Harry H.

So I'm in Delta's mileage program and in August saw on the Skymiles Dining page that if I signed up by a certain date, which was 4 days into the future, I would get a bonus of 3000 extra miles upon my 1st purchase within 30 days, vs the usual 1000 miles. So I signed up about 10 min after I saw that. I used my skymiles dining linked card to buy dinners exceeding their minimum charge right away. BUT I only got credited 1000 bonus miles instead of 3000. I call the 'customer service' line and talk to a low level rep, explaining my situation and asking for a mileage adjustment pursuant to what they advertised. He said no it expired the previous month (NO IT DIDN'T - I saw the due date very clearly. I only look stupid), then I asked him to take it up thru his supervisor, which I suspect was just a first line sup with no authority, and she flatly refused in about 10 seconds. Now as an IT veteran, I know it's possible to archive the pages whenever they modify it, but these guys probably aren't saavy enough to do that, so I can't prove it. Maybe I should've taken a phone pic of it, but I didn't expect these guys to be noncompliant with what they advertised on their page. Advice ---DON'T BOTHER JOINING THESE GUYS. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE THAT THEY'RE GOING TO GO BACK ON A REWARD/BONUS THAT YOU MAY BE LEGITIMATELY ENTITLED TO! I'm pulling out of this program - I have absolutely no confidence that the administrators of Skymiles Dining have ANY SENSE OF CORPORATE/PERSONAL INTEGRITY!

I got online to sign up for TSA precheck. I either got autoforwarded or hijacked to this site unknowingly, which offers to register you for TSA appt at your city's center. They charged $140. IMMEDIATELY AFTER, I started to get multiple spam/scams each day. I'm real careful about that kind of stuff because I was in IT for 20 yrs, but unfortunately didn't look at the URL real closely nor the webpage headers.

TSA ADVISED DURING MY APPOINTMENT THAT THEY *NEVER* CHARGE ANYTHING TO SIGN UP AND MAKE AN APPOINTMENT ONLINE! Be forewarned. These guys are essentially a scam.
I tried calling my Chase credit card support, and they were totally worthless. They said they won't initiate any dispute unless I first waste my time to reach out to them to ask for a chargeback - OF COURSE THEY'RE NOT GOING TO! WHATEVER OTHER SERVICES THEY PURPORT TO PROVIDE ON THEIR WEBSITE, I WOULD BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL OF. EVEN BETTER, DON'T USE THIS SITE.

Tried to call Chase cred cd support to reverse a charge from a scammer charging a high fee for signing up for TSA precheck. TSA advised that these guys were scammers, and it costs nothing to sign up for Precheck appt. Chase rep basically said I'm screwed. Lady directed me to waste my time trying to contact the scammer, and unless I do then they won't initiate any dispute. OF COURSE THE SCAMMER'S NOT GOING TO ANSWER ME AND REFUND MY CARD! The only place worse than these guys is Bank of America.

I'M SKEPTICAL THAT THESE GUYS ARE EVEN IN BUSINESS ANYMORE!

Here are the facts. In 2018 and 2019 I used them. Alondra always answered the phone, very nice, and flowers were always very good. Only one delivery hiccup due to a new driver. On April 16,2021 I called to order some flowers.
What I wanted wasn't on their website, which btw is a clone of Teleflora's website. So I go to the site, order a mixed for $50 but in the instructions specify that I wanted it all gerbera daisies instead. I then call them after placing the order to confirm my request. The first 3 times, whoever's on the other end (prob a cell phone) JUST HANGS UP WITHOUT EVEN SAYING HELLO! I try thru the afternoon, and goes to voicemail so I left a couple msgs. This morning, Sat., I call after they open. Again, just voice mail. So I cancelled the order by voicemail and cancelled the charge on my card.

I SERIOUSLY DOUBT THAT ALONDRAS IS IN BUSINESS ANYMORE. The Alondra I dealt with in 2018 and 2019 would NEVER HANG UP OR JUST LET IT GO TO VOICEMAIL AND NOT RESPOND BACK SAME DAY!

AVOID THIS FLORIST. I found one down the road who didn't hang up on me and took my order.

These guys are fairly new. They try to pitch how customizable their devices are advertising different sizes for everyone. Not True. According to their sizing, they only have 3 sizes, no more, so if you're not form fitting into one of these sizes, you may as well go with a rubber ring. So this stuff isn't leading edge, but really bleeding edge because guys don't come in just 3 sizes. I gave them two chances (their return/refund procedure is bulky and risky in terms of what if their new one is ineffective also), and neither suited me. Oh, ALSO they finally admitted in their email sales pitches that their device typically lasts ONLY 4 MONTHS, and then you have to go give them more than a hundred dollars to get another one! NOT WORTH IT.

I've used both this and teleflora. Here's the thing - in both cases, florists get a shakedown to have to conform to the huge cut that 1800FLowers or Teleflora levies, for the 'privilege' of dealing online. As a result, and understandably, Florists are NOT going to used their best and freshest flowers to fulfill an order that they're only getting a really small cut of the overall order. Also with 1800Flowers, we have absolutely NO CLUE whether the flowers made it on the delivery truck by looking at the website. My order for delivery today (only 5 min left in their promised window of delivery by 8 pm) was place 5 DAYS AGO so there's no excuse for it not being delivered today. The reviewer who complained about the difficult to understand offshore CSR is true - I'm Asian, and even I had a heck of a time trying to understand the Filipino lady - I had to stop her and ask her to speak slowly numerous times. In my past orders thru these guys, the bouquets are NOT fresh, and do not reflect in any way the bouquet photo posted online. So there's a disclaimer that the photo may not reflect what the recipient really gets, but to this extent, why don't they just get a kid to draw a flower with crayon and put it up? It's pretty close.

My advice - don't use 1800Flowers or Teleflora - instead do a google search for a florist in the recipient's area with good ratings and simply call them directly. I discovered that the Service Fee is in fact lower when you call a florist directly, and since they don't have to hand over a huge cut of their money to these clowns. They'll give you your accurate bouquet and on time.

Pretty good resource for public domain printed music. Saves a lot of money just being able to print off just what I need.

News about the piano business. Sometimes slightly interesting interviews, but nothing of significant value to professional pianists. Just kind of clogs my inbox every so many days.

These guys, who I think are from or have a connection to Hong Kong based on their previous user login info, I believe are Misusing their Microsoft Licenses. Here's the scam; they suck you in for buying Office365 for anywhere between 29.99 and 49.99, a 'lifetime license'. Go do a search for this and you'll see confirmation of my experience. So, I buy this, and then about 6 mo later, when I log in to Office 365 online to look at my OneDrive contents, I get this big banner saying that this license is not a valid one, and that my OneDrive contents and Office365 will STOP WORKING. I notified whoever these guys are, and they simply gave me another login and password to use, but I know that, and others have experienced, that another 5-6 months will pass and this will also be invalidated by Microsoft.

Here's what's taking place. There is NO LIFETIME LICENSE from Microsoft. Ask them. These guys will ostensibly buy an Enterprise License, from 250 user on up, then RESELL each 'seat' or individual user license to anyone in the world. When they get busted, they'll simply change their account and background information, and start doing it again under another name. An Enterprise License is for all users inside ONE COMPANY, and isn't meant to be resold like this, so when MS finds out, they invalidate your account. These guys don't care, so unless you go complaining to them for another login/password, they'll just change their stripes and move on. In the end you get burned.

The websites that expose this racket caution that if you see something like an Office 2019, it's bogus - there is NO SUCH THING as Office 365/2019 Lifetime License, as they will advertise it. As to those who advertise Office2019 for between 29 and 49 bucks, that's the same type of scam. Microsoft's price is $250 for the Home/Business, so you know that they're just reselling seats under an enterprise license that only one co is supposed to use internally. I dumped these jokers after only losing 30 bucks fortunately and got a real license for Office365. MS lets me pay monthly, something like only ten bucks a month so it's affordable and all my cloud documents and OneDrive won't someday vanish mysteriously. Crooked operation. And they try to suck you into becoming a 'reseller', which means fraudulently reselling more of their licenses.

I'm a professional musician. Before Amazon, this site may have been the go to place to get sheet music. Your neighborhood music store will also use this site to order your music. I ordered a piece of sheet music recently, and ordered express shipping too because my need was immediate. Never got here. I got an email this week saying that it was returned as undeliverable. They refunded the sheet music price but when I called about being made whole for the shipping, they said pretty much, too bad, not our problem, go chase down the shipper and complain to them. I suspect that they didn't get the addressing right.

Lessons learned: I should've gone with my gut and ordered Amazon even if it wasn't under Prime shipping. I would've at least gotten it. Also, Amazon hands down has much better pricing. Even if you use the publishers' websites, you'll get equal pricing (and prob less shipping) through them. However, if you want to wait forever to get your music, pay over standard shipping prices and chance that it might not get to you, absolutely, go with sheetmusicplus. For me, never again. If I'm going to get screwed over, at least I want it to feel good.

I found a coupon for this home cleaner on Groupon with an expiration date 6 months after the day I found it. I called and texted repeatedly, and finally got a response several days later. I was all ready to hire him but he said that he wouldn't honor the Groupon coupon. I pointed out that it was supposed to be good through March 2019 which was months away, and he simply said that he changed his mind and decided not to honor the coupon anymore. I don't know why he did that - was his business so slow that he had to raise his rates back? Anyway, after seeing this arbitrary decision to just pull his sale price, it's a huge red flag to me about this business and I sure wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I eventually found someone else with total integrity in their pricing and quality.

The concept of home concerts is not new, but in recent years is pitched as a viable way for a performer to maximize their touring time/travel. Concerts in Your Home was acquired by the Listening Room network, which purports to have concerts in public spaces vs residences if I understand the site correctly. I suppose acquiring CIYH was a way as a business to have your cake and eat it too. The site and related online articles I've seen about this org suggest that their domain is pretty small, mainly the state of FL.

Having said that, it's not clear just exactly what sort/genre of performer they want. I don't see classical music listed in the types of concert they host or when they try to describe what sort of performers they admit. But aside from that, what are the various types/examples of performers they want to have in their roster? Folk? Rock? Acoustic only? Rap? Blues? No amplification because it's for smaller venues (and how small are these public spaces?) It's all very nebulous and unclear. As a performer, I've studied this site twice over the course of a year and it just isn't clear to me what the expectations and desires are.

The biggest thing that shuts it down for me, even if I was a performer of one of the genres they do peddle, is that once admitted, they shake the performer down for another $245 according to the website for the privilege of 'belonging' to the roster. Quite bluntly, this is a bad business model. I've found other home/small space concert networks around the country that don't shake down the performer for money, and have happily become involved with those networks without paying anything.

I've used Indeed to search for jobs. They have a great many openings posted, but I personally found a lot of them in my field to be people trying to mislead you into thinking that it's a bigger/better job than it actually is - I know that from being very connected to players in the industry here. I suppose that eventually you could find a job here, but it seems that the really good jobs are not advertised. I sure haven't seen them. Maybe good for temp or seasonal jobs, but they don't seem to be openings that I can't find when I search other common job sites.

Kroger shows up as stores with different names throughout the western US. Where I live it's Smiths Food and Drug. They have Kroger branded goods and gasoline. Their prices are better than Safeway and Albertsons by far. Meat and produce are good. Gas is usually the lowest in town.

They have a decent selection of wines/liquor, and the prices are somewhat competitive though I find Total Wine to offer more value across the board. What really keeps me from going in is the incredibly cheesy and tacky advertising on their billboards. It just makes the business seem cheap. I feel better shopping at Total Wine personally. They stand on their own image perfectly without having to make stupid jokes in their ads.

These people are the only ones who provide the electricity so it wouldn't do any good for anybody to complain about the service. However, one thing that they can control is their buggy smart thermostat system and application. It gets disconnected all the time, and I constantly have to back out of the app and retry, then usually on the second attempt it connects me to my thermostat.

You have to have trash pickup and there's only one co in town to do it. Yet, it would be easier to pay my bill if a) the interface was more than just rudimentary functionality, and b) if they had an app so we can pay whenever we like. I doubt that technology is anything important to a bunch of garbage collectors though.

I used Honey as a browser extension for quite a while, most notably on Amazon. Shopping over a great variety of items, I found that the savings that Honey finds for all of the items is either the same savings as Amazon, Walmart, Target etc, and when it does find a difference, it doesn't seem to be more than 25 to 50 cents cheaper. I believe that Honey takes up some unnecessary computer/tablet/phone system resources, which can slow your device down. Not worth it to me.

Place was clean, counter staff courteous, and prices are pretty good. That said, I got the bulgogi dinner. It didn't taste like the charcoal grilled bulgogi that I've had at other local restaurants since it was probably just fried, and tasted actually like sukiyaki meat. I like sukiyaki a lot so I didn't have a big problem with the taste. Only wished that it tasted like authentically prepared bulgogi.

I took a round trip day trip from Las Vegas to Phoenix on 9-29-18. On the outbound, the driver engaged with us before the ride, telling us about his experience/experiences as a driver, then explained everything we needed to know about the ride, including the wifi and what rows didn't have power outlets. He also asked everyone if they wanted to see a movie during the ride, explaining that due to some people not liking the movie going on, he needed to ask to make sure everyone was ok with it. He offered up some good choices for us. HOWEVER, on the late afternoon ride back, a different, and clearly a new and inexperienced driver took me back to Las Vegas. No personality, didn't explain anything beyond the stops he was going to make, nothing about the wifi (which only worked 1/3 of the trip before it quit), and when a couple passengers asked if we could view a movie, he just said very flatly, NO, and sat down to drive.

I say that he was totally inexperienced with the route because 1) he had to use Google Maps on his tablet, and 2) he took the turnoff into Boulder City, local roads with lots of traffic lights, to get back to Las Vegas, when it is in fact possible to just stay on the new freeway and end up on the same Beltway much sooner! He added 35 minutes to the ride as a result and we arrived really late. I'd ride Megabus again because the price is right, but sure as hell hope that I don't get him for a driver again! I don't have nearly 6 hours to waste riding with a driver who has no clue what the most direct route is. Review would've been 5 stars without this bozo.