Tuesday night was a benefit for the Atlanta Humane Society at East Andrews. I think the event was a success—there were lots of people and doggies. But the venue leaves a lot to be desired, which makes me re-think going there in the future.

Only patio area was open—the inside restaurant was closed—so there was only one bar for the crowd. That bar was staffed by only one bartender and she had a difficult time keeping up with the crowd’s drink orders. When we arrived, we had to wait about ten minutes to place our drink order. When I went to buy our second round, my wait time exceeded 15 minutes. At that point, I seriously considered leaving, but I regained my sanity and instead just planned to order myself two beers instead of just one. Which I did. Which made me happy.

Because the inside restaurant was closed, no lights were on. A trip to the restroom required patrons to walk into a dark restaurant with chairs stacked on tables. Any number of creepiness could have lurked in those shadows. Good thing I had not watched any horror flicks recently.

At the end of the evening when I cashed out our tab, I congratulated our bartender on surviving the harrowing evening. She was exhausted but in good spirits—but probably the latter only because she was taking a few swigs herself.

Dear Comcast and ABC,

Sunday night I decided to watch “Body of Truth” through Comcast Video-On-Demand (VOD). Thank you for making the show available. I was, however, extremely frustrated by your decision to completely disable any fast forward functionality.

I did not let the notice at the beginning of the show that the fast forward feature was going to be disabled bother me. Fast forwarding through any VOD offering through Comcast is an inexact process, aggravated by slow response and only one fast forward or rewind speed. I hardly ever fast forward through any VOD offering because it ends up being more frustrating, which is opposite to my desire for TV entertainment.

While watching “Body of Truth” I paused the playback. The pause timed-out and stopped the playback function, as it usually does when I pause VOD for longer than two minutes. Typically, all I have to do at this time is restart the playback to resume the show where I left off.

In this case, however, I was forced to start playback from the beginning of the show. Not only did I have to re-watch from the beginning, I could not fast forward through any of what I had seen just minutes before.

I completely understand the desire to not permit fast forwarding through commercials. I will tolerate that as long as the commercials are limited in length.

However, I will not tolerate the asinine decision to prevent viewers from fast forwarding through material which has already been watched. I’m assuming it was a Comcast software glitch that forced me to start from the beginning of the show, but not allowing me to skip through what I’d already seen? If I hadn’t been only 18 minutes into the episode, I would have stopped immediately and never watched any ABC fast-forward disabled offering again.

I urge you to rethink your logic and what you believe your customers will endure. I understand your desire to maximize your revenue stream, however frustrating your viewers with these ill-conceived methods will likely undermine your goals.

Please fix and I will be much more likely to watch.

Sincerely,

David Perez

Zebra Pen Corp’s customer service… A+

Recently, the company I work for stopped providing retractable pens to employees. I despise the cheap pens with the caps–the caps are easily lost and the pens don’t clip well to notebooks. Ugh.

So I headed to the local office supply store and bought a 2-pack of Zebra F-301 pens and a 2-pack of ink refills. This is a nice, fine point, stainless steel barrel pen and it wasn’t very expensive. I figured the stainless steel barrel would really make this a long-lasting pen. I also kept the receipt–cause you know it’s coming off my taxes!

After a few weeks of using the pen, it stopped writing consistently. I checked the ink cartridge–it was only 1/2 empty. Disappointed, I sent the ink cartridge in for a replacement and used one of the refills I purchased to continue my work-related note taking.

Today, I received TWO 2-pack ink refills and TWO pens. Awesome! Thanks Zebra Pen Corp!