From the same guys who did the very funny “Internet Help Desk”

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This isn’t a story of a bad customer service experience I had myself, rather it’s a bad experience I saw another person having. I was at Fred Meyer a couple of nights ago and was running my items through those new self-serve checkouts that never seem to work properly. This time it was my steak that wouldn’t scan because the bar code had placed over a corner and couldn’t be flattened for the scanner to recognize.

At the self-serve station behind me was an elderly woman who had a number of clothing items. She was obviously having a tough time getting each item to scan correctly, but she was giving it her best shot. As I was placing my bags in the cart, I noticed another Fred Meyer employee was standing next to this lady. I thought to myself how nice of her to give this customer some assistance.

But I was wrong. The Fred Meyer employee said to the customer: “I hate when people use these type of coupons because now I have to ring up all your stuff again manually”. The poor lady, who just wanted to make her clothing purchase, just stood there probably feeling like she was in the wrong for trying to use a coupon. The Fred Meyer employee grabbed all the clothes in a huff and bought them over to her station where I can’t imagine it took more than 2 minutes to ring up the purchases and redeem the coupon.

Found this on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog. I love this shirt.

Gotta feel bad for this guy trying to demo Windows Vista speech recognition capabilities. Wow, let’s hope other new Vista features work better than this.

Oh, and if you like the video so much you can even buy the t-shirt now.

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“I can fix this….SOB”

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I love Zillow. It’s pretty dang cool to type in nearly any address and have it spit out an estimated home value. Several agents I’ve talked to have mentioned they feel the Zillow values are on the low side but are pretty close. We’ve started to look a bit at areas north of Seattle. We lived in Woodinville for six year years and loved our neighborhood. I think Kim and I long to get back there.

Zillow now has “Heat Maps” for 17 cities that visually show the how “hot” an area is based on the property’s price per square foot. Here is the map for the Seattle area. Lots of red = expensive homes.

I think I’ve found a Christmas gift for my 3 year old son. I’m certain he’d love the Toilet Monster. Watch the monster in action here.

Independent Sources has a hilarious look at 10 of the worst company URLs. Looking for a therapist? Try http://www.therapistfinder.com. Full list here.

I finally got around to watching Elizabethtown. Cameron Crowe always uses a lot of music. But I’m glad he does because it introduced me to this great song from Tom Petty called “It’ll All Work Out”.

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I walked into Fred Meyer tonight and went straight to the magazine rack. Kim hates when I do that, but she wasn’t with me tonight. I noticed the large section of magazines had been organized into 3 main areas separate from the others. The first group included car, computer and finanical mags. The second group included health and beauty and men’s magazines like GQ and Maxim. But the third group was the most interesting. It included a large selection of childrens magazines along with the paintball and gun mags.

It’s funny how stores like Fred Meyer make an effort to separate the kids magazines from the GQ, Maxim and Cosmo, but have no problem putting them right next to magazines with pistols and rifles on the cover. Would you rather keep your kids away from the sexy covers of female models or sexy weapons?