New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for November, 2007

If I could get CitiGroup CEO Charles Prince on the phone or catch him on the street, this is what I’d like to say to him: Ha! Ha! Ha!

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to see one of the top fat cats like this jerk getting a little payback that he so richly deserves.

I surely don’t expect him to suffer any financial pain. Guys like this are wealthy enough to live out their lives (and probably the lives of many others) without having to earn another cent.

I’d like to see him out on the street like all the poor people that have suffered through foreclosure due to the willingness of the big lenders to push mortgages that people could not afford.

No, it’s not financial problems that will be a problem for Charles Prince. His real  pain will come from the embarrassment of looking like a failure. Guys with enormous egos like he probably has must fear that more than anything else. He failed in a very public way at the helm of a huge company everyone has heard of.

News reports say that Prince is set to step down tomorrow at some kind of emergency meeting. Good riddance.

Maybe, just maybe, this will be a lesson to the greedy creeps that run some of these big corporations. Sometimes your actions come back and bit you in the rear end.

As readers may know, I am anything but a fan of CitiGroup/CitiBank/CitiMortgage/Whatever and any news regarding hardship on the part of that outfit puts a smile on my face.

I sure feel badly for all the lower-level employees who are just trying to make a living and may be facing lay-offs soon. I did my time inside Corporate America for quite a few years myself and was thrown out on my butt a while back, so I can truly say that I “feel their pain.”

I do not, needless to say, feel the least bit sorry for the Charles Princes of the world, however. It’s quite refreshing to see a little bit of what some of us might call “justice” metered out for a change. Hit the road, Prince, CitiGroup may become a better company without you.

How many times have you clicked on a link to a news story and then ended up at the brick wall that is the “Register” page? It happens to me all the time.

I’m a regular reader of the Drudge Report, and as most Internet users know, that site contains many links to various news stories all around the net. It seems to be less frequent than it once was, but I still end up getting a registration page thrown in my face when I click on a link to a story.

This is because of the short-sided nitwits that are running some of these news sites. What they don’t seem to realize is that when I hit one of these registration pages, the last thing I am going to do it register on their site. And it really doesn’t have anything to do with privacy issues.

I visit the Drudge Report because I want a quick rundown of the day’s news stories on one page so I can scan it quickly and see what stories interest me. I am not going to stop my surfing to fill out my name and address or name and zip code or whatever on some site that puts a wall around their content and only allows registered users to access it.

What these registration tyrants don’t seem to realize is that the same news stories are available on about a million other sites that do not require registration at all.

When I run into one of these registration brick walls when trying to access a news story I simply bring up Google, click on “News” and then type in some keywords for the story. You know, something like “dog bounty hunter racist” (I’ll use that one only because I think that guy is such a jackass).

Google News will present me with than more than enough links to satisfy my appetite for that particular news story, and then some.

News sites make their money from the advertisements that appear when you visit their sites, but registration tyrants don’t seem to realize that demanding registration from their readers is reducing the number of eyeballs on their pages. People like me very quickly seek their news elsewhere and some other news site benefits from the extra eyeballs on their pages.

Smarten up and ditch the registration nonsense already. It’s so 1990′s.

I got an e-mail recently from my Dad about dealing with telemarketers and junk mail senders. It was one of those e-mail messages that is forwarded endlessly around the Internet, but this one actually looked like it might have some useful information contained within.

The old tried-and-true methods like picking up the phone and then asking the telemarketer to “hold on” and setting the phone down until their patience runs out was covered as well as a new idea or two I had not heard of.

I have no idea if this next one actually works, but I just may give it a try next time I get one of those annoying telemarketing calls that hangs up on you without saying a word.

The information I got from a telephone company employee differs a bit from the explanation of these “hang up” calls that appears in the e-mail, but for all I know, there could be more than one purpose for these annoying phone calls.

Anyway, this e-mail reports that if you hit the ‘#’ button on your telephone a bunch of times (like 6 or 7), the system that makes the call will recognize it as some kind of signal that will remove you from their calling list.

I’m a pretty skeptical guy and these are the kinds of things that always sounds like a load of crap to me. Frankly, I doubt this button-pushing will do a darn thing, but I figure it won’t hurt to give it a try.

The information in this e-mail regarding junk mail was nothing terribly new, but it did give me an idea or two.

People have been playing tricks for years on junk mailers by using postage-paid envelopes to send their junk mail back to them. I’ve done this a few times myself in the past but have not done it for quite a while.

One of the suggestions was to take the little advertisements that utility companies, credit card companies and others enclose along with your bill and send them back along with your payment. The only problem with that idea is that I do 100% of my bill-paying online these days. I did get another idea from this, however.

As a small business owner, I can use some of the postage-paid envelopes to send advertisements for my products or services back to the sender. Sure, it’s a long shot that the employee charged with opening the mail will actually buy anything from me, but it’s not impossible. Besides, it gives me a small sense of satisfaction to return some of my own junk mail to the junk mailer.