Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Breakfast at Hawthorne's. Breakfast this morning was at the historic Hawthorne Hotel in Salem with over 200 members of the North Shore Chamber of Commerce in attendance. Suffice to say that certain Senators and Representatives had the crowd believing that there is an organized, cohesive, pro-active, attendance-heavy Legislative Caucus advocating and fighting on behalf of the region's interests. Sounds good to me. But what caucus were they referring to? Not the one my Rep co-chairs.
CNN was there to cover Kerry delegate, Wayne Burton, President of North Shore Community College. As things wrapped up, my good colleague joined the CNN groupies (she is already a Cowboy Junkie groupie), while I was much more interested in checking out a newbie company that was busy outside promoting their feature product i.e. they had a custom-painted Hummer parked outside the hotel and were giving demos. The company is called BioDefense Corporation and their feature product is called MailDefender. Basically MailDefender is a supped-up washing machine that decontaminates incoming mail at the point of entry. Here are a few touted product features:
* Operates safely, simply and securely in your facility [well that's good...]
* Uses safe, proven, commercialized disinfection technologies [as opposed to unsafe, unproven, and non-commercialized disinfection technologies??]
*Sanitizes up to 12 lbs. of mail in just under 45 minutes with no extensive drying or cooling time [beats my washing machine, that's for sure]
* Alerts the user to the presence of anthrax, smallpox and/or ricin [an optional feature available at purchase and installation]. Oh my, what a world.
Even so I told our Internet provider Comcast to switch our service over to the new house on AUGUST 7th, some idiot entered JULY 12th into their work log instead. A completely random date if ever there was one. It takes only seconds to turn off service. But it takes hours, and hours, and hours -- no wait a minute, DAYS -- on the phone with Comcast to get it back on. In fact it's still not up and running correctly. When things like this happen, I milk it until I get lots of credit put on my bill for the inconvenience of it all. The hubby simply blames Bush, fat Americans, SUV's, me, the kids, and the dog that we have no Internet service right now.
The gas company isn't on my Favorite List either at the moment. A unionized, monopolistic company, the term customer service is a foreign concept to them. All I want them to do is come by my damn house and run a gas line up so that the plumbers can convert our heating system. That's not asking too much is it? One of their excuses is that "[they] don't work if it's raining." There is a silver lining because the painters come to paint the inside of the house when it rains. So I find myself in a constant schizo state of wishing it would rain and not rain at the same time.
CNN was there to cover Kerry delegate, Wayne Burton, President of North Shore Community College. As things wrapped up, my good colleague joined the CNN groupies (she is already a Cowboy Junkie groupie), while I was much more interested in checking out a newbie company that was busy outside promoting their feature product i.e. they had a custom-painted Hummer parked outside the hotel and were giving demos. The company is called BioDefense Corporation and their feature product is called MailDefender. Basically MailDefender is a supped-up washing machine that decontaminates incoming mail at the point of entry. Here are a few touted product features:
* Operates safely, simply and securely in your facility [well that's good...]
* Uses safe, proven, commercialized disinfection technologies [as opposed to unsafe, unproven, and non-commercialized disinfection technologies??]
*Sanitizes up to 12 lbs. of mail in just under 45 minutes with no extensive drying or cooling time [beats my washing machine, that's for sure]
* Alerts the user to the presence of anthrax, smallpox and/or ricin [an optional feature available at purchase and installation]. Oh my, what a world.
Even so I told our Internet provider Comcast to switch our service over to the new house on AUGUST 7th, some idiot entered JULY 12th into their work log instead. A completely random date if ever there was one. It takes only seconds to turn off service. But it takes hours, and hours, and hours -- no wait a minute, DAYS -- on the phone with Comcast to get it back on. In fact it's still not up and running correctly. When things like this happen, I milk it until I get lots of credit put on my bill for the inconvenience of it all. The hubby simply blames Bush, fat Americans, SUV's, me, the kids, and the dog that we have no Internet service right now.
The gas company isn't on my Favorite List either at the moment. A unionized, monopolistic company, the term customer service is a foreign concept to them. All I want them to do is come by my damn house and run a gas line up so that the plumbers can convert our heating system. That's not asking too much is it? One of their excuses is that "[they] don't work if it's raining." There is a silver lining because the painters come to paint the inside of the house when it rains. So I find myself in a constant schizo state of wishing it would rain and not rain at the same time.
Comments:
Post a Comment
