Dear rss free blog,
Boppy
pillows for breastfeeding mothers and Blackberries to keep in touch
with the world have little in common.
Yet
the vendors of both products need more Americans to work for them. Maybe we need a WPA or CCC, two New Deal programs the
Obama lot are not even thinking of copying, which put people to work
in the 1930s, to create new jobs 80 years later.
This
is a suggestion of a friend, IF, an 80-something-year-old life-time
Liberal Democrat; she even lives on Manhattan’s West Side. I live in
the Silk Stocking district by the East River, mainly Liberal
Republican. But IF has a point.
A
couple of years ago before my daughter-in-law had her first baby, I
hosted a baby shower for her NYC friends in my Silk Stocking
apartment. She had moved to Boston but had lots of city pals.
She posted a gift list with Amazon including a Boppy Pillow.
Despite the list, she was sent four of these things. Before heading
home she called to arrange a pickup of the surplus pillows.
Instead
of taking them away, Amazon delivered three more pillows. I called and
explained. Nothing happened. After about three weeks the package room in my building
said I would have to get rid of the boxes of pillows filling the place up. I called Amazon one final time and they seemed
to have no idea what was up. So I delivered the unwanted
pillows to a home for unwed mothers in the city (not even that far
from my silk stocking district.)
The
same thing just happened again. I was given an opportunity to get a
‘free’ RIM Blackberry by brokers E-trade, in part because I was overcharged the
limit price instead of the actual price when I bought my most recent
Japanese shares. So I logged in via the E-trade website to an outfit
called wirefly.com where I selected the most advanced Blackberry and
signed up for a 2-yr AT&T plan. As I went to the checkout on the site, I
discovered all sorts of additional services like direction finders
and childproofing had been added to my order. I live in a grid city;
my kids have kids.
So
I backtracked. I wound up doing this 5 times. I finally had a pure
order for what I thought I wanted and input my credit card details.
Then I got confirmations that I had ordered six (6!) Blackberries and
6 plans from T.
I
called to cancel. A nice man in India handled the Wirefly side. But later I had to call a USA human being to handle the T stuff, because
I could not get the single Blackberry to work when it was delivered.
She told me that I should be using my existing cellphone to link up
to my laptop, rather than going for the Blackberry at all. Its screen is too small for a grandmother’s eyes. It is too expensive for a re-start-up company. Today it is going back with Fed Ex.
Here
is my New Deal for the 21st Century, with credit to IF:
create an incentive for companies selling goods over the Internet to
provide human being customer service on the phone employing Americans.
We
ran into another snafu Monday when I did not get my emailed
newsletters going from the www.global-investing.com
website to my emailbox. Many of you who do not use roadrunner got your newsletters, but I did not get mine which is the test issue. After passing through
about 4 checkpoints to verify of my ID to get to the Roadrunner National Help Desk, the
first “help” person, with an exotic accent (neither Indian nor
Spanish; no idea what) hung up on me and did not call back. I set out to do the steps again with another 4 ID verifications and
finally was able to get the ban on emails from my site to my emailbox
lifted.
I
later learned that my emails from our website were not going out from
the webhost I contracted with, but via another service called mail304
opentransfer.com for addresses@global-investing.com. which may have had clients who spammed. We don’t. Once again, it would have
helped if someone would have called my office to tell me what was
happening. Road runner could hire a few unemployed people to do the job, if needed
with a government subsidy.
Why does the post office have to deliver mail and the Internet not do so? Why should these guys endanger my business and not even bother telling me?
Moreover, as Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy of France has been saying, Gross
National Product is not the best measure of countries’ quality of
life. Getting the Internet under control with human intervention
would put people to work and enhance the quality of life for
everyone. It would even boost the US GNP and cut unemployment.
The
newsletter for paid subscribers follows with a recommendation on how
to play closed-end fund yield stocks for reader Phil S. and others
who read Brown Brothers Harriman‘s Marc Chandler in my issue
yesterday.
*Most
yield-oriented CEFs proudly invest in dollar-denominated instruments
or hedge their foreign exchange interest and dividends to protect
against a decline in foreign currencies. So if you want to benefit
from Mr. Chandler’s expectation that the dollar will weaken further,
you have to buy more exotic CEFs. We tip two.
