Consumer Digest

I hate La Senza because its lingerie is generally designed for The Girl, which as you'll recall from my last post, I am not. In the spring and summer it becomes a frightening, blinding place with neon pinks and greens, "pretty" patterns with polka dots, flowers, and swirls, and an astonishing array of products to turn female breasts (which are not, naturally, spherical) into high-sitting, nipple-free globes of gel, air, water, and padding.

The novelty wears out.

However, I needed underwear desperately, as the mice raided my own stash and no amount of laundering cleanses the memory of mouse shit. And I needed it cheaply.

Buying undergarments makes me think about sweatshops more than anything else, and that makes this process joyless. I become your nightmare customer; outside all smiley, inside brewing with rage and hurting and frustration. I don't want to live in a society that will judge me on the visibility of my nipples under a shirt, the symmetry and uniformity of the fat on my chest. I especially don't want to live in a society that underpays the women who do backbreaking work making these garments, and then overcharges me to promulgate the whole cycle.

Long story short, the person at the counter was pleasant. An environmental studies major, in fact. I wanted to ask her how she feels about working for a known sweatshop user, but thought better of it. If I see her again I'll ask. She agreed that the sports bras I was buying (no padding!) were very comfortable.

In other news, Modcloth answered my website-related email within the hour, and said they'd email again just to tell me when the issue was corrected. Hot damn.

The Source At Circuit City: 0

I find that staff in stores that specialize in electronics tend to be snobby and disdainful. They treat me like The Girl, which is a killswitch. I'm not The Girl, meaning, I don't subscribe to notions of femininity. I can pay for my own supper, think my own thoughts, and defrag my own hard drive. I don't care much for children, my choice of alcoholic beverage is a cold, imported beer, and I prioritize comfort over style - meaning you will never see me in a pair of heels, trying to run across an intersection with all the majesty of an antelope getting taken down by lion (floundering, falling, losing limbs).

So I don't appreciate being ignored in favour of guitar-playing dork dudes when I want customer service. That means you, The Source (At Circuit City). It's not like I was there to buy a pink skin for my iPod. I wanted some serious headphwnage (yes, I spelled that right) and a couple cables as well.

There's a commercial on TV for some guy deodorant which is a manifestation of this. The announcer says, "Men love technology." Then the deodorant stick suddenly shoots out several terrible animations of "technology" which are supposed to represent various attributes of the product, Swiss Army knife style. A girl, all toweled up, suddenly walks into the bathroom, sees the SuperDeororant and shrieks like The Girl.

Because she's scared of it. Because men like technology. The closest a woman would get to technology is her revolutionary new mascara. Right?

In my opinion, math fear is like technology fear: fear of the unknown. And it's hard to know math and technology if your social system repeatedly slaps your hands away and says "Don't touch, this is too hard for you, this is a guy thing, don't worry about it, you don't need to know this."

And these giant sociological gears grind round and round, and like a miniscule butterfly effect, I get bad customer service.

How To Catch A Mouse (Alive)

A day after setting my homemade, live-release trap, I have released two mice into the wild (downtown Toronto). This trap was made with my own cunning ingenuity. It is an alternative to the other ones online, which generally require you to make a staircase out of objects (not possible in all nooks and crannies) and are best used when your mice are on a table (mine aren't). This trap took me about 15 minutes to make, mostly because I started with no gameplan. There are probably tons of improvements you can make on it.

Materials:

- roll of duct tape
- $10 wire mesh wastebasket like this one (I got mine at Canadian Tire, they also have them at office supply stores, like Staples, Home Depot, or Office Depot)
- thick, flat corrugated cardboard, plastic...ideally plastic, which is harder to chew
- any scraps to make mouse-friendly tunnels (thin cardboard, tubing)
- bait (peanut butter, seeds, chopped cookies, cereal, any dry sweet stuff)
- plastic grocery bag - the kind that makes loud crinkly noises

Procedure:

1. Line the entire inside of the wastebasket with duct tape, placing the strips of tape vertically (not in rings around the inside of the wastebasket). Make them smooth, so the mouse can't climb up. Each strip of tape should start 3 inches from the bottom, and end 2 inches from the top of the basket.

2. If you know where the mice travel, place the wastebasket where it will block a very important travel route. For example, my mice have taken up residence in my wardrobe, so I've opened the doors and placed the basket inside. Now they can't get into the wardrobe without climbing the wastebasket.

3. Block off "alternate routes" that the mice could use to avoid the wastebasket obstacle, using the cardboard or plastic. For example, opening the doors of my wardrobe creates triangular gaps which they could climb through without climbing the wastebasket. I've blocked them off with cardboard and tape. Remember: adult mice can squeeze through holes the size of a dime. Smaller mice, like mine, can squeeze through half that (I've seen it). Try to think strategically here.

4. In case the mice are hesitant to climb up the mesh (which they easily can), make a couple tunnels leading to the top of the wastebasket. Mice like tunnels. Increase your odds. I've used a piece of cereal box cardboard, taped into a tube. Actual tubing will only work if it's reasonably rough on the inside. I have no idea if this step is necessary.

Now that you've made tunnels, it's possible that a mouse will climb the tunnel, walk around the top rim of the wastebasket, and jump away from the wastebasket. Use more cardboard to make "blinders" on the top of the wastebasket, at 2 sides, so that it can either go back down the tunnel, or jump into the wastebasket.

5. Line the bottom of the wastebasket with a piece of the grocery bag. The noise from the mouse moving across it will help alert you that you caught one.

6. Cover the plastic with bait - not so much that the bait will fall out of the mesh, but enough that a mouse at ground level could easily smell it. I used Mini-Wheats cereal (frosted) crumbled, a bunch of chopped shortbread cookies, some globs of peanut butter, and some sunflower seeds. Make a real food paradise in there! Mice like sweet stuff.

Why is this brilliant?

A mouse has no choice (hopefully) but to climb a very easy-to-traverse wastebasket. It knows from sniffing the bottom 2 inches that inside the wastebasket is a lot of food. It climbs up, peers down, takes a couple tentative steps down the top 2 inches on the inside, and eventually falls. There it discovers that smooth tape is preventing it from climbing out. It can jump about 10 inches max, which isn't enough.

Now, how you want to get the mouse out of the wastebasket is up to you. I find it takes me under a minute to get one out while preserving the trap - I take a tall plastic container with a lid, corner the frightened, frenetic mouse (which practically corners itself) until it plops into the container, and then quickly put the lid on before it jumps out. It's a panicked and disoriented creature - it takes me two tries at the most and I have no eye-hand coordination.

Insecticide

There was a ladybug on my bed with it's innards gone, just a tiny husk of a shell and some legs, still moving for hours. I thought it died on the side of my bed until I saw it now. I tried to flick it off and it just twitched, and I shuddered and then hit it off with the remote. I'm afraid of killing things. I can touch a thing that is very living but not dead things or wounded things. I can't slap mosquitoes with my bare hands. It takes all my will just to smack one to death with a book. I'm terrified of stepping on something, alive or dead, and feeling it crunch beneath my foot. I have strange dreams about millipedes...

Scared and sentimental about bedroom mice

When you share a bedroom with mice, and it's 3:30am, you start to think you're seeing the bastards everywhere. Because you are. I just saw a goddam giant! The problem is that I'm torn between a sensation of decided unease - alright, fear - that there are little things moving around (do they wander into beds?) and a sense of gentle interest in the creatures. I miss having a cat, and mice are, in their own tiny way, the closest thing.

This little one, which is large compared to the last little one, is making trips from the side of my bed to behind the television set, every ten minutes or so.

If they didn't leave droppings and chew things, I'd leave them be.

I confess I like the idea of conditioning them psychologically. They could learn names, speed through mazes, press miniscule levers for food pellets, and so forth. But these house mice are afraid of me. I'd probably have to start with their babies.

I know, I know. Mice are pests.

But how can they be pests when they don't have exoskeletons?!

Zoho's customer service is ridiculous.

Posted by a user on a Zoho feedback forum, July 10th, 3:46am:

I have wasted hours and hours over the past two days with your awful service. Initally, it looked quite promising for a simple, single form application. After it was all set up, disaster. A simple script stopped working (it worked yesterday) and all hell broke loose. Data items couldn't be deleted or accessed. I started over with a new application. Every time I tried to put in a lookup field, the application began spitting servlet errors. I couldn't even get access to the script any longer. Everyone on the phone at support said things were running smoothly. In the end, I created and deleted THREE accounts. The service slowed to a grinding halt and eventually I couldn't even login without a 10 minutes of watching the Firefox balls go round.

If these are the service levels you are aiming at, good luck.

AWFUL.

Posted by the same user, 21 hours later:

I want to thank you very, very much for all your help. I had the whole development team call me today from India. Despite a horrible cell phone connection on my part, they patiently listened to the issues and addressed every one. I am really impressed and look forward to a "beautiful relationship" from now on.

Food for thought: seven of the first 10 results of a Google search for "Dell customer service" are complaint-related. I gripe about Dell and I've never even bought one.

What are Zoho's tactics?

I sent their support team an email with a simple question.

The next day, I received several paragraphs from a guy who repeatedly used my first name, included a personal anecdote related to my inquiry, and offered help that I didn't even ask for.

I was torn between asking him to marry me, and asking him if Zoho would grant me three wishes under the condition that I can't ask for more wishes and I won't use them for evil.

The most striking thing is that the enraged user above and I were both using one of Zoho's (numerous, shockingly good) free services.

I'm not someone who likes to tout products or services. They seem invariably linked to five-year-olds in sweatshops or shitty copyright policies.

But I'm touting Zoho. Best customer service ever. Online or off.

Dell take notice!