Most of my friends and family know that I’ve been getting down with my bad self where my health and fitness are concerned lately. One thing I’ve been doing is walking on a regular basis. What I’ve found is integral to my workout is having a decent playlist or music regimen that day. Without it, I get weak fast and lose motivation completely within minutes. It’s not always easy to remember which songs motivate me and which ones don’t, so I generally rely upon online lists to remind me of songs that pump me up. As such, I’m going to make playlists a regular feature here for cardio when I remember to do them. Feel free to comment with your favorite songs as well and I’ll try to integrate them into my routines. Enjoy!
Note: Some browsers may have difficulty viewing this without using the “Pop out” feature. Please feel free to use that to view the songs and play them if you’d like. I know Safari has difficulty with this particular playlist.
I know you read my title and you are questioning me already. What? Verizon Wireless? But they have awesome customer service! Everyone loves them!
Not everyone. Some of us think Verizon Wireless can die in a fire.
It takes desperation to get to that stage of thinking, my friends. Let me explain my situation.
In February of 2010 I got the Droid Eris. I enjoyed that phone a lot. It was cute and man could that thing zing along. Unfortunately, my Eris had a sickness. When I would type on it, it would scroll to the left and stay there or mix and match my words. It did this on all models and it finally became a known issue and around Christmas of 2010, Verizon offered to replace my Eris with the Droid Incredible.
Keep in mind I pay money every month for an extended warranty to make sure that my phone works.
From the beginning of my time with the Droid Incredible, the phone would randomly reboot. I didn’t notice it but once or twice a week because my phone generally stayed on silent. When the random reboots started taking place in the middle of my phone calls, I decided to start seeing if there was a pattern to the problem. None was found. I left the ringer and notifications on and realized that the reboots were taking place at least once within every 12 hours. This was unacceptable to me and I called Verizon.
I explained that, in my job, it is important that I not inadvertently hang up on clients who may not be ready to deal with my hanging up on them and then not being able to call them right back because my phone is busy saying, “Droid!” and rebooting. They sent me a refurbished replacement Droid incredible. Within 12 hours the phone had rebooted again. I called Verizon back.
Over the course of week I spent over 10 hours on the phone with Verizon reps who generally put me in tears with their lack of understanding and down talking to me and went through 4 phones. Few of them made decent notes on my account and I was forced to re-explain my situation every single time I called. I also had to talk to two reps on every call (Tier 1 and then a Tech). I made 3 trips to Fed-Ex, a 20 minute drive, to either pick up phones or send them back. Finally, an understanding rep sent me a different model. Before I agreed to it, I asked her to look to see if there were any known issues with that phone. “Nope, there are none!” she cheerfully stated.
She cheerfully lied.
When I got the phone, a Samsung Fascinate, I was excited. No random reboots here. I was pleased. I loved all things about the phone and I thought that I could finally relax.
This was until I went to work the next day. I rely upon my GPS to get me everywhere. I use Waze to show me accidents or hazards on the way there and I also sometimes have to go places that I’m not familiar. I need my gps because I’m honestly not good with directions.
Tonight, I called Verizon and talked to Charles. Charles ran me through some fun tests and listened when I told him I’d tried everything I could find on the net (remember, I like this phone–I liked my Incredible, too) and checked his own known issues where he confirmed that “yep, this is unfixable unless you want to do things outside of what I can help you with.” Yep. I know. Rooting is the only known fix for this and I wasn’t about to void the warranty I pay for every month. He was very nice and offered to replace the phone with a different phone. I considered it, but the phone he wanted to replace the Samsung with also has known issues with rebooting. I am not wanting to get into that particular bag of nuts yet again. I politely declined and told him I’d try to stick this out a bit longer.
Two hours later, I went on my evening walk. For those that don’t know, I try to walk as often as I can and one of the things that helps me the most is my application for Cardiotrainer. What I didn’t realize is that because my GPS always says “still searching,” my Cardiotrainer wouldn’t log my workouts at all. This was a dealbreaker. I walked home in disgust and immediately called Verizon. Charles had politely offered so surely this wouldn’t be an issue for me, right?
Wrong. Remember how I told you how I was treated with the Incredible? Here we go again. “I’m sorry, since we sent you the Fascinate, I can’t send you another device.” What? Charles said you could and had your rep been honest in the first place, we could have avoided all of this in the first place. “I don’t know what Charles told you, but he didn’t indicate that you went through anything technical nor do his notes indicate that he offered to switch out your device.” Well, we’ve already noted that reps don’t write anything except the bad stuff in my file, so color me unsurprised. How about when I told her how I did a factory reset and, because I’m clearly a lying liar, she asked me in a smart tone, “Oh? How do you do a factory reset.” I said, “Really? I’ve done these with every phone I’ve had. I’m not new to this. I don’t have it in front of me so it’s going to be hard for me to remember the steps very well but…” and then I went on with the steps. Thank you, tech, for implying that I lie because clearly my new phone isn’t NEW ENOUGH for me. Even though I said at the beginning of the call if “someone could fix this problem in this particular phone I would like to stay with this phone.” Hey, you’re a clever cookie. You got me. I was so jonesing for something else that I didn’t do everything in my power to keep this cool freaking thing so I could get a phone that frankly is a smaller and a little heavier than I wanted.
Also color me unsurprised that yet another rep is willing to work with me on fixing a problem that I shouldn’t even be having.
Verizon, you place your reputation on excellence in coverage and customer service. I’ve received neither of those in my entirety in this contract. What I know is that you are wasting my time and your money by sending me defective devices and giving me the runaround when I call you on your behavior. Fix the devices, fix the problems and send me a phone that works and you won’t hear from me again.
What’s sad is that I’m a throwaway customer to them, even though I’ve been a loyal Verizon customer since 2003. 7 years is a long time. Longer than some marriages. After all the pushing you did on me last week to go ahead and upgrade early, can I just say that I am incredibly thankful that I was smarter than that. Why on earth would I re-upp a contract with a company who treats me in a way that puts me in tears after a phone conversation? Who feels like it’s ok to waste 2 hours of my time a night when I’m working on my dissertation with their nonsense instead of just doing the right thing?
Verizon, I’m done. You and I are breaking up. At the end of my contract, we’re through. I’d sooner get a pre-paid junk phone than deal with awful customer service and phones that don’t work. You’re no better than Sprint when dealing with your customers. You have a lot of growing up to do if you want to stay at the top. Just remember it doesn’t take much to fall.
Being in the fields I’m in professionally, I hear a lot of people that are upset in regards to the economy. I think they are probably feeling that way with some righteous judgment, at the same time, there is a sense of entitlement that comes from the folks with a bachelors degree. I’ve often heard, “I have a bachelors degree! I should be able to get a job without trouble and instead I’m battling people that barely have a high school diploma. I was told that the key to getting a job when I was an adult was the bachelors degree. Why is this so hard?”
Well, probably for quite a few reasons.
The bachelors degree isn’t the magic key to having a job. No degree is in an economy where jobs are scarce and even Mcdonalds isn’t hiring as many as are willing to work there. Here is what you don’t want to hear. Your degree isn’t worth as much as it used to be. Plenty of people get degrees that don’t deserve them or don’t have the skills a degree purports, so a degree doesn’t mean as much as it used to.
I know, it’s sad. It’s painful. It’s true.
What I know is that students can no-show to classes most of the semester and beg amnesty and in most cases, they can get it. Colleges now don’t want to be known as “hard” or they lose tuition money and the goal is student retention, even if it means giving in to students that don’t deserve it. An unexcused absence is almost always overlooked and students that don’t deserve an A, B, or C and truly deserve the D or the F, will generally get a better grade if they ask a professor for clemency. Why? Because adjuncts have little flexibility when it comes down to what they can say no to and remember, the goal is to retain students.
Fine. We can blame the adjuncts, of which I’m one, but then we also need to remember that schools will accept just about anyone and as long as they meet requirements, they get to graduate. Ds get degrees. So, when those D degrees go out for employment, they can say they have their bachelors just like those that got A-degrees.
The government has made it much easier now to go to school. Everyone can get loans. Not everyone can pay them back, but everyone can go. That has made the market saturated with people with bachelors degrees. According to Factcheck.org and the Census Bureau, 27% of the population has at least a bachelors degree. Welcome to your competition. It’s not a status symbol anymore. It’s also not necessarily a sign of hard work (see above paragraph) or intelligence. It is a sign that you met the requirements. People can get college credit in pickleball (Oh my gosh, do I love pickleball, but that’s another blog post). If I can get 2 college credits for playing pickleball, what indication does that have that I’m a well-rounded, intelligent person?
Lastly, the jobs that are available don’t necessarily need a bachelors degree. What I’ve seen are a bunch of overqualified people scrambling for jobs that are beneath their status because there are no jobs available. Yes, I know you are overqualified to file papers and answer the telephone, however, that is what is available. People in their 50s are now delivering pizza to make ends meet. People with doctoral degrees are wondering if they will make retirement.
Why isn’t a bachelors degree enough? Because there isn’t enough work for everyone to go around. Of course we could stir things up by bringing up illegal immigration, our country’s debt, extreme outsourcing or other reasons why there might not be enough jobs available, but the bottom line is that there aren’t the funds for the people that need them, we have a number of baby boomers that can’t leave the jobs they have to make room for others to take them because they aren’t financially secure enough to retire, and people that start working a lot earlier and are qualified to do more things thanks to the advancement of technology.
It doesn’t get better, it gets worse. Things have to change. This is why your bachelors isn’t enough. Now, the question is what do you do about it?
This summer seems to have been the summer of reading in this house and I couldn’t wait to read this book. In the same vein of going on a trip and having a life experience that I found in “Eat, Pray, Love,” Sisters of the Sari by Brenda L. Baker is one of those books that will grab you and transport you off to India to live in someone else’s shoes for a little while.
Kiria is a Canadian CEO who decides to take a vacation to the non-touristy spots in India. What she finds is that people are all too willing to fleece a white tourist and, after losing her luggage, what she really wants are clean clothes and a little bit of understanding. She finds it in Santoshi, an Indian woman who gives her the last of her money so she can travel back to her hotel. In her quest to repay Santoshi, she discovers that her life has not been as cut and dry as she imagined and that there is much left to be discovered about herself and about others.
First, let’s hit the plot. I was intrigued and entertained by the plot throughout the story. Ms. Baker winds a tale nicely and vividly. Both the setting and characters were well drawn and secondary characters were nicely used to help flesh out the important aspects of the novel. My one complaint is that I feel like I ended the book not knowing or understanding Kiria any better than when I started. In other words, her dynamics didn’t feel like they changed much to me nor did I think she came to much understanding of herself. Yes, she absolutely went to huge lengths (without giving away too much of the plot here) to help others and do great things, but when we end the book, I feel like she herself has changed very little, quite honestly. Elements of who she was were there from the beginning and her growth was not strong. Nor was that of Santoshi. Perhaps the greatest growth came from Laxmi, who was a secondary character who realizes that even in a culture that does not support women’s liberation, you can have it all and you can be happy.
Overall, I truly enjoyed reading this book. It hit on the cultural issues I found lacking in other books regarding Indian tradition and culture (fiction novels, that is) and I enjoyed the characters. More depth in them would have been nice, but not everyone wants a character who goes beyond the surface level to scratch deep. A very nice summer read that went by quickly.
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in order to review it. Thanks!
Ok, this isn’t mine. I don’t own the video. But this? It has to be shared. Thanks to my friend Jules for sharing with me. This is why people think all single women over 30 are destined to be crazy old cat women. Thanks, Debbie. You big jerk.
Life is like a game. We all have challenges, thoughts, opinions and beliefs. Often, it feels like something out there, life, karma, catty people, or blue shells (for the Kart lovers), seeks to bring us down. Luckily, we always get up. This is where I wear my heart on my sleeve and my foot in my mouth.
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We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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Life is like a game. We all have challenges, thoughts, opinions and beliefs. Often, it feels like something out there, life, karma, catty people, or blue shells (for the Kart lovers), seeks to bring us down. Luckily, we always get up. This is where I wear my heart on my sleeve and my foot in my mouth.
