can’t beat that!

We received an ad in the mail, recently, which immediately disturbed Lacey and I. It’s a service that lets you create real, usable postage stamps with a picture of your choice. Sounds kinda cool, right? But take a look at the ad, and see if you can find what’s wrong with this picture:

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It seems like a cool concept, at first, to put whatever picture you want (as long as it’s yours/legal/etc) on stamps. But this ad is proudly showing a picture of a cute little kid, on a stamp. That would be cool if you’re just sending mail to your friends and family, and nobody was going to handle that mail in between.

But the reality is that several people are going to handle each piece of mail, and you’re probably going to send some to billers/rebate warehouses/misc. companies as well, and multiple people will probably handle the mail within those companies. If any of those people happens to like little kids, in a NAMBLA sort of way, then you’ve just given them your cute kid’s home address via the return address on the other corner of the envelope.

In other words, you’re announcing, “Hey, pedophiles! Here’s a picture of my cute kid, and here’s where to come get him/her!”

I remember Lacey talking about some online moms’ group forums where there was some controversy, a while back, when people posted their addresses (for swaps/co-ops/etc) publicly and had cute pics of their kids in their signature blocks. These stamps aren’t quite as bad, I think, because at least their exposure is limited to a few people handling snail mail, whereas the online message boards are googleable.

But, still, stamps.com might want to consider this before enabling proud, naïve parents to advertise their children this way. Art would be fine. Maybe even the family pet. But not children.