THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Well, you know, not really. But while driving to Cleveland I saw a car with a Mullinax license plate holder and it reminded me of that eponymous car commercial from my youth.

I also saw a sign off the Interstate in Columbus that said something along the lines of

“Closed for the foreseeable future because I am a black man”

So I’m not really sure what that’s about but yeah.

It really is amazing how little things are needed to travel with just myself and 2 older kids, as opposed to the whole armada

Here’s a letter that I just whipped out to Meijer
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Hello,

I am writing with a complaint from my recent shopping visit to Meijer store 224 (Marburg Ave Cincinnati OH) on Wednesday night around 6:30 p.m.

I came shopping with my entire family. Because I only needed to get a few things, I figured it was safe to bring everyone. Normally if I was doing a week’s worth of shopping I may have left my small children at home.

I quickly got my items and proceeded to the check out area. There were only 3 “regular” checkout lanes open, compared to 8 or so of the self checkout lanes. I understand that you probably are trying to save on paying more cashiers, and in general I applaud that. But this evening I had several coupons with my order, and I find that the self checkout machines always seem to “beep” on coupons (even though I’ve purchased the correct products in the appropriate amounts). These “beep”ings require a cashier override and since there is typically only 1 cashier for all of the self-checkouts, it manages to take approximately forever.

So I got in a regular lane. There were 2 people in front of me and I waited my turn. As the belt space opened up, I put my items on and waited. The gentleman in front of me was apparently having a problem. He bought 2 premade sub sandwiches and was arguing that they were supposed to be ringing up Buy 1 Get 1 Free. The cashier made 3 calls to various departments, eventually figuring out that he was correct, while I waited. But then this price correction apparently required a manager override. I waited. She called to customer service to request an override. I waited. As I waited, the gentleman requested 2 packs of cigarettes. The customer service manager apparently forgot about us, so while I waited, the cashier called again. The manager came over and put her code in and finally it was my turn.

The cashier scanned my items. The Cheerios that I bought did not ring up with the correct price, but eventually the cashier put in the correct (3/$5) price as an override. I gave her my coupons, and to my amazement, only 1 of them beeped! She verified that I had (of course) bought the right items in the correct amounts, and put in the coupon. I paid for my items, but of course my checkout (Catalina) coupon did not print out.

This week at my store, Meijer is offering a Buy 15 participating General Mills / Betty Crocker products, get a checkout coupon for 120 Box Tops for Education. Since it didn’t work, I trekked up to customer service where I waited (again) for my turn. Finally it came to be my turn and I explained my predicament to the gentleman working at the desk. He didn’t really have any idea what to do, so I suggested that in past times when these types of things have not worked (which sadly is all too frequent), the CS representative would just scan one of my items 15 times and the coupon prints out. He tried that with a variety of items that I had bought (all listed as “participating” items), but no coupon printed out. Finally I suggested that we try it at a regular lane. We went over there and finally! it worked and printed out my coupon.

I wished him well and left the store. All in all, from the moment I got in line to check out, to the moment when I was finally able to leave the store, it took 43 minutes.

Needless to say, this is unacceptable, and makes me much more likely to do my future shopping at Kroger or Bigg’s (especially since there are 6 Krogers that are convenient to me compared to the one Meijer store)

Thank you for reading this

Dan Miller
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Or actually that’s the letter I wanted to write to Meijer. Unfortunately, Meijer apparently only cares about the first 1400 characters of your experience. So THIS is the letter I actually sent to them.
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Hello,

I am writing with a complaint from my recent shopping visit to Meijer store 224 (Marburg Ave Cincinnati OH) on Wednesday night around 6:30 p.m.

Under the impression that you would be interested in my poor experience last night in the hopes that it would help you improve your customer experience, I wrote a detailed letter explaining my issues.

However, I am limited to 1400 characters. If you are interested in improving your store’s customer service, I would be happy to send you the whole detail.

The short answer is that due to various Meijer issues (price mistakes, coupon beeping, checkout coupons failing to print, etc) it took me 43 minutes (no exaggeration) from the time I went to check out until the time that I was finally able to leave the store.

Needless to say, this is unacceptable, and makes me much more likely to do my future shopping at Kroger or Bigg’s (especially since there are 6 Krogers that are convenient to me compared to the one Meijer store)

Thank you for reading this

Dan Miller

…I am going to hang up on you.

This happens all the time when I am on the phone with various companies, for call center / customer service type things. We do our business, complete the transaction or what have you and then I say something along the lines of “Thank you so much”, in the tone that means “this is the end”.

This is their cue to immediately launch into some spiel about either thanking me for being a customer or trying to upsell me on some related product or whatever. Frankly I don’t know what all it is because I HANG UP THE PHONE!

People (and really it’s companies because I’m sure these folks are just doing what their bosses are making them do / say) - the appropriate reponses to “Thank you so much” and the ending tone are:

a) You’re welcome
b) Have a nice day
c) Good-bye.

That is all.

Yes, yesterday was a great day in the coin finding world. While it seems obvious to me, allow me to explain that hitting for the coin cycle in this case means finding a penny, nickel, dime and quarter, all in the same day. I mixed my sports metaphors last night while explaining it to Carolyn calling it a “coin hat trick” which I guess would be finding at least 3 coins (maybe of the same kind) in the same day?

Found a penny at work on the ground at the cafeteria. Then my son found a dime in the driveway (which we had previously ruled would count). Then the goldmine at the park for soccer practice. There was a quarter stuck in the coin slot of one of the pop vending machines. It was jammed in there too tightly for fingers, but Carolyn was able to snag it with some nail clippers

Then she also grabbed another quarter from the ground underneath the pop machines and alerted me to a nickel also down there. It was pretty far back there so I grabbed a stick to try and bring it closer in. Complicating things are that these vending machines are behind a fence-type cage, with only cutouts for the areas where you would put in coins / take out snacks / pop, etc. So it was an awkward angle trying to get that nickel, and eventually I gave up that the stick was just not going to cut it. Carolyn then reminded me of the ice scraper in my car, so I went and got that. It was definitely up to the task and the coin cycle was complete.

Total on the day - 66 cents, a definite record, and brings up the total to $3.86.

A good 7 months and change after I bought it (well traded for it), I finally got my riding mower out for the first mow. It had gone through a few problems. First of all, the battery died. After testing it out with the van battery (and possibly destroying the van battery in the process?), I finally went out and bought a new battery on Saturday.

So Saturday I got it started and took it out and about. But I couldn’t get it to actually cut. Eventually I figured out that there was a lever to pull that drops the cutting part down to the ground, but even after I pulled that (or pushed it I think), it still wasn’t cutting. It was hot and I didn’t feel like messing with it any more so I gave up.

But last night I was back with a new batch. After taking it out and trying a few things, I noticed a new lever I hadn’t pushed before. It was a little sticky but I flipped the switch and lo and behold the blades started a-swirlin.

I’m not sure what “PTO” means but apparently that’s code for “turn the blades on”

So I spent an hour or so cutting the grass. It was kind of cool. As I have mentioned before, there’s just something cool about the first time you do stuff like this (mow your own lawn, or shovel snow, etc) - some sort of sense of just pride I guess. The 2nd through millionth times you do them? Not so much.

Anyways, I’m still (obviously) a rookie on the tractor and so I’m working on figuring out the best way to cut the yard. As you no doubt can imagine, the tractor doesn’t have quite the turning radius of a hand mower. So it makes the corners (and near trees and such) a little more tricky. Seems like it would be a good math problem. Given a tractor t with turning radius r, determine the optimal path for cutting a yard with dimensions d. Or somethin.

So those of you who don’t subscribe to my other blog Every Whatever might have missed a recap of the various trips that we recently took to / from North Carolina.

Day 1: Cincinnati to Hershey: 27 counties (7 new)
Day 2: Hershey to Kitty Hawk: 21 counties (19 new)
Day 3: Kitty Hawk to Blacksburg 25 counties (22 new)
Day 4: Blacksburg to Cincinnati: 21 counties (16 new)

Of course, it has not escaped my attention that the reason you might not be subscribed to Every Whatever is that you find road trip reports intensely boring. In that case, feel free to head on over to Carolyn’s vacation report

So remember back in March when I talked about sending in logic puzzles I had written to Dell Magazines?

Well anyways, I (finally) got a reply back from them. I got a letter in the mail saying that they had reviewed the one I sent to them (”Shootout at DK’s Corral) and it “was reviewed by two separate test-solvers, both of whom found the idea of triangular numbers just too confusing for our regular solvers.”

So, I sent off an email trying to figure out how I could best modify the puzzle to meet their guidelines, so we shall see how that goes.

So on my way to work today I saw one of those ARTIMIS signs on 71 northbound. It said

Work Crew ahead
North of Rest Area
Expect Long Delays

As I drove past I thought well isn't that one of the most worthless messages ever? The only rest area I can think of is the one right by the crossing of the Little Miami river about mile marker 40 (or about 25 miles north of the sign).

So any regular commuting traffic will be off the highway by the time that they get there (and true to that thought I saw no delays during my trip, long or otherwise).

And any travelers passing through, that might be affected by the so-called long delays, won't have any idea where the rest area is or when to expect delays!!

I'd have replaced the whole 2nd line with something like Mile Marker 40. Then it becomes at least somewhat useful.

As a side note, I have recently started taking advantage of blogger's "blog email" address - where you can send an email to a particular address and it just automatically blogs it for you. You don't have all the formatting options that you have in Blogger's GUI but I am finding it useful for quick, shorter posts.