No, I Won’t Answer Your Survey!

I’m halfway into the first paragraph when IT slides across the screen aiming straight for the spot where I’m reading. Then zip – it’s there! Another freaking online survey covering up and obliterating the article I’m trying to read.  NO, for the millionth time! I will NOT take a “few minutes” to answer a “few brief” questions. Yeah, yeah, my feedback is “valuable” to you, a great help to “improve” your services. But guess what — I consider my time to be a mite more valuable than this trillionth survey asking questions ultimately designed to boost your bottom line.

This survey barrage is happening everywhere. Surveys arrive by mail too. From the hospital after an X-ray: “How many minutes did you wait for your X-ray?” the survey inquires. Like I keep track of that kind of stuff?

Visits to customer support also elicit instant email surveys inquiring about my level of satisfaction with the support employee. And of course any company I’m doing business with also gets in the act emailing me THEIR survey inquiring how they can improve their product or service and enhance my online experience.

Online surveys are dirt-cheap and cost zero employee-time — ducky for companies.  Instead of paying for high quality customer support and professional research involving humans to get a fix on what customers REALLY are thinking, companies seem to be sending out ever more surveys to  consumers so THEY can submit information and do all the work.

Surveys have morphed into another task companies have assigned to their customers. Remember when bills came with return stamped envelopes? Those stamps are long gone. Return envelopes too may be on their way out. Verizon has already eliminated the cellophane over the address field, making it easier for the post office to mangle envelopes in transit. And it’s not enough that customers must now buy stamps. The cable, electric and phone companies also demand that I play clerk and write my check amount on my return bill PLUS transcribe my account number on my check.  Sorry gang, I’m not in the clerk business.

And bigger than that is the subject of my time. It’s mine. It’s valuable. And dime a dozen surveys can’t have any of it.

More from the workplace:

 

Jan.22, 2012 | filed in Economics, Investing, Outside-the-Box | Comments (5)

Luscious, Light, Lickety Split Chocolate Desserts

Is there anything more dreamily delicious than a gorgeous chocolate dessert? For me, no! It would also be nice if my chocolate treat didn’t have enough calories to sink a tanker and I could whip it together one-two-three. With that in mind I did some research and voila — here are a few chocolate dessert collections that will gratify your deepest chocolate longings with a minimum of calories and cooking time.

  • Starting out with the probably the healthiest and fastest recipe, My Healthy Eating Secrets dashes together the impossible — a chocolate mousse so nourishing and light on fat it can be eaten anytime as a snack. Really. Four simple ingredients, including Raw Cacao an unprocessed, unrefined chocolate that’s considered a  “super-food.” and Raw Agave, a natural unrefined sweetener, are tossed into a blender and poof — a few minutes later they’re transformed into airy, densely flavored chocolate mousse.
  • Also featured are recipes for guilt-free Chocolate Banana Ice cream and Chocolate Mousse Parfait.
  • All of Delish’s 16 chocolate dessert recipes contain a lovely 100 calories or less.  Another plus is their use of powdered cocoa to deliver heart-healthy antioxidants.
  • Boot Tracks, one of their super-simple recipes, is easily mixed in a bowl by hand if you don’t have a mixer like me. Then instead of ending up in a stove, the chocolate batter is spooned into a waffle iron, an entertaining procedure kids are sure to appreciate and enjoy.
  • Cooking Light calls their chocolate recipes “lightened, but still decadent.” An aficionado of velvety chocolate pudding, I cast my “Yes!” vote for their yummy sounding Creamiest Chocolate Pudding that comes in at a respectable 194 calories per serving.  But it’s their Hot Chocolate Fudge Cakes that REALLY get my chocolate motor going. I have vivid childhood memories of savoring hot fudge ice cream sundaes, the one and ONLY  thing I ever ordered in ice cream parlors.  Those hot fudge days are long gone, but not my memories of them. Memories that are apparently also shared by readers who tried out that recipe, and deliberately gave it less than the called for cooking time to insure the interior hot fudge retained its silky, runny texture.
  • For all the vegans out there who seem to be multiplying like rabbits lately, I also came across a recipe for tofu chocolate pudding. Judging from the numerous compliments the recipe received from readers, Its creator clearly knows his way around tofu.

Valentine’s Day is on the horizon, a perfect time to score a gold star with one of these luscious, light chocolate desserts, don’t you think?

More on Eating Light and Valentines Day:

 

Jan.16, 2012 | filed in Food-Stuff, Health, Holiday | Comments (6)

Is Your Employer Underpaying You?


While working on staff at two different companies, I was startled when documents listing employee’s salaries somehow suddenly crossed my desk. Wow! Here I’d been wondering how much money coworkers were making and shazam – there were the numbers in crisp black and white. Twice!

Both financial documents were enlightening, but the larger company’s payroll turned out to be even more instructive.

The biggest surprise was the whopping salaries paid to the big cheeses. I knew of course they were paid a lot — way more than the peasants below them, but the disparity was just enormous. The gigantic salary of my own department head made me glad I had stuck to my guns and not accepted the lower compensation he had first offered me. Even though we immediately clicked and I sensed working with him would be enjoyable, something had made me hold out for bigger bucks than his initial offers. Indeed, If I had swallowed his lamentations of limited budgets and resources along with that lesser salary I would now have been ticked off in spades.

The next big surprise was the pitifully low salaries paid to employees at the lowest end of the totem pole. Yes, many had probably started close to minimum wage, but even workers who had been around for ten years plus had barely risen above that level. Which suggested they had not been receiving timely cost of living raises. Loyal and hard working, they certainly deserved those same increases that higher level employees were receiving. Yet not having received these raises, those employees had apparently not stepped forward and requested them either.

I was also unsettled by the much lower salary paid to some older, highly experienced employees versus young new hires with limited experience. Here again, a lack of raises seemed to be a factor. And in fact an older bookkeeper that was being replaced by a young “financial officer” at a much higher salary woefully lamented that her employer “knew all along” her position was worth a lot more than her low salary. True, but if the bookkeeper did not speak up for herself and point out her own value, management had apparently felt no obligation to reward her silent modesty.

Prior to glancing at this financial info, I had never given any thought to monetary wage differences between creative and sales departments. This difference turned out to be considerable. The higher ups in sales were being paid way more than higher up creatives. In the creative department myself, I felt no envy. In a way I felt it was almost a just distribution. The creatives got all the exhilaration and fun of conceiving and producing company products. All sales got for their efforts in selling that product was mere money.

And then we came to the same old inequity: male employees were being paid more (sometimes much more) than their female counterparts. It appeared too that men heavy in the chutzpah
department were also ending up with more change in their pockets.  Nothing surprising there. But the important question was — when was the inequality going to end? When were men and women finally going to receive equal pay for equal work?

More Career Tales:

Jan.09, 2012 | filed in Career, Financial, Outside-the-Box | Comments (10)

How I Saved 64% on My Renters Insurance

For the past few years my renters insurance premiums have seen pretty steep increases, but this year’s 2012 bill catapulted my blood pressure to the top of the charts. The insurance company I’ve been with for years upped my annual bill by 20%! The reason? Not a single one on my end. Last year not one circumstance in my apartment, building or neighborhood changed an iota to warrant this hefty increase.

There was no way I was going to pay for the over-the-top new premium. Nor had I any intention of speaking with the company in an attempt to lower their bill. Their price hikes had been getting out of hand for awhile, but this newest increase was out of the stratosphere as far as I was concerned.

So off to the Internet I went, quickly discovering that getting quotes for comparable renters insurance wasn’t going to be a fast operation. Insurance info is spread out hither and yon in a diffuse, haphazard, even misleading fashion. (Some insurance offices don’t mention the fact they sell only one company’s insurance). And companies enjoy having prospective customers fill out pages of web forms before they’ll part with a precious price quote.

It took me quite awhile to come up with some comparisons. Two that happened to be from the same company also had the same policy that somehow cost different premiums depending on which neighborhood office was doing the quoting. Hmm…

In the end because of the short turn around time, I took to the phone.  One company, through a near-by neighborhood broker, stood considerably taller than the rest.  I spoke with an associate who was efficient, pleasant, fast and excellent at e-mail follow-up. After realizing I’d save money in the long run by slightly upping my deductible, I soon had myself a binder and shortly thereafter a policy. Which in the end saved me — are you ready — the sweet annual sum of $329.00. So with a little research, instead of costing me 20% more, my new renters policy cost me 64% less.

Not only that but the policy even offered better terms than my old one: $300,000 personal liability over $100,000. It also covered fungus (mold to you and me), an item that wasn’t even mentioned in my old policy. Plus pay-outs were based on the current cost of replacing items rather than their worth after depreciation (which, considering how long I can hold on to goodies, could easily put them in the zero worth range).

So in the end that sky-high bill was a good thing — just what I needed to blast out of a costly rut.

More on Living Quarters:

Jan.02, 2012 | filed in Economics, Frugality, Home/Garden | Comments (6)

Good Fortune Quotes for 2012!

Here are some good fortune quotes for our coming New Year:

“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Labor is the fabled magician’s wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.” ~ James Weldon Johnson

“The less we deserve good fortune, the more we hope for it.” ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.” ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If you marry for money, you will surely earn it.” ~ Ezra Bowen

“Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

“I’m not into the money thing. You can only sleep in one bed at a time. You can only eat one meal at a time, or be in one car at a time. So I don’t have to have millions of dollars to be happy. All I need are clothes on my back, a decent meal, and a little loving when I feel like it. That’s the bottom line.” ~ Ray Charles

“Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.” ~ Walt Whitman

“A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

“All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.” ~ Anita Brookner

More Goodies from our Quote Collection:

Dec.26, 2011 | filed in Holiday, Living, Quotations | Comments (2)

Christmas Quotations with Zing!

In contrast to all the familiar Christmas songs and salutations surrounding us this season, here again from early blog days are some quotes with a bit more zip and zing:

“Our children await Christmas presents like politicians getting in election returns: there’s the Uncle Fred precinct and the Aunt Ruth district still to come in.”~ Marcelene Cox

“I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white man would be coming into my neighborhood after dark.” ~ Dick Gregory

“There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.”~ P.J. O’Rourke

“Have you any old grudges you would like to pay, Any wrongs laid up from a bygone day? Gather them now and lay them away when Christmas comes. Hard thoughts are heavy to carry, my friend,  And life is short from beginning to end; Be kind to yourself, leave nothing to mend When Christmas comes.”~ William Lytle

“Of course, this is the season to be jolly, but it is also a good time to be thinking about those who aren’t.”~ Helen Valentine

“If you want me to sing this Christmas song with the feeling and the meaning, you better see if you can locate that check.”~ Mahalia Jackson

“Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.” ~ Ken Hubbard

“At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a sharp, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.”~ Herman Melville

More Holiday Favorites:

 

Dec.18, 2011 | filed in Holiday, Outside-the-Box, Quotations | Comments (8)

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