The Wacky World of Chris Knight

Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea

If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn’t read this.

Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

This is one of those ideas that will work just a couple of times before it becomes annoying. Even now, to look at this guy’s home page is to give yourself a headache. Thank the elder gods that this guy didn’t allow animated gifs!!!

Still… It is a little inspiring. I’ve had Tampa Bay Ads sitting on the back-burner for over a year, and this gave me the impetus to change the format of the site. Do I need $1 per pixel? Nah, I’ll settle for two bits a pixel. That should give me enough for a down payment on a 1 bedroom cottage in the San Francisco area…

-Chris

Home Depot Apologizes to Pencil Thief: Home Depot Inc. apologized to a carpenter who was banned by the chain worldwide after he absent-mindedly pocketed a pencil he had used up to do some quick math.

From reading the article it appears that Home Depot is apologizing for overreacting to an actual case of theft. An accidental theft of a $.20 item that many of us remember as being given away for free by our local lumber yards until Home Depot ran them all out of business. Was a Home Depot employee out of line when they handed him a pre-printed form letter banning him from all Home Depot stores? The fact that the employee had at his ready disposal a form letter for this very purpose indicates to me that he was just following an already in place store procedure. I’d even bet that Home Depot had, at least at the time, a zero tolerance policy for theft and that they only reason they apologized was the bad press.

What I would like to see is Home Depot apologizing for treating all customers like thieves. I’m sure you know what I mean: the demeaning walk through the exit where the security guard asks to see your receipt so he/she can mark it with a pink or yellow marker. It it is illegal in most states to require a customer at a non-membership store to show a receipt, but it isn’t illegal to ask. Home Depot has been, in my experience, the most aggressive when it comes to asking to see my receipts. I have personally chosen to never shop at Home Depot again because of these two incidents:

1. As I was exiting a Home Depot and the guard asked to see my receipt. As is my usual, I said “Have a nice day.” and kept walking. The guard said something to me that was semi-polite, but then turned to the other guard on duty and called me an asshole. This is unacceptable behavior given my having politely refused to submit to their demeaning receipt check.
2. I was leaving the Davis Street Home Depot in San Leandro California. As I walked by the overall wearing employee, not a guard, at the door he asked to see my receipt. I said “No thank you, but have a nice day.” He started to follow me into the parking lot, and asked to see my receipt again. I repeated “Have a nice day.” At this point he started to yell at me that I had to show him my receipt. People started staring. I turned to him and explained that under California law I was not required to show him my receipt. He said “OK, but I can ask you to never return to this store.” I replied “Fair enough” and I walked away.

The way I figure it though, since Home Depot as a corporation allows this kind of behavior in their stores, the entire chain is guilty of treating their customers like thieves. Why should I limit my Home Depot restriction to one store? I have chosen to take that one employee’s request that I not return to that Home Depot and apply it in a more global context: I won’t shop at any Home Depot again.

There are other alternatives. They may not be as convenient now that Home Depot has run most mom and pop hardware stores out of existence. I’ll happily buy my dignity with a little inconvenience, and I hope Home Depot suffers from their ‘everyone is a thief’ mentality.

Home Depot apologized to one man after he did (accidentally) steal a pencil. The least they can do is apologize to every honest customer who submitted to their demeaning receipt check because they didn’t know they had the option to just keep walking.

I won’t shop in another Home Depot until they apologize to the customers who actually deserve it.

There are lots of elves that work through the winter holidays. After Santa went bust with his pets.com investment during the dot-com boom/bust many if his elves went to work for Amazon and UPS; after all, that’s where all the toys come from now.

A few though were bitter about their losses. With their pensions invested in a failed sock puppet, and Santa delving into horror since he can’t afford to run a toy factory anymore, some have turned to crime. These bitter elves have taken jobs at UPS; not so they can delivery toys, but rather so they can steal them.

Today I came home to find two boxes waiting for me on the porch. UPS had left them while I was at work, no signature required, so I was not able to inspect them prior to accepting them. The smaller of the two boxes looked odd, like it had not been properly folded closed at shipping. The merchant sticker was intact across the seam though, so I was blissfully ignorant until I got the box open.

Eagerly I did open it, as this was the RMA memory from Other World Computing (aka macsales.com) which would finaly put my G5 saga to a temporary rest. In an earlier post I mentioned that I had 4G of memory to install in my new box. Well, it turned out that one of the modules, if not the whole pair, was defective and caused random machine crashes. OWC was very responsive when I called for an RMA, and they cross-shipped my replacement memory. Except, well, the box was empty. OK, not entirely empty; the rat bastard evil elf who stole my memory left me the RMA paperwork. Fat lot of good that does me.

I called Other World computing, and spoke to Mike in customer service. He said that he would file a lost/stolen item claim with UPS, and that I would hear from them within the half hour. UPS never called. I’m guessing they have a lot of evil elves, and I’m probably down the list of call-backs by a fair number.

I figure the theft had to have happened at OWC or at UPS, and if it happened at OWC mine was a pretty small order to take such a risk. I can’t imagine why a thief on my doorstep would have taken the time to pry open the box and then put it mostly back together. It would have been easier to just pick up the paperback sized box and walk away. That leaves UPS. I wonder if the theft has anything to do with my package not being trackable in the UPS system for several days of its journey?

This holiday the wrong elves were working at UPS. The bastards!