This is the thread where we call out the companies everybody hates and post stories.

5 times phone cloning, people. 5 times.

August 15, 2004 -- A 26-year-old skateboarder is scarred for life after she fell onto a red-hot Con Edison manhole cover — mere blocks from the scene of a tragic death earlier this year when a woman stepped onto an electrified Con Ed cover.

Magazine receptionist and DJ Liz Wallenberg told The Post she was skating to see friends at an East Village club early Wednesday when she hit a bump in the road at 13th Street and Second Avenue.

"I landed with my arm and back straight onto the metal cover," Wallenberg said. "I noticed it was kind of hot, but I didn't realize how bad it was until my skin started to sizzle."

But Wallenberg, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said: "They promised they would check everything and fix those problems. And now I have a manhole cover [branded] on my back."

She said she's considering legal action against Con Ed, as she was unable to work for three days — nor was she able to perform her regular set, as "DJ L-Train," at the Williamsburg club Metropolitan on Wednesday.

xpost h we were being teh funny.

Bicycling to work the other day I stopped at the Burger King (I know, I know) for a coffee, and there's one guy ahead of me in line buying a cheeseburger. When the teenage girl at the counter told him it was 25 cents extra for cheese, he proceeded to get INCREDIBLY irate, raising his voice to shouting level about how he could "Go down to the store and BUY a whole goddamn POUND of cheese for a couple of bucks!" Over a quarter! Then he cancels his order and demands to speak to the manager, whom he's still berating as I get my coffee and slink out.

As I'm leaving on my bike, the guy comes storming out and climbs into a van marked MIDWEST UTILITIES (the local gas & power monopoly). All I could think as he peeled out of the lot was how many slices of cheese my $300 monthly utility bill would buy.

.. Just wondering who to hate & why ...

And by the way, nice way to monitor a system. Send some clown around town with a phone. No wonder the coverage is so spotty.

xpost - sorry for my response then!

They are expensive and dumb. One time we rented one of their trucks to move some furniture. We drove it out to Blacksburg, VA, and loaded it up, and then found that the back door was messed up and wouldn't close. We called and they said they were sending a repairman. He never came. So then we drove to a garage with the back door open to have them close it. Fuckers. But mostly their prices are really bad, Ryder was a much better deal and the truck was much nicer and cleaner when we moved to Chicago.

I briefly worked for a company that made cellphone earpieces. I processed return orders for defective merchandise, and nearly every single one of these orders came from C0mpU5A, though we supplied other vendors with much more merchandise than them amd it seemed unlikely that they were the only ones receiving defective merchandise. I'd receive about 200 orders a day from them, always from individual people who worked at various C0mpU5A's across the country, requesting return #s for 2-3 items of merchandise at a time. In addition to that, they always used incorrect order forms and non-existent product codes, meaning that it took at least 20 minutes to properly process each one of their orders.

In contrast, I received about 5-10 orders from from our hundreds of other vendors a day, in total. And it would usually be for a whole damaged shipment.

Everyone at the office thought they were scamming the company and exploiting discounts, but didn't bother to do much about it.

The band and I were looking for a memory card for our Bose 4track digital recorder. There were several of them under the counter, but we wanted to hold them in our hands and look and compare them. There were people walking back and forth back behind the corner, and one guy who was helping someone look at cameras verrrrrrrry slowly.

After ten minutes, I go over to the guy and politely interrupt saying, Excuse me, I hate to bother, but could you open the cabinet so we can look at the cards until you're done with this gentlemen, please?

He acted like I had just asked for they keys to his wife's chasity belt. I CAN'T DO THAT I HAVE TO WATCH YOU AS YOU LOOK AT THEM FOR THEFT CONTROL. So in other words, we'd have to wait until someone could babysit us while we looked at them.

Instead, we went to the BestBuy down the street, which is pretty awful in its own right. The cards were hanging unsupervised on a rack in the back of the store. We pawed them until we found the right one and paid about ten bucks less for it.

(Since it was BestBuy, we had to stand in line for thirty minutes, but....anyway.)

Also: Sears is evil. But you probably knew that already.

PSE&G I also hate.

B35t Buy is EEEEVIL, though I imagine most dept. stores are like this. I worked at one for 1 whole week last year - I hoped for the Music Dept. (since that's my area of expertise), but they were short-staffed in Audio / Video, so off I went to sell DVD players. The big thing @ BB is to sell the accessories - wires, surge protectors, warranties, etc. - since the stores don't make much money on the big ticket items. Since money's made selling these upgrades, BB wants folks on the floor that'll sell the upgrades - you can't sell the upgrades, you don't get hours. I actually managed to sell a TV / VCR with a warranty while there, though I felt like I was pulling my tongue through my ass while doing it.

Anyway, for the 3 days I actually worked there (approximately 20 hours), I was given about 1 hour of training, & left alone multiple times in the department, left to my own devices in trying to push product. Without any B35t Buy gear, either - like, y'know, hook me up with a blue shirt already so I at least LOOK like an asshole, too. A couple of times, the store manager wandered by & saw me by myself, then fetched the head of the dept. (usually off trying to sucker a customer into buying Home-Theatre-in-a-Box or some DirectTV contract) and had me stick to him (or one of his top dogs) like a tick on a fat kid.

Runner-up for Worst Thing About My BB Experience = getting up for a Sunday morning 7 AM "employee meeting" to prep for the Christmas shopping season (especially GREEN FRIDAY, AKA the day after Thanksgiving) - lots of milling around, pretending to be customers, standing in loooong lines, punctuated by various supervisors sharing their experiences re: the trials & tribulations of the XMas shopping season & other such things. Lots of cheering & whooping and "sir yes sir" call & response stuff, too.

Worst Thing, By Far = seeing the top sales rep in my dept. upsell some pregnant woman on all sorts of high-end wires & surge protectors & static cleaner-uppers on top of the home theatre stuff she bought. So much stuff, in fact, that he (& I) helped cart the stuff out of the store. The husband (who bailed just before the wife got upsaled to fetch the car) looked at the bags of extra crap like they were dead baby seals. After me & the sales guru come back into the store, the store manager (seemingly affable, slightly rotund & balding, wears glasses) & dept. supervisor walk on by, give the kid congrats on the upsale. "But why didn't you sell her on the HIGH HIGH end wires? And what about a service plan?" asked the store manager. Kid hems & haws, says (in essence), "Dude, I got an extra $180 added to that bill!" Store manager replies, "Gee, I guess you really don't want those extra hours, then, do you?" Kid backtracks, stutters, scoffs, begins to state his case; store manager says, "Just kidding," claps him on the shoulder, smiles like a serial killer, then walks off to beat up Alec Baldwin's character from _Glengarry Glen Ross_. I quit the next day.

Oh and

I HATE APPLE

2) Motorola made the V265, which I bought a few months ago and which, on half the calls, made horrible static noises and made it so the other person couldn't hear me. I got it replaced and after a few days had the same problem again.

I am still pretty happy with T-Mobile so far, despite discovering that txt msgs are a nickel each under their normal plan.

I just got a notice from some kind of collection agency. They are working for...SPRINT PCS. Who are trying to "collect" from me the exact amount they determined THEY owed ME after I got billed for someone else's phone calls to the Dominican Republic...FIVE TIMES.

Fucking cocksuckers. WTF!! They didn't even spell my name right, this collection agency.

I actually have never hated Comcast. I've subscribed to and off of my premium channels, rarely wasting time on hold, and usually getting the connection fee waived. I'm much more likely to like giant cable conglomerates after a decade of Century Cable in southeastern CT, a company that defied all logic and was obviously and completely the worst cable company ever. I didn't get access to PPV till 1994, ESPN was a "premium channel" until 1997, and TBS didn't even hit until 1998. When they got bought out by the evil Adelphia, everyone in the Norwich area cheered. LOUDLY.

Although they do lease generators to Glastonbury so eeerm. Twats but helpful.

scottish and southern, FUCK YOU

1) why have you suddenly decided you supply my electricity, when
2) i've never even heard of you before
3) your phoneline is engaged? not even a "your call is important to us" bullshit queueing system, what kind of tinpot cowboys are you anyway?

also, what the fuck is this on your site?

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1068/1355217182_7b3766b827.jpg

ok it was actually british gas that made a mistake, sorry little southern scottish whoever you ares