Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I’ve had a bajillion domains registered at GoDaddy for years, not because I particularly liked them, but more because it was easy. After my friend Dave died, I inherited all his domain names, and they were all on GoDaddy, so for ease I just transferred them to my account there.

But given their recent support of SOPA, plus their half-hearted retraction of same when they realized their posturing was not winning them any friends, was pretty disgusting. They backed down, but they won’t actively denounce SOPA. And they should.

So I started the process today to move all 46(!) of my domains to another registrar. (I inherited a LOT of domains from Dave!) But you can’t transfer a domain if it’s set to expire in the next seven days, so I had to renew six of them through GoDaddy before I could move them off. Here’s what happens when you renew domains on GoDaddy:

Click any of these for full size versions.

The first upsell. Notice all the disclaimer marks at the bottom.

The second upsell. This is just the part above the fold; about one third of all the “Special Offers” I had to scroll through before finding the “No Thanks” link.

LOLWUT??? I tried to renew ONE domain – faerytrail.com – for $8.99, and it tacked on 32 extra domains for a total of $293.44. Neato! All six domain names I tried to renew had at least one extra one tacked on that I didn’t want. This is, at the very least, highly immoral.

Last, but not least, the final upsell, after I winnowed out the chaff and bought the renewals for the six domains I wanted.

So, there you have it. Why GoDaddy sucks – and it’s not just because of SOPA.

Most Kindle books are wonderful, and I adore my Kindle. But I’ve recently run across a book that was scanned in and not checked for formatting or scanning errors, and it annoys me. It’s a novel called The Land of Laughs I ran across in the comments of a Boing Boing story.

So here’s the note I sent to Amazon about it:

Comments:Dear Amazon -”

I just wan- tecl you to know that the Kinclle version of #8230;The Land of Laughs -” a Novel is riclclled with stray characters, scanning issues, and other prob- lems that eat away at the enjoyment of reacling a good book.#8230;

This mess- age might be a little over the top…” but it’s representa- tive of the types of errors founcl in the text.#8230;

I got a response back a couple of hours later saying they have asked for it to be corrected and would let me know when a new version is available. Cool!

Walgreens failed today, spectacularly.

First, I logged on to my web account to cancel an auto refill. I got this:

Right. That doesn’t work, does it? So I emailed customer service to let them know. Logged back into my account to see if there was another way to cancel my refill and found, to my horror, that some other woman’s prescriptions were displayed in my account along with my own! WTF! So I know what medical conditions she has. I was absolutely horrified. Was she seeing my stuff? I called Walgreens and they promised to look into it. Uh huh.

A little while later, I actually went into my local Walgreens to pick up greeting cards to send the kids at camp. The pharmacist was shouting into the drive-through phone, top of his lungs, “OKAY, THIS IS A NEW PRESCRIPTION FOR CONCERTA! HAVE YOU TAKEN THIS BEFORE? THIS IS FOR ADDH (sic), DID YOU KNOW THAT, ABOUT THE ADDH?” WTF!

And lastly, I had sent an email to customer service this morning about the auto refill issue. I got an answer back at 1 AM. Thanking me for my product suggestion. WTF!