The Real Jenty

I’ve spent the last 2 days in the most awesome conference where a lot was spoken about knowing your client/user and designing solutions for them. Now I did know a lot about it, but it’s been drummed into my head again by various speakers.

Then I get home, and get immediately irritated when I see my mail that arrived today. Every single thing I receive in the mail box is a waste of time and effort.  And the one thing that irritated me the most was the letter from Wesbank, that I didn’t even open, where the envelope promised some cash if I opened it.

In fact, from research, people will only open mails and emails etc, if they’re at the point of needing it based on what’s on the envelope.  And in those 5 seconds, not that week…. your chances of anyone opening it are so very slim.

I mean truly!! How much wasted money do they spend on mail drops like that? Surely they don’t get the return.   It’s definitely not customised for me.  They need to think about something else.  I don’t even open it.  It goes straight into the paper recycling bag.  Along with the Spar specials and the other spam.  It’s all spam!

In fact, that brings me to my next point.  There’s a lot of legislation about sending spam emails… I can opt out of any electronic spam… but HTF do you opt out of this crap?!  I’m not even a client of Wesbank’s!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned somewhere along the line that I don’t recycle much around my house, but I do recycle paper.

Now I’m a lazy  person, and it’s all about convenience for me.  Truely the only reason I recycle the paper is because it’s so damn easy.  Once a week, the Mondi guy comes around the area and collects his Ronnie paper pick-up bags, and he leaves refill bags for the coming week.  Every household in the area gets one back for his purpose.

So, then last week, I got a mail from the community news people saying that the recycling service is being extended. So now, they’ll also collect tin, plastic and glass. The instructions were to leave a bag filled with the new type of a waste on the kerb, and they would leave a seperate bag for it.

So I duly did that.

It seemed like a perfectly brilliant idea.  No hassle.  Easy.

Except there’s one BIG flaw in this plan.  The orange paper pickup bag that works perfectly well, is useless for other waste for a number of reasons:

1. Until you start recycling properly you actually have no idea how much of the stuff you collect in one week, and one bag is simply too small.
2. The instructions say to rinse your waste before putting it in the bin.  All very well and good, except it’s still smelly.  Paper doesn’t smell.  Other waste… well… it smells!
3. I have huskies… the smelly tins and empty milk containers are just so very tempting. No matter where I put the bag, the dogs smell it out.

So, there’s goes my recycling initiative for the moment… I don’t have time to phaff around with this stuff.  I need a proper bin… not a silly bag!

1. Connor thinks that my dad needs to get Bakugans for his 60th birthday which is coming up soon. LOL!! Can you imagine?
2. I arrived 10 minutes early for a meeting… the person made me wait on the street outside their house until the allotted time. LOL! How weird is that?!
3. I made a HUGE blunder by going to meet a prospective client…. without my portfolio!! LOL! I’ll be surprised if I get that wedding
4. I didn’t take a photo for my 365 day challenge… just never had the time
5. The Mac specialist at the Incredible Connection store in Fourways looked at me blankly when I said that I needed an adaptor specially for the Macbook Pro… dude had never noticed that the 2-prong plug on the machine is non-standard. And then promptly told me that they didn’t sell them… seems useless to me… how can you sell a machine without selling the thing that’s going to allow it to work properly!
6. Prolabs is driving me nuts… this photobook I ordered is taking forever and no-one can seem to tell me for certain where the hell the book is!! They better find it by tomorrow! To say that I’m annoyed is an understatement. In fact, the book was supposed to be the subject of my photo for the day.
7. I still haven’t found the time to collect my new Moo card shipment from the post office.

It was one strange day…

Seriously, some days like today, I really really despair over the lack of good retail websites in this country.  I’m not talking all of them, but seriously, the really big brick and mortar shops should have a better presence online by now.

I suppose it’s a chicken and egg situation, where they’re not getting enough traffic and clients from their websites so they’re not prepared to jack them up… but I swear if they were better… they would get more online orders… especially if they were clever about the costs of delivery.  The old excuse about the size of the web audience in this country doesn’t make sense anymore, based on the recent stats I’ve seen… retailers should do their homework again.

Take this evening for example, I’ve been trying in vain to update my “stuff” page (my page with stuff that I want in the hopes that Lance will get me a surprise for my birthday).  I’ve been trying to get a link to a site for a steel colander.  Now that’s quite a basic thing to have in a kitchen (even though I don’t have one, and Pierre melted my Tupperware one when he steamed the rice in it one night), so it shouldn’t be difficult to find. Well, now… Woolies have them in the shop, I saw them today, yet their online store doesn’t list them.  Home Etc and Boardman’s websites are truly pathetic… what’s the freaking use of a brochure ware site for a retailer?! And that actually goes for most of the brick and mortar shops locally.

I ended up having to link to Amazon… it’s just really useless.  I would love to shop more online, but the retailers here are just so freaking backwards.   I’m not surprised more and more people are shopping overseas and importing stuff.  I, for one, don’t have the time to wander around shops anymore, I’d much rather buy online.

It’s time the local retailers caught a wakeup, seriously!

On Wednesday evening I got a very odd phone call.  It was from Joey, who owns Ultimate Functions, to tell me that someone had used her photos on their website, and she’d noticed that one of my photos was there too.

After looking at the Perfect Kids Party site later, I saw that she was right.  A photo of a cake, that I’d taken at a party last year, was on this website’s cake-gallery.  But this “woman” didn’t just download my photo, all she’d done was display a photo from Google images and she’s linked directly to my website.  This means that anyone who clicked onto the photo, would come to my blog.

It’s not just that she stole the photo, that makes me as mad as hell, it’s that she’s implying that she made the cake.  She’s selling a skill that she doesn’t necessarily have.  It’s fraud!

Anyhoo, after checking out all the other photos on the site, I realised that it wasn’t just me. She’d also used photos of events done by Monkey Magic and she’d used cakes from overseas cake companies and blogs too.

So, on Thursday morning, I decided to phone her.  And she put the phone down in my ear when she heard what it was about!! Man, there’s nothing that makes me more livid!  She didn’t even listen to me, and thought I was Joey on the phone… she told me she’d removed that photo and slammed the phone down!

COW!

Then I got angry.  If she was just ignorant about photo usage, surely she would have removed all the images that she’d stolen after she’d received the first phone call!!

So, I’ve now contacted every single other company that she’s stolen images from too.  Monkey Magic quickly changed their image, so that there’s a massive STOLEN written across their image; but because of the way she’d linked to mine and Google has cached it, I haven’t been able to do the same.  I’ve also contacted Jozikids, where she is listed, because it seems she used some of their other images too; as well as Party Craze an Australian cake website, the Baking Shop, and Wonderful Wortel World

I’ve got a letter that’s ready and prepared to send to her ISP, but have decided to wait until tomorrow before sending it.  And that’s only because I spoke to her again on Friday night and she told me that after speaking to Merle from Jozikids that she agreed to remove them all, but she hasn’t got internet access until Monday.

She has until 8am tomorrow morning, or else her ISP will definitely know about it!!

How STUPID can one person be?! She’s destroyed the reputation of her fledgling business completely.

From looking at her Perfect Kids Party site, there’s no way to tell now which parties she’s actually done.  Maybe every single one of the photos is fraudulent, and she just got lazy when putting the page together and started linking sites instead of downloading photos.  I sure wouldn’t believe another word that came out of that woman’s mouth!

On Sunday while walking around Montecasino, I noticed that my Ginger Mary handbag was about to come apart.  The strap was literally coming to pieces.

Now this bag was a gift for Christmas (and I blogged about it too)… I’d got one as a gift, wasn’t happy with it, and took it back and got this one instead.  I LOVED my bag. I’m not the kind of person that changes bags with every outfit, and I only have one that I use daily.

So yesterday at lunchtime, I bumble off to Sandton City to Truworths to complain about it.

And OWM now I’m mad! It’s not enough that a handbag has lasted less than 3 months, but the store has just made me so angry.

What happened in the store:
1. Shop assistant doesn’t know what to do about my complaint. She calls her supervisor.
2. Supervisor tells me the rules. They will only exchange it if I have a receipt and it’s within 3 months of purchase. Freaking stupid if you ask me, considering it’s faulty. There’s no way a handbag should last less than 3 months!
3. She looks up the codes on the system, finds the price, sees that’s it’s not on sale yet, and doesn’t look happy. I’m assuming that she was hoping she’d catch me out!
4. She decides she’s not going to make the call, so she takes the bag to the “store manager”
5. Supervisor comes back to tell me that the “store manager” wants to send it to the area manager to make the decision. I should get an answer today apparently.
6. I complained on Twitter while I was in the store, and they responded later to say the store was investigating.

Why I’m so mad:
1. I understand the slip rule for a normal exchange (and btw Ginger Mary is only available at Truworths). But in this case there’s something wrong with the bag! A handbag should not last for less than 3 months. It’s just ludicrous
2. What’s the freaking point of having a store manager if he/she can’t make a decision?!!?? It’s just a handbag, it’s not even leather, it’s cheaper than a jacket for pete sake!
3. Not only did the store manager not have the balls to make the call, he/she didn’t even bother to speak to me in person!! That’s just plain RUDE!
4. It’s now 11am. I went there at noon yesterday. I have still not heard anything.

I’m not happy. I’m also not buying a gift for anyone from Truworths anymore.

**update: Truworths eventually phoned me at 2pm, after I tweeted again. The verdict: I can come into the store to exchange the bag for something else. How I feel now: I’m wondering whether my tweeting and blogging has resulted in this result, if I hadn’t have done this, would they have even phoned me back without me hounding the store. She wouldn’t even tell me what the area manager said. I wonder if the bag even left the store as she said it would.

I know, I should be excited about the World Cup, but I’m not really.

This morning on 5FM, Gareth Cliff was waxing lyrical again about the World Cup, and after being asked whether people will be working during this time, Gareth said yes, all businesses will be working, and should be profiting on the back of it… and only teachers will be off.

Well, I don’t see it that way.

I’m a mother who works.  Like most people who work, there are only a certain number of days leave that you get allocated every year.

I would like to know the following… if all the schools are closed, and all the daycares are closed, who is going to look after the kids for 6 weeks?  Who?

I don’t know about you, but I can’t take that much leave.

So, guess what’s going to happen, companies will have to let people bring their kids to work.  And guess what… productivity levels will drop… therefore less money to be made by everyone!  Let alone the increase in frustration and aggravation levels in the offices because of the kids creating havoc everywhere – and not just for the non-parenting, but also for the parents who will be endlessly hassled for drinks and entertainment during the day.

Oh yes, I see fun ahead.

I wrote a blog post in October last year about Simply Slim after a discussion about the drug at bookclub one night.

For those living under a rock… it’s a weight loss miracle cure that’s not sold by pharmacies, but by agents and random people who have set up camp in shopping centres across the country (that in itself is a worry!).  It was/is touted as a natural weight loss pill and hundreds and thousands of women have been buying it and losing oodles of weight.

However with the weight, comes horrific side effect, some of which I blogged about at the time.

The point of my new blog post…  KUDOS to the medical council for FINALLY investigating this stuff!

According to the Government Gazette, the MCC has suspended the sale of the product with immediate effect.  And according to Timeslive the levels of sibutramine found in the product are above legal limits and after many complaints they’re suspended the product.

I get between 20 to 30 hits on my blog post every day from google searches like “simply slim complaints” and “simply slim dangers” and “has anybody experienced side effects of Simply Slim” and “simply slim side effects”.

My stats have been telling me that there’s a HUGE problem with it.

And on top of that, one of my friends has been told categorically by her doctor that her heart problems are directly related to her taking the drug!

I’m sorry, but that’s not normal. I know that a lot of people swear by it, and have lost oodles of weight on it… but people… you’re killing yourselves early!!

I just hope they actually shut the whole operation down. And yes, I feel sorry for the agents. They’re really in the middle of this mess, after being given “medical” training on the stuff and being told that there’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s safe to take.  Ja right!

And I’m NOT going to respond to people who comment saying I have no idea what I’m talking about… this is my opinion! I know people have gotten their lives back on the stuff because they’ve lost so much weight in the process, that’s not the issue… the issue is how much of your body you’ve irreparably damaged by taking it.

I know one shouldn’t wish one’s life away… and it’s only 3 months until Christmas, but man, this month has been bad.  Next month can only be better.  @Tertia and @EveD were just saying the same thing on Twitter, and I have to moan here too!

Reasons why this month has been crap include:

1. Connor being hospitalised

2.  Lance still not finding a job

3.  Fights and more fights at work and everyone in the strangest of moods

4.  Nicole (SIL) being hospitalised for unknown causes

5.  Bradley starting to lie more and more often, and it’s a huge cause for concern

6.  Realisation that I have to redo a corporate shoot because I forgot to ask the men to wear jackets – so I know they won’t be accepted and I won’t be paid for it.

7.  I’m so very tired and I can’t snap out of this mood

8.  Pool looks like a pond, and we have to replace the pump and the filters and the pipes.

9.  Stove packed in, and still can’t find the cause for it… and we really don’t have the money to replace the whole thing

10. Garden is an absolute mess and needs time and money spent on it.

.. and the list goes on…

By the time I got home tonight, I was so freaking annoyed!!

I flew to Durban for the day, and I stupidly wore wide lgged pants with a turn-up at the bottom, and high heels.  Do you know how many times I freaking tripped?  My heel kept hooking in the turn-up.  Now when you’re looking and feeling like a pack horse with handbag, camera bag, tripod and laptop bag… that’s not a good thing!

In fact, I even fell and sent my camera kit sprawling across the slate tiles..  thankfully only a handful of people saw it… but damn my knees are sore!! I’ve seriously bruised them and my ego!

I feel like actually chucking those pants in the bin actually!!  Arrrgggghhh!