Honestly, grow up and get with the real world.

I bet they have that thing framed and posted all over the walls of the customer service office as an example of the awful attempts at communication they have to deal with.

In light of the substandard education of the author, I wonder if the difficulties with the bank may have been self-induced.

Hopefully he'll take the refund and use it to pay tuition for a GED.

Between home purchases and re-financings, I've probably shopped and signed for 8-9 different mortgages. I've never had an unprofessional experience. Some lenders are certainly better organized than others, but never has anything smelled of fraud or deception. I'm not sure where all these unscrupulous lenders or clueless borrowers are residing, but I don't believe they are a significant portion of the industry.

People borrowed more money than they could afford, and banks bet the market would continue to rise. Sometimes risk is poorly managed. Looking for corporate bogeymen is counterproductive.

No, no, there all victims of the greedy banking industry! Don't you read the NYT?

The example in the article says nothing about how the lender defrauded the poor, unsuspecting borrower. It certainly hints at some sort of bait and switch, but I'm suspicious of the carefully chosen language and the lack of follow-up or specifics. It's easy to paint a picture of a victim of the evil mortgage lenders if you don't bother to list all the facts.

No one held a gun to anyones head and forced them to take the loans. As I mentioned, volumes of state and federal forms are required to ensure consumers are protected from themselves. Even with all the mortgage disclosure laws there's people out there that will claim to be victims even though their own stupidity drove their situation.

Fact: No one who pays their mortgage on time gets foreclosed.

I call maximum bullshit on this statement. Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage knows you have to sign literally dozens of documents that specify the interest rate, what you'll be paying, and for how long. There are other documents you sign that verify you've been given all that information. For anyone with two working brain cells, it's patronizing at best. For someone to claim they didn't know they were signing a teaser ARM is absolutely non-credible in today's marketplace.

"The age of free cellphone games is dead, killed by the greedy profit gluttons in charge of major cellphone companies."

So anything less then something for nothing is greed? I'm all for consumer protection and a fair marketplace, but to whine because companies don't hand out their marketing baubles for free anymore points to a bunch of spoiled, overly indulged marketplace idiots. Of course it's about money people! It's how the folks who run the cell companies pay their mortgages, make payroll, provide health insurance, and feed their kids.

Copywrite aside, is there anything in the sales contract that mentions this issue, or is that not a relevant issue on this site?

Think about it -- a woman walks in to a car dealer at the end of the business day and demands they accept a lease return they are unable to verify. She won't take no for an answer so the manager gets involved. She starts unloading on them about the car's maintenance record (WTF is that? Like they care) and then won't leave when it's obvious they don't want to deal with her. I'd probably call the cops too.

Seriously, if you are going to complain, literacy goes a long way. Sounds like the tech did a crappy job, but any manager reading that is going to write the customer of as an uneducated rube. If you're not great writer, get someone to proof read your work.

1) Has anyone confirmed that the original info she got was correct? Some Chase customer service rep on the phone says to do something and therefor the car dealer is somehow obligated to comply? She should have called ahead to the people she was dealing with.

2) Why did she feel the need to unload on them about her maintenance problems? Seems to me that implies there was some rudeness and confrontation on both sides. This "kiss my ass, I'm a customer" attitude is the cause of half the problems on this site. Did they do any maintenance on the car? Why should they worry about it if they didn't do the work?

3) Typically when people start talking about calling the police, it's when a customer has become belligerent and disruptive. Seems to me the dealership just wanted to get her out the door, making the likely accurate judgment that the faster they ended their relationship with this woman the better.

What you describe is a situation where you want a discounted phone under a given set of conditions that you then try to change after the fact. That's not the way the system works. If you don't like the deal they are offering, don't buy the damn phone?

Why is that so hard for people to figure out?

I see quotes above about some AT&T policy. First off, they are not contractually bound by their own policies if they are superseded by the actual contract. Secondly, I suspect they specifically exempt the iphone from the policy. Lots of assertion on that point. Some actual evidence may help that case.

This is much different. Despite the deregulation of routes and price structures years ago -- a very good thing that lowered air travel costs across the board by a huge margin -- the air traffic system remains in control of the Federal Government.

In the final analysis regulation of air travel is a legitimate federal function and therefore Congress and the FAA have a responsibility to fix this mess.

It comes down to incentives. I don't claim to understand it, but the current system of business incentives for the airline industry has made it cost effective to leave people crammed on board cramped airplanes for extended periods of time. To hear the FAA and airline reps publicly proclaim it has to do with the weather (like that's a new problem) or the old air traffic system does nothing to remedy the fact that people get stuck sitting on planes sometimes for 3 times longer than the original flight.

Regardless of the causes of the problems or the state of the air traffic system, at some point the FAA and airlines have to have a system where they can open the doors and let people off the airplanes. In my mind, an hour is too long without some resolution.

That people thought the source of the water was ever something other than a municipal water source is what cracks me up. I agree that people are stupid.

I still buy the water. I know that it's probably sterile and meets some minimal FDA guidelines, regardless of the source. When I'm out and about, a bottle of water is a handy way to quench thirst. It doesn't really matter if it didn't come from a Manchurian glacier. It's just water.

Here you are wrong. This site is overflowing with entitlement minded simpletons who revel in the notion that they are victims of corporate greed yet voluntarily continue to fork over their own cash and then demand more than they paid for after the fact. This article is a perfect example.

1. Buy phone with fully disclosed capabilities and rates.
2. Decides he wants more than what he voluntarily paid for in the first place
3. Demands that the company give him something in addition to what was initially agreed on in the sales contract.
4. Resorts to attempts at gov't coercion when his other efforts at extortion fail.

The answer is very simple. If the guy wants phone service overseas, he is fully capable of purchasing it via several means. He can use his iphone and pay the rates he agreed to in when he bought the thing, or he can purchase another service.

The guy doesn't just want overseas service, he wants something at a price he deems is "reasonable" but no one else is willing to offer. No free lunch folks.

Somebody call the waaaaaambulance.

There is no free lunch. The fact that companies make money providing goods and services that are in demand does not obligate them to provide high cost, low demand, non-productive services just because a few people feel they are important.

Ref the previous payphone article where the town in CA coughed up the dough to pay for it rather then try to extort it from the private business via gov't power.

Seems like the prevailing notion on this site is that businesses should be charities.

Technology drives economic change. Economic change always causes displacements in some for or another. That's just reality. The alternative -- gov't control of the economy -- is much worse.

People need to adapt and stop expecting business to offer freebies.

Seems to me the solution might be to lobby for better cell phone coverage. Public pay phones are going the way of the telegram. Technology is making them obsolete. Time for the canyon dwellers to find alternate solutions.

If people go ahead and pay what they agreed to pay when they signed the contract, the "meltdown" will have no effect.

Here's a hint -- don't take out loans you can't afford to repay. I took a fixed rate mortgage in 2005 rather than risk increased payments of a variable rate, despite the initial low rates.

The real victims here are not the homeowners getting foreclosed, but the employees and shareholders of mortgage companies who are now left holding the bag while the other "victims" default on loans they never should have been given. Lots of business made high risk loans that should never have been made to begin with. The deadbeats who default on them aren't the ones suffering.

"Forget that Al Qaida lead! We've got to get over to Sam's Club ASAP to rescue a besieged line of shoppers! Oh the humanity!!!"

I'd be curious to see some actual facts regarding how effective this method is to deter shoplifting. Despite the sentiments of many here, business aren't looking for ways to piss off customers.

I fail to see why folks get so worked up about having someone check your receipt. Privacy? Bullshit. You just had it all scanned at the register. They want to make sure what's in your cart is the same as what's on the register. At Sams, Costco, and everywhere else, they do it to every one.

All this high and mighty principle is misguided. Get over it, or shop elsewhere.