The Continuing Saga of Car Wars

After work this afternoon I made sure to stop in at the restaurant where my car was hit last night and speak with my employee.

Poor mae…

Anyway, when i spoke with him on the phone earlier he mentioned something about just paying for it out of pocket. Problem is then i have to pay for it and try to collect my money. I’m not having any of that shit.

I took a pic of his insurance card and the damage to both if our cars. He is supposed to call his agent monday but i left him a voice mail any way. If he hasn’t called me by monday afternoon i will pay my agent a visit and allstate can sue the shit out of him. Just as long as my car is fixed.

When he found out i was coming up there and wanted his insurance info he apparently got very nervous and started shaking and dropping stuff. He looked like he was going to pike when i took the pictures. Oh fucking well. Learn to drive…

Rolling In The Deep

The Continuing Saga of Car Wars

After work this afternoon I made sure to stop in at the restaurant where my car was hit last night and speak with my employee.

Poor mae…

Anyway, when i spoke with him on the phone earlier he mentioned something about just paying for it out of pocket. Problem is then i have to pay for it and try to collect my money. I’m not having any of that shit.

I took a pic of his insurance card and the damage to both if our cars. He is supposed to call his agent monday but i left him a voice mail any way. If he hasn’t called me by monday afternoon i will pay my agent a visit and allstate can sue the shit out of him. Just as long as my car is fixed.

When he found out i was coming up there and wanted his insurance info he apparently got very nervous and started shaking and dropping stuff. He looked like he was going to pike when i took the pictures. Oh fucking well. Learn to drive…

The Black Keys

Discovered these guys through my wife a few months ago. I particularly enjoyed this song.

Buyer Beware

I’m real funny about clothes. Hell, most of my shit is over 20 years old and up until a couple of years ago anything I had bought new amounted to the same style jeans I have been wearing forever and t-shirts from vacation spots which have taken the place of t-shirts from concerts.  I guess a lot of guys are pretty much the same way, with a few exceptions. I guess we are the same about hair styles as well.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I started noticing that there were a couple of companies that are manufacturing some pretty cool clothing. Roar and Affliction are a couple of them. I took a liking to quite a bit of the stuff that Affliction makes and sells. It’s up to date but still sort of ‘80s metal, which of course is when I came of age and my brain will always be partially stuck there. Never mind that I’m 44 and supposed to be past that crap.

So I started purchasing Affliction. Not a shitload but considering how much they charge for their stuff I probably have a couple grand invested. Since I am not a rock star or anything like that (except to my children) that’s quite a bit. Most of it I buy locally from the Buckle or occasionally online.

About a year ago I purchased a pair of jeans and almost immediately a button fell off the back pocket. WTF? No huge deal but I tried to get in touch with someone from the company and my emails went ignored. I never pursued it after that.

This past December I purchased myself a $600 leather jacket from Affliction through Buckle’s online store as a birthday gift to myself. Never mind that I got it during a great pre-Christmas sale, the going price was $600. As a matter of fact it was the same jacket I gave my son as a 21st birthday present last year. I liked it so much that I wanted it for myself and considering that my current jacket had finally started falling apart it was time to get a new one.

Anyway, flash forward to the end of January. The jacket has metal studs on the back and epaulets and three of them had already fallen off. Christ, as I mentioned I am 44. It’s not like I’m moshing in a pit or running through the woods or other stupid shit. I wear it to work and then come home. So I started emailing Affliction, asking how I could get it repaired or where I could find some replacement studs for the damned thing. No answer. So I emailed them again. And again. Still no fucking answer. At that point I posted to their Facebook page. I figured someone would see it, shit, they have something like 70,000 likes on their page and they post daily, usually several times.

Still no answer. Not only that but I think maybe they deleted the fucking message off their wall. Their wasn’t even any cussing in it. I was fairly polite as I always am until someone really pisses me off and I feel that I have no resort.

So I waited another week and finally emailed Buckle, which as I mentioned is who I purchased it through. The director of their Internet merchandising responded within 24 hours, recommending that I take it into the local store and show it to the manager. Since I am on vacation this week I stopped by a couple of days ago. While they don’t carry any replacement studs or anything like that the manager graciously took my jacket and apologized for the lack of customer service on Affliction’s part and they ordered me a brand new one, shipped straight to my house. I just tracked it a short while ago and it’s supposed to be here tomorrow. That’s pretty fucking expedited and nice on their part. Perhaps whoever is running the PR show for Affliction, who are so fucking worried about clothing Rock Stars and MMA fighters on my dime, should take a fucking lesson from Buckle. Of course the folks at Buckle realize that without consumers on their side they won’t have anyone to sell their stuff to. I guess Affliction doesn’t have to worry about that shit.

I was going to file a BBB complaint but since the company I actually did business with was Buckle I won’t but I did look up Affliction Clothing on the Better Business Bureau and guess what? They got an “F”. That figures. “F” doesn’t stand for fabulous or fucking awesome at the Better Business Bureau. What it does stand for though is this:

“We strongly question the company’s reliability for reasons such as that they have failed to respond to complaints, their advertising is grossly misleading, they are not in compliance with the law’s licensing or registration requirements, their complaints contain especially serious allegations, or the company’s industry is known for its fraudulent business practices.”

Damn, that’s harsh but it’s exactly what I have dealt with as well.

As much as I like the clothing and will probably continue to wear what I already own, I highly doubt I will ever spend another fucking red cent on anything manufactured by  them again. There are plenty of folks who make quality stuff that will be more than willing to take my money and then answer any questions I have without making me kiss their fucking ass or jump through hoops to do it.

Two More Days of Vacation Left

Taking the wee one to the doctor shortly so I figured I would stop in for a minute or two.

My youngest has always been pretty tiny but for the last year or so she has had quite a few growth spurts and the growing pains are excruciating for her. I can remember how my legs hurt as a teen and it was not something I particularly enjoyed.

While it is most likely exactly what I posted above, we just want to make sure that it’s just growing pains. She cries at times because they are so bad. It may just be that her tolerance for pain is not particularly high but we have to be sure.

It’s been a pretty uneventful vacation week so far, which is a good thing. Still trying to make up for lost sleep but the fact that I am staying up too late and still getting up with the family in the morning doesn’t help. Today was the last day this week I would have been able to sleep in due to plans for the rest of the week. Maybe after I drop my daughter at school I can get a nap in.

Anyway, not much else planned. I am going to get back to scanning some of my dad’s old slides tonight and I’ll either post them to Flickr or Facebook or perhaps both. Some of his date back to the early sixties but there are quite a few photos as far back as the 1800’s including some dry plates (glass negative plates). Eventually I will get them all scanned as well as a shitload of documents and then I will donate most of the older stuff to the Sandy Springs Historical Society. My Great Aunt Sold/Donated the last 22 acres of the family property and a park is supposed to be created there. It’s called the Lost Corner Preserve. It sort of pissed me off at the time that my father and his brother were never notified about it but since the land passed from her brothers to my Aunt Peggy there wasn’t a fuck of a lot to do after the fact.

Two More Days of Vacation Left

Taking the wee one to the doctor shortly so I figured I would stop in for a minute or two.

My youngest has always been pretty tiny but for the last year or so she has had quite a few growth spurts and the growing pains are excruciating for her. I can remember how my legs hurt as a teen and it was not something I particularly enjoyed.

While it is most likely exactly what I posted above, we just want to make sure that it’s just growing pains. She cries at times because they are so bad. It may just be that her tolerance for pain is not particularly high but we have to be sure.

It’s been a pretty uneventful vacation week so far, which is a good thing. Still trying to make up for lost sleep but the fact that I am staying up too late and still getting up with the family in the morning doesn’t help. Today was the last day this week I would have been able to sleep in due to plans for the rest of the week. Maybe after I drop my daughter at school I can get a nap in.

Anyway, not much else planned. I am going to get back to scanning some of my dad’s old slides tonight and I’ll either post them to Flickr or Facebook or perhaps both. Some of his date back to the early sixties but there are quite a few photos as far back as the 1800’s including some dry plates (glass negative plates). Eventually I will get them all scanned as well as a shitload of documents and then I will donate most of the older stuff to the Sandy Springs Historical Society. My Great Aunt Sold/Donated the last 22 acres of the family property and a park is supposed to be created there. It’s called the Lost Corner Preserve. It sort of pissed me off at the time that my father and his brother were never notified about it but since the land passed from her brothers to my Aunt Peggy there wasn’t a fuck of a lot to do after the fact.

Everything Working Now

All seems to be well with the site now. The reason stuff wasn’t updating properly was due to a caching plugin I am using. Not much time for blogging today but hopefully I can start getting stuff up again on a regular basis. I have to devote more time to the crime blog but those links will show up here as well.

Finally made the move to WordPress

Not sure what’s going on but it may have something to do with my theme. It doesn’t seem to want to refresh a page until I actually add new content if at all. I didn’t discover it until I had done quite a bit of work getting rid of menus and some of the sidebar stuff and added my own. It’s very puzzling but I will figure it out eventually.

I will be using this as a site to not only occasionally post but also to aggregate everything I do around the web. I am using Diso Actionstreams, which is a port of Movabletype’s Actionstreams plugin. I tried several different Action Stream plugins and either they only offer sidebar content, didn’t do exactly what I want, or were just plain crap.

Another Rambling Post

So I have successfully made the switch over from Movabletype to WordPress. Some of the links and comments may have issues for a while but everything seems to be moving along nicely. There have been some issues with Disqus linking to the old blog from the comments and I haven’t quite figured that one out yet but I may have time later this week.

 

I am currently on a much-needed vacation which started Saturday. Not doing much this week but the girls and I did manage to drive up to Tennessee yesterday and pay a visit to Eric and his lovely wife. We had a nice lunch in town and just hung out for a while teaching the girls the finer points of shooting pool, something I enjoy doing but am not very good at.

It’s about a three hour drive to their place straight up 113/120 to 441. The last time I made the trip was during October two years ago and at that time the trees were in full fall foliage mode. Very beautiful. The girls were well-behaved on the drive and it was very enjoyable. The drive home always seems to take a bit longer and I was pretty tired. Had to stop about an hour from Eric’s and find one of those nasty five-hour-energy drinks. I hate them and have always made a practice of shying away from any type of energy drink but as I was starting to nod off I had to have something. 5-hour-energy is like crack. Not very good for you and only lasts a little while. It did help me to get home though.

I seem to be suffering from a bit of sleep deprivation, which may explain why I was so wiped out early in the evening. Opened a new store two weeks ago and it’s been kicking my ass. It’s a half hour from the house and is actually well outside the geographical area where my other stores are. As a matter of fact by all rights it should belong to someone else but between myself and my boss we have opened more new stores than their entire team put together. Hell, I’ve probably opened new stores than they have.

It sits right in the middle of fucking nowhere. Very few restaurants and an extremely large residential area. Since we opened two weeks ago every days has been like Christmas. Literally. For those that don’t know Christmas is the busiest day of the year for our company. Up until the last few years nobody else opens their doors on Christmas day and it’s normally standing room only from 6am until midnight. And so I have been working from 630am until whenever I get home. Some days the store manager has worked late and I get to go home but he is brand new, just like 90% of my hourly associates. He’s like a fucking deer caught in the headlights.

I really can’t complain too much though because at the end of the day it translates into more money for me to bank and that’s why I keep doing this.

Anyway, welcome to the sort of new site. If you haven’t been here before don’t expect much. I seem to rarely post anymore although now it’s tied in with my crime site and I may be able to post once or twice a week before I pass out at night. Basically all Skullfucking amounts to is a place for me to rant. I am rude and unapologetic. If you don’t like it go somewhere else and bother someone who gives a fuck. Don’t expect any beautiful prose or wit. I am rambling and jump from one subject to the next and sometimes I just post plain old weird shit.