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Latest Complaints
Nice company… But crappy products.I bought OVO Lab phLink for the Macintosh a year ago thinking this software would be a fun, useful PBX voice mail system. We had an eMac lying around and the product had four or five mice rating — so it HAD to be good, right? (buzzer sound here) WRONG ANSWER! The product truly truly SUCKS. I shelled out $150 for each USB port, one for each line and I set this up in a matter of minutes. Installation was a real breeze. But big problem was getting the damned thing to work. I bought the 4.01 upgrades (more money) and updated the OS to 10.5. I shelled out almost $500 and every time I called to test the system. click click click click was noise on the recordings. I go the the Mac and listen to the MP3 files and heard no noise. I called Qwest — our phone company to come out two times and check line noise, move the DSL from one circuit to another. I get them on their 2nd trip out here to create a POTS line (Plain Old Telephone System) and that didn’t work either. With Qwest adding another $173.19 to my headache, I’m now up to $673.19 total and nothing worked. I emailed these guys in Italy. I even sent them a letter and put a lot of stamps on it. Nobody emails me back, nobody calls me. I then start drinking a really fine Merlot from my favorite guy, Miguel Torres of Chile. He makes the best Merlots and best red wines out there. After my first bottle I begin to feel better and I start surfing my iPhone for a Macintosh voice mail software. I find Parliant Phone Valet. It was affordable and it allowed callers to save their voice mails, and it would auto email them to my email and allow my iPhone to check voice mails too. Wow. $200 something was a bargain. So I ordered it and three days later it arrived. In 13.5 minutes I had it running. With five voice mails and a special after hours CLOSED voice mail. So super easy and I needed NO manual and NO tech support. PhLINK sucks and so does OVO Lab. Parliant’s Phone Valet is what you want. The Billing Procedures of Dish Networks + DirecTV Suck.I work hard and I love my job. I don’t often look at the checks I write every month going out to the water company, mortgage or my $400 a month payment to my credit union for my Acura MDX. But one month, I started looking at the creeping changes of my Dish Networks bill. It seemd to be creeping up $3 dollars a month for no reason. My mom has the other service. She has DirecTV. She faxed over her bill to me and ironically, pointed out the same question. Why is her bill going up from $72.57 to $75.73? Then she asked a question I was pondering about. Why did she all of a sudden lose the National Geographic channel and the Dog Whisperer channels? I remember her having them several months ago, but one day I visit my mom and I turn on the TV and I try to go to National Geographic and it’s just not there anymore. There is a conspiracy here, because the same thing happened to me on Dish Networks. Biography, History Channel and others disappeared from my service, too. Someone out there at either DirecTV or Dish Networks has to become a whistle blower on this issue. Because I’m friggin’ hopping mad at getting screwed like this. When you call them up, demanding to know WHERE your two or three favorite channels are, you get an Indian or Pakastani person politely explaining to you that you never had those channels to begin with in your original programming line up. That makes me even more infuriated. They make it seem like your the idiot with a really bad memory. Here’s my conspiracy theory: Dish Networks and DirecTV watch your TV watching habits. Today, you are at the basic package level 1. You have America’s Top Choice something… it’s 100 channels, and whether you like it or not, you have get Noggin, Nick at Nite, Disney, fifteen channels of ESPN, and more crap channels I never watch so I don’t want them, but rhe rub is you CAN’T remove them. So the two or three channles you DO watch are secretly taken away and stuck into the next higher package. Eventually, you complain about the missing channels you used to watch, the firms make you feel like your memory is wrong and you end up paying extra for the next package upgrade. And then you get more channels of crap you don’t want to watch in order to get Biography or the History channel turned back on. I am sick and friggin tired of HANNA MONTANA! I don’t EVER WATCH THESE CHANNELS. So why am I having to pay for them? Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhggg!!!! Your advertising commercials on these channels never reach me, so I’m not going to be motivated to buy products and services on the channels I’m not watching. So why are you forcing these damned things down my throat? Someone has GOT to explain this one to me. I want to watch 11 channels. That’s all. Eleven channels. Not 100. Not 500. Just 11. I have friends, family and every colleague I speak with has their own line up of 10 to 15 channels they want to watch, too. Neither one of these satellite firms are listening. Well it’s time to listen, because I am going to write a big fat check to the people who are going to start up Select Star. It is a new service and it’s going to be TV your way. No more having to buy channel packages. You want 11 channels, fine. You pay for 11 channels. Who else out there is fed up with Dish Networks or DirecTV? – Bart Mad at American Express Merchant ServicesI’m a merchant. I have Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover charge abilities for our customers who buy things from our website. I use Authorize.net for the processing. Today I get a computer generated letter from Kim Goodman, Executive VP of Merchant Services, Americas. She informs me that for the privilege of my putting money into AMEX bank (last year it was like over $150,000) I now get to pay them 3.5%. In effect I have to pay more to let people pay me if they use the AMEX card. We do not run a porn shop. We sell virtual tour cameras and products – services to law enforcement and REALTORS. This sucks that I have to pay more when customers want to pay me with their AMEX card. Google check out is the circumvent here. They charge 2.2% and they don’t care what card my customers use. Does anyone else have a beef or a bone to pick with AMEX? I mean, don’t they charge their customers a premium to own the card? So why do the small business owners of America have to take it in the shorts with price hikes like this? – Bartman |
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