While shopping for a household cleaning product, I was shocked to see how dangerous most of the products are. According to their labels, the risks range from mild skin irritation up to “irreversible eye damage”. Ouch — these things sound more like what you’d find in a toxic waste dump than anything you’d bring into […]

Asking a customer to “calm down” is probably one of the worst things you can do. Think about it for a moment: if the person is genuinely pissed off, they’re going to view the request as condescending — an indication that you don’t understand why they’re upset. Similarly, if they’re already calm but you ask […]

Thankfully, I have never worked for a collections agency. But given the current economic climate, I’ve been party to more than one conversation where a customer owes a vendor some money. They’ve got the same sob story as everyone else, and want a few more weeks or months to pay up. The trouble is, this […]

Whenever I make certain types of changes to my investment account, the company sends me a written confirmation in the mail. (This happens despite my preference for email notifications — “for your security”, they assure me.) So I get a letter in the mail, no big deal. But this goes from curious to annoying when […]

Every day or so, I get a piece of spam from a site that I no longer use. Technically, I guess it’s not spam, since I did actually sign up for the site many months or even years ago, and I probably never turned off their email options. But here’s where it gets fishy: these […]

While waiting for a haircut over the weekend, I was subjected to the usual assortment of generic pop music on the in-store radio system. Interestingly, the salon just had the stereo tuned to a normal radio station; they weren’t playing Muzak or satellite radio. As each song came and went, I noticed a striking similarity […]

As I look ahead at my plans for the new year, I keep coming back to a troubling observation: anecdotally, the things I work the “hardest” on tend to be the least satisfying in the long run. I’m not saying that pursuing a goal isn’t worthwhile, or that putting effort into something is a bad […]

Software products have long and complex license agreements. Movies on DVD don’t seem to have any lengthy license, just a warning not to copy or show the movie in public. So why do you only have to agree to the software license once, yet DVDs stick the same warning up there every time you watch […]