Not that I’ve ever actually eaten one, mind you, but when you choose a name like “guacamole” as an alias, well, seriously, how good can they be in either form — whole or squashed into a slimy lumpy paste?
And how dare it be considered a fruit along side things like grapes, apples, oranges, and mangos?
Avocados are more disgusting than radishes, even, and those taste like dirt. Crunchy. White. Dirt.
But this isn’t really about disgusting fruits (or vegetables)… It’s about a flyer I received in the mail this week from Subway.
Take a look at this:
Do you see what I see?
I’ll give you a hint — it’s apparently Trademarked.
No, it’s not the Subway logo. How exciting of a post would that make, I mean, really…
Okay — here’s a closer view:
The only thing that could possibly be worse than an avocado on its own is having to pay a dollar extra to have it added to a sandwich…
No, wait…
Adding radishes in addition to avocado would definitely make it worse…
I keep hearing about how banks have started, well, raping their customers with sneaky fees and I like to think that I’m diligent enough when it comes to my finances to dodge them but, once again, Bank of America has dinged me with an unannounced fee that I’ve never once had to pay in the past.
This is the second time in just 3 months that I’ve been assessed a “new” fee.
Last time it was a $14 charge, billed a Monthly Maintenance Fee, for letting my balance go under $1500 when the previous floor was $750. I must’ve missed some fine print on the back of some flyer stuffed in my with my statement or something…
They hit me twice with that fee. Twenty-eight bucks for nothing…
This time the fee was only $3. Some might call that nickel-and-diming and not that big of a deal but in reality, that’s 60 nickels or 30 dimes. That’s some serious change.
This time they call it a Check Image Service Fee.
So, remember when you used to get the actual checks that you wrote back with your statement each month? That stopped years ago and then they started printing postage stamp sized pictures of the checks written on your statement. Now they’re charging for that, apparently.
Okay, whatever, that’s fine.
I can imagine that there were some substantial costs involved in actually stuffing the original checks into envelopes. Those days are long gone and I’m sure the banks have seen tons of savings as a result.
Scanning the checks (which they have to do anyway) and printing them on the customer’s statement costs, well, essentially nothing. Maybe one extra page per statement and a tiny bit of toner. For a bank, that’s the cost of doing business.
Kinda like the free lollipops if you actually set foot inside a branch — if they even still offer those…
They’re trying to capitalize on a service that’s rapidly going extinct anyway…
In short, I know that they’re really just trying to push their customers to go paperless in some kind of “green” initiative which, I’m sorry, is just stupid.
Newsflash: Paper does grow on trees.
But what *really* rubs me the wrong way about this fee is that I didn’t write ONE SINGLE CHECK during my past billing statement so there are no check images…
Really, you need to click on the link — otherwise the rest of this post is meaningless.
Regarding me missing the mark…I beg to differ.
Don’t get me wrong — I thought it was a good commercial. Well, the first minute or so of it was good.
I thought the soundtrack worked (partially because you never heard his (Eminem’s) nasally voice).
I thought the message was, well, it was good too.
I just thought the star was all wrong for the reasons I listed out originally.
Beag mentioned the Grammys — Eminem’s got to have some curb appeal. Good point but that’s the thing — how many folks over the age of 30 have ever heard any of the songs nominated in any of the categories?
We’re about the same age — right in the center of that most coveted advertising demographic. I don’t know about you, but I pretty much punched out of the modern music scene in the Dave Matthews era and the waning days of Pearl Jam.
I’m also not ashamed to admit that I enjoy listening to all three… Back-to-back-to-back…
At the same time, though, I have zero interest in the acts performing on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve celebration anymore. Haven’t had any interest in over a decade. The same holds true for the Grammys — performers, nominees, and presenters.
I think I’m in the majority on that one. I still watch the show but mostly because nothing else is on on that night — kinda like how I watched the Super Bowl even though my Bears weren’t in it.
Point is, Eminem has little appeal to me and probably everyone that I know over the age of 30.
On a tangent, since I mentioned the Dick Clark thing, I’d like to take this moment to mention that Will Smith’s daughter is terrible. Just terrible. “Whip My Hair?” Huh?
Now, for the whole “Made in the USA” thing, well, I know that that hasn’t been the case in the auto industry since, well, probably the early 1970’s — just like you mentioned.
I drove a GEO Metro in the early 1990’s. It was a GM product. Inside the door, it said Suzuki. Go figure.
My BMW was assembled in the heart of NASCAR country. German engineering? Yeah, right…
My Scion was actually assembled in Japan. I’m actually pretty surprised by this.
I only mentioned the “across the river” to connect it with the Justin Bieber reference. That, and hailing from southern Ontario, I know first hand that the landscape is dotted with humongous auto assembly plants. And technically, Windsor, Ontario could be considered a Detroit-area assembly plant like you mentioned — close or not, it’s still in another country.
I also thought it was appropriate as they threw “Imported” from Detroit right in your face as if Detroit itself is another country. What’s up with that?
We’re in total agreement that Chrysler had/has lost its edge. I blame the Plymouth Voyager explosion of the mid 1980’s. Mini-vans were their bread-and-butter back then and they held on to that “image” for far too long.
They do need some “edge”. But I still say that Eminem in a Super Bowl commercial was the wrong way to go about it. On MTV, during a Jersey Shore marathon, sure, but not the Super Bowl.
When it comes to widely viewed events (such as the Super Bowl), the memorable commercials are the ones that have appeal to the masses.
Comedy is one way to get there — though that generally works best for beer commercials.
The Volkswagen Passat Darth Vader spot used comedy and a “villian” from 35 years ago. That worked. My son is the same age as your little one (to the day, I think) and he knows who Darth Vader is. My mother knows who he is too.
It appealed to all ages (and genders) making it a perfect Super Bowl commercial.
VW is not suffering from an image crisis though…
Back on topic and regarding what I think was a poor casting choice for a Super Bowl commercial.
The last big, BIG televised event that I can think of was the Winter Olympics last February. You may or may not remember the BC Tourism commercial that ran nearly every break featuring Sarah McLachlan, Ryan Reynolds, Michael J. Fox, Steve Nash, Kim Cattrall, and Eric McCormack.
If not, here it is:
Same idea as the Chrysler commerical, while not all local to Vancouver or even British Columbia, all of them are Canadian and pretty much everyone on the northern half of this hemisphere will know of at least one of those celebrities. Further, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll have a neagative image towards any one of them either…
Ryan Reynolds was named People’s most beautiful person three years in a row. I’m not certain why — he’s alright, I guess — but that crown ensure that grocery store tabloid readers know who he is along with all those folks going to see his chick flick movies.
The older crowd would know who Michael J. Fox is from his time on Family Ties. Or even the Back to the Future movies. More recently, he’s the face of Parkinson’s disease. He’s well known and, as far as I can tell, pretty well respected too.
Steve Nash was the NBA’s MVP for a few seasons. All of the wannabe jocks know who he is.
Kim Cattrall covers the cable crowd. She was one of the stars in the Sex in the City series that got so many people to pay extra for HBO. She’s also been in tons of movies and even dated Pierre Trudeau (a former Pime Minister of Canada).
Eric McCormack, rightfully so or not, covers the gay crowd. I’m not sure if he’s actually gay or not, I don’t think he is — it doesn’t really matter — but from his role on the tv show Will & Grace, I’d say that the masses just assume he is.
How do these six spokespeople differ from Eminem? Well, first off, the variety alone ensures that 95% of the audience will identify with at least one of them. Maybe Chrysler should have had a few more cameos.
Further, though, and more importantly, they all have pretty squeaky clean images.
I’m not an expert on any of those celebs — I listed pretty much all I know about them — but I do know that their image is treated with higher regard than that of Eminen. Image is everything.
That’s why I thought the commercial was terrible.
You just don’t want a perceived thug telling you they’re coming back. To me, that’s the message Chrysler sent and it’s 100% because of the casting. It’s not edgy — it’s almost insulting.
Oh, and I don’t see Detroit making a comeback.
Dearborn, maybe.
Okay, does this mean we should have a rap showdown?
;0)
Seriously — I really appreciate the well thought-out, not to mention long, comment. Thanks Dude!
I’m going to ignore the Brisk Iced Tea commercial for the time being but what was Chrysler thinking?
I got the message of the commercial — yeah, yeah, Detroit is making a comeback and Chrysler is trying to market themselves as edgier or something by using a local celebrity in a wicked long commercial.
On paper, or in a brainstorming marketing meeting, that sounds like a pretty good commericial, I’ll admit.
But then you choose Eminem to star?
What, was the scummy Kid Rock unavailable?
Now I know that Emimem has a pretty big fan base but his fan base would only make up a tiny sliver of the total Super Bowl audience — most of which would have tuned out long before the commercial aired anyway…
To the masses, Eminem is the guy who can’t get a full sentence out without using profanity, beat his girlfriend/wife, and on top of that, he hates his mom too.
Would you want someone like that as your spokesman for a 12-million dollar plus spot during the Super Bowl?
The vast majority is who Chrysler should be marketing towards…but they chose not to.
I won’t be buying a Chrysler. I probably won’t be buying anything out of Detroit — actually.
Seriously, though, most of the cars are made across the river in Canada anyway. “Imported” from Detroit is right…
Justin Bieber might have been a more appropriate spokesman… and, last time I checked, he still lives with his mom.
So while reconciling my numbers last night I noticed that my BoA checking account balance was off by $14.00.
Hardly a troubling sum but I’m seldom off by a penny.
And $14 even? What could that be?
A “fee” was the first thing that came to mind…
Had I used another bank’s ATM? Had I needed a money order or a cashier’s check? Had I done something out of the ordinary in the past 30 days?
Three strikes — I hadn’t done anything unusual.
8 seconds of research revealed the culprit.
Yep, as expected, on December 23rd I was hit with a $14.00 charge labeled as a “Monthly Maintenance Fee“.
Not impressed.
The last time I was hit with one of these, they’d changed the “flavor” of my checking account under the guise of night following one of their many bank mergers.
Apparently, then, BoA was not offering the account that my former bank (which was swallowed up by BoA) was so they just changed it and hit me with a fee.
Crazy, my account number never changed. My PIN hasn’t changed either. My checking account certainly did, though…
I had that all taken care of with a nasty phone call — and took note of the “new” minimum requirements to operate fee free.
The only parameter that applied to my situation was a minimum $1000 balance.
No problem, I thought, I can do that.
I’d been maintaining a 4-figure balance for as long as I could remember so I was under the impression that I essentially had that “free checking” you hear advertised so often.
For compassionate reasons or whatever, they’d lowered their minimum balance to $750. They were pretty darn proud of it — like they were heros or something.
Cool — I thought. Though I still maintained a $1000 balance, at least now I had a bit more wiggle room should I need it. You may have noticed in my net worth updates that (very) occasionally my checking account would dip into the $900’s.
No biggie, right?
Wrong.
Apparently BoA changed their terms again back in November. No glossy spread to announce the change this time – Minimum daily balance in checking– $1500 or more.
Nice, huh? They doubled the minimum balance. Un-announced too, as far as I’m concerned.
But, hey, the recession is over, right? It’s all good.
I’m just glad it’s only cost me $14.
Make that $28 — I’ve got less than $1500 in my checking account right now…
Might be a good time to make the switch to my hometown Toronto Dominion, peculiarly dubbed “America’s Most Convenient Bank”…
(For the geographically-challenged — Toronto is in Canada…)
Okay, so we’ve hit a bump in the road on the renovation process.
When compared to all of our other previous home improvements — I kinda knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. Things were coasting along far too nicely…
We had the new floors sanded, stained, and poly-whatevered this week. It looks alright, I think…
The problem is that the flooring dudes were sub-contracted out and compared to the real in-house guys that our contractor has used for everything else so far, well, they don’t stack up.
They suck, actually.
So much so that the dry wall guys will probably need to come back in… And then painters will need to come back in again too because of how sloppy these morons were with the stain.
They have so much to touch up — after they’d already finished a job well done that, well, I feel sorry for them.
Worse, is that I think it sucks that our nice and solid brand new walls with a single coat of paint on them are going to end up looking like, well, repeatedly painted walls less than one month into their lifespan. So much for nice sharp corners. Sorry — that just sucks.
They even got stain on our nice new white lightswitches… I mean, seriously, why are so many contractors like this?
Further, guess where all of that remaining hardwood flooring that I’m guessing will be used for the staircase ended up? Well, they put that out on the front porch. Not sure if you’d heard but there’s this hurricane named Earl approaching and, well, our floor is outside.
Now I know that hardwood is supposed to be strong or whatever and I don’t really think we’re going to see much of a hurricane in my neck of the woods anyway but I’m also pretty certain that the flooring we’ve had installed isn’t “all-weather” flooring.
Is it my responsibility to move it back into the house myself?
I don’t think so.
If I don’t move it back in, will it make the cost of my project go up?
Probably.
It’s a crappy situation.
Personally, though it hasn’t been rained on (yet), I still think the integrity of the unused floor boards has been compromised already. That really sucks.
We emailed the contractor already to let him know the remaining supplies are on the front porch — and he just emailed us back (for real — just now) to let us know to bring it back in. I’m sure he’s thinking “wtf?” right about know… Might even be calling the flooring guys to say it outloud…
I guess I’m glad that’s solved.
I’m also thankful that everyone else left to come back in has been here before — we’ve met all of them and you know what? They’ve done a great job. I’m just angry for them since these bozos just made their jobs a little more difficult…
I know, I know, some of you are probably thinking, “Dude, it looked better before you stained it — you ruined your brand new floor” and to a certain degree, I know where you’re coming from.
I liked the natural look too.
My wife said it would show dirt more easily.
She’s right and then I started to think that it’d look like a basketball court and, trust me, I hate basketball so we couldn’t have that.
Dark was the way to go. We settled on “Dark Walnut”. I think I’d have preferred an even darker stain — I didn’t expect the grain to pop as much as it did — but this looks pretty good. Again, not what I pictured but pretty darned good.
It doesn’t clash with the colours we’ve selected for the walls (though I suppose we could totally alter the colours now) and it’s not that standard generic blond colour that you see in all of the McMansions still being built during this apparent housing slump.
We’re fortunate enough to be able to totally customize the interior of our house right now so we’re not going to make generic and bland decisions. Thin strip hardwood flooring in a dark colour is definitely not a common sight…
That said, do you think it’s too dark?
Some people think that dark colours make rooms look smaller but I don’t know if I agree… I mean, rooms in a 125+ year old house are pretty small as it is — I’m not sure the floor colour is going to trick anyone into thinking otherwise…
One annoyance that I seem to stew over repeatedly is traffic.
It’s never the number of cars on the road — my commute is quite tame. All two miles worth.
Instead, even with such a short commute, it’s the number of, well, criminals and just plain idiots out there on the road with me.
I’ve ranted about Virginia drivers — I’m sorry, you’re terrible.
I’ve gone on and on about how practically every other car in Connecticut has a temporary handicapped placard hanging from their rearview when it’s quite clear that there isn’t anyone with a physical handicap in the car.
Red lights? who cares! Apparently these days you just need to honk your horn as you speed through one and it’s okay.
It drives me bonkers when I see a smoker toss a butt out the window. That’d be like me throwing gum wrappers out the window (which I don’t). The former is apparently okay but the latter is littering? Explain that one to me…
I nearly explode when I see someone empty an entire ashtray at a stop light (if they even bothered to stop.)
And I’m not even going to go into my feelings on texting while driving.
Would you believe that I actually saw a guy texting while on a motorcycle a couple of weeks ago? No joke… I should have run him over…
So go back up to the photo at the top of this post.
This guy was in front of me at an ATM last weekend. Everything seems to be pretty normal to the untrained eye but when you look a little closer, this is kind of like when a bank robber puts on a fake moustache to hide their identity…
The dealer logo on his truck indicated that he bought the truck less than one mile from where I live so… isn’t it a but odd that he has a Florida license plate? A special one, even…
The very illegal way around this, though, is to register your car in another state. That way Connecticut has no idea that you even own the car (which seems odd in this digital age)…
Florida, apparently, is an easy state to “use” in this situation.
Seriously, I’d say that 10% of cars on the road in Connecticut have Florida plates slapped on them right from day one. Really, I’ve never seen a space shuttle or a manatee in Connecticut but they’re all over the license plates up here.
Further, 90% of the cars with Florida plates have bogus handicapped placards too.
Hey, if you’re going to break the law, why not go all out, right?
So back to this tax cheat, I mean, you’d think that allegedly being a fire fighter, you know, he’d hold himself to a higher standard being a pseudo government official of sorts.
Really, some even consider them heroes. I’m not of that sort but that’s neither here nor there…
Even still, I think we can all agree that heroes should pay their taxes.
What really blows my mind is that the police (also apparently heroes) don’t seem to care.
You’d think that our state government would be upset about all of this lost tax revenue, not to mention illegal tax evasion going on.
It’d be quite easy to stop and then enforce — I mean it’s right out in the open under their noses.
Just using the guy up top as an example:
His car was purchased at a dealership in central Connecticut.
He has a bumper sticker touting that his kid was a student of the month at a local elementary school.
His freakin’ vanity plate clearly indicates that he’s a “Connecticut Fire Fighter”.
I’ve been *so* behind with posting over the last few months so much so that I didn’t even do my annual “I Filed my Taxes Today” post this year.
Cutting to the chase, I filed my taxes back on February 13. It was a fun filled Saturday morning spent in front of the computer telling TurboTax that, no, once again, I did not earn any income working on a farm and I don’t have an illegal alien working as a maid and living under the basement steps.
Seriously — you spend far too much time answering questions that only apply to a tiny tiny tiny slice of the population but good luck finding where to enter how much you paid in property taxes…
Or how to get your $1000 credit for making a person? I checked the box but I didn’t see my refund magically go up $1000… Whatever…
Anyway, 2009 was a bit of a step backwards in the Smurf household. We earned around $10k less.
That’s okay though — unlike a lot of folks my age, I’m fully aware that my top earning days are behind me. I neve expected my income to continually rise the way it did through my twenties and I’ve definitely run into a plateau of sorts.
Maybe 2010 will be better but I doubt it. Some might blame the economy, or whatever, but the fact is, at a certain point, you just level off. I’m cool with that.
The good news is that we didn’t owe this year like we did last year. I wasn’t sure *how* that was the case last year but we took steps to make sure that it wouldn’t happen again.
Making $10k less didn’t hurt our cause either.
In the end, as you can see up at the top, we received $2585 back Federal and $1262 back from the State for a grand total of $3847.
No small sum but I have to admit — I really thought we’d be getting more.
I’m glad that I wasn’t counting on it but I almost feel naive for actually thinking that having a kid would “aid” me in my taxes in a get-rich-quick sort of way.
Right now, it sorta feels like that “buy a house and you’ll get tons of money back on your taxes” myth. I fell for that one too.
Gee — borrow over a hundred thousand dollars, pay thousands upon thousands of dollars in interest and then we’ll give you $30 back on your taxes for your troubles. Such a deal!
Maybe it’s just me…
Oh, and I’m pretty sure I ranted about this last year but I’m going to rant about it again this year cause it really rubs me the wrong way…
In the mail, I received a Form 1099-G from the State of Connecticut indicating that I “earned” $1258 from them in 2009 and that I had to report it as income on my taxes.
Okay, so I was over taxed in 2008 by $1258. Then, in 2009, they refunded me the $1258. And finally in 2010, I need to pay taxes on that same $1258 that I overpaid in 2008.
So, wait, why again do I have to pay taxes on my refund?
I already over paid taxes on it once — the state gave it back to me — and then I had to pay taxes on it again?
Not that I’ve ever actually eaten one, mind you, but when you choose a name like “guacamole” as an alias, well, seriously, how good can they be in either form — whole or squashed into a slimy lumpy paste?
I keep hearing about how banks have started, well, raping their customers with sneaky fees and I like to think that I’m diligent enough when it comes to my finances to dodge them but, once again, Bank of America has dinged me with an unannounced fee that I’ve never once had to pay in the past.
I drove a GEO Metro in the early 1990’s. It was a GM product. Inside the door, it said Suzuki. Go figure.
I’m going to ignore the Brisk Iced Tea commercial for the time being but what was Chrysler thinking?
So while reconciling my numbers last night I noticed that my BoA checking account balance was off by $14.00.
Okay, so we’ve hit a bump in the road on the renovation process.
One annoyance that I seem to stew over repeatedly is traffic.
I’ve been *so* behind with posting over the last few months so much so that I didn’t even do my annual “
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