Entries tagged with “Rant” from CrabAppleLane Blog

Bet you don't see that title every day. Today's mini-rant and QOTD courtesy of USA Today:

Nearly 3 million homeowners were behind on their mortgages at the end of last year, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) said last week. An additional 1 million-plus borrowers were at risk of imminent foreclosure.

When an ordinary citizen gets in over his head, Mortgage Bankers say, "Awww, that's too bad.". Now that Mortgage Bankers have gotten in over their head, this ordinary citizen is tempted to say the same thing. However, I can only say this from the comfort of my locked-in interest rates on my mortgage, credit cards, and auto loan for the next few years. Hopefully, the crisis will have been dealt with before I need to ask anyone for money again.

First hummingbird sightings at CrabAppleLane:
March 14, 2001
March 17, 2002
March 10, 2003
March 20, 2004
March 12, 2005
March 12, 2006
March 11, 2007
March 9, 2008

Quote of the Day

I can't get you to pay if you've got no skin in the game.

Dennis Lauria, Lender and loan servicer

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "It might be a chick thing. I’m not sure. It could just be a wacko thing."

One of the products I deal with daily is made of glass, plastic, and metal. They usually weigh about 10 pounds and retail from $200 each to about $1500 each. The one I talk about today is worth a little over $500. Included in that retail price is maybe $2 worth of packaging. Also factored into that retail price is the outrageously high number of damage claims due to shipping and handling. They get tossed around. Back in the day, shippers used to mark a package “Fragile” or “Handle With Care”. Apparently, that isn’t enough any more. To the rescue comes a new kind of warning label. I received a package that sported one of these yesterday. Mine was green. As Adrian Monk might say, “Here’s the thing”: The product was in its own box. The shipping genius then fashioned another, MUCH larger box out of two boxes that he/she must have had lying around and placed the product inside of it with no other packing material whatsoever and slapped that green warning label on it. It was kind of like a shoe box with only one shoe in it. If you move or tilt the larger box, the smaller one inside was going to get jostled. The warning label did what it was supposed to do. It was RED when I saw it which meant it received rough handling. Luckily, the product inside was undamaged.

I deal with another product daily that is hazardous. You have to be certified to ship hazardous material but you don’t have to be certified to receive hazardous material. Someone else needs to figure out the logic to that because it still mystifies me. Anyway, these products retail from $600 to $800 and are labeled “Explosive: Ground Shipping Only” or something like that. They get tossed around, too. Not only do they get tossed around but I once received one of these where a shipping genius slapped an overnight air freight label over the “Explosive: Ground Shipping Only” label and put it on an air carrier. That one came to me sometime after the ValuJet crash because I remember thinking about it. The thought that something intended for me could cause an airliner to go down? It bothered me. Hopefully, that sort of thing can't happen any more but yesterday's incident doesn't give me much comfort.

NO ONE IS READING THE LABELS

Got any shipping nightmares? I probably have another couple of hundred but I'd like to hear yours.

Quote of the Day

We had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
Meeting all the groovey people
We've rocked the Milky Way so far
We danced around with Borey Alice
We're space truckin' round the the stars

Deep Purple, Space Truckin'

Blog of the day here.

Quote from said blog: "The OS-engineering world is pretty small. A surprising number of Windows employees have worked at Apple in the past. And vice versa. Are these guys stealing?"