Macy’s furniture delivery service

If you like getting used/opened furniture that might have sat in someone else’s house and then got returned, or if you like waiting entire months to get the furniture after you’ve already paid for it, then Macy’s is the store for you.

That’s exactly what happened to my parents. They ordered a sectional leather sofa back in December, only to receive used pieces in the shipment after it took Macy’s about four weeks to deliver it. But wait, that’s not all. My parents refused the shipment on the perfectly reasonable argument that they expected to get new furniture, not used furniture, and they’ve been getting postponed again and again for the 2nd shipment since then. Plus, there’s no guarantee that they’ll receive new furniture this time, and it may take another refusal and another re-shipment to get things straightened out — that’s if they’ll ever get straightened out.

When they call Macy’s to ask about the status of the furniture shipment, they get transferred from place to place and person to person, and no one wants to take responsibility for making sure the shipment contains new furniture or that it gets to them on a certain date. They’re full of cheap excuses and all about covering their lazy, pathetic asses instead of doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, my parents’ living room has no sofa, and they’re sitting on chairs (they’ve been sitting on chairs for the last three months), waiting for Macy’s to get their act together.

Home Depot’s kitchen cabinet services

You may or may not know that Home Depot offers custom kitchen cabinetry. Well, don’t use them, not unless you want to receive the wrong parts, or realize that you have missing parts in your order. There’s no table in my parents’ kitchen, and there was supposed to be one in there about three months ago.

When they complained to Home Depot (the store in Hollywood, FL), an Indian woman manager there, who obviously thought she was still in India, not in the US, where we expect customer service, told my parents that they shouldn’t do business with Home Depot if they didn’t like their experience. She also blamed them for not opening every part box at the store and checking each piece of wood. She said it was their fault.

That’s lame and inexcusable. I think I’ll take that manager’s advice and tell you all not do business with Home Depot. They’re not worth your money. And believe me, my parents must have spent over $125,000 with Home Depot over the last few years with renovations to their house and apartment, so they know what they’re talking about. They’re not occasional customers, they’re loyal customers, or at least used to be.

NueMD medical practice management

They may say they have a Mac version of their software, but they don’t, not really, not by Apple software standards. When your software has no clue where to install, and it alternately installs to the desktop or at the root level of the hard drive instead of knowing it needs to go in the Applications folder, your code monkeys are just monkeying around.

Have a look at a screenshot of their website. That’s how it renders on Safari. That speaks volumes about their Mac compatibility. I honestly wish I’d gotten involved in the software selection process when my parents decided to choose something to run my father’s medical practice. It’s very likely that I would have ruled out NueMD after a very short trial.

Did I mention that they have expired system alerts that flash every time you log in, and you can’t disable them? They have no clue how to make them go away when you call them. And that sometimes, you can’t get their software to recognize when you press the Caps Lock key? Ugh…

That’s it for now. There are a few choice contractors in South Florida that I would very much like to warn you about, especially a certain plumbing contractor. I may do it in the near future.

These same crooks have been calling me from private phone numbers, harassing me, and trying to intimidate me into letting them post responses on my website. They’ve tried repeatedly to post comments on this post and on my other post about them, and I refuse to let their lies go through to the live site. They need to be in jail.

I wrote a post over a year ago detailing my nightmare experience with GISOL, a supposed web hosting company whose performance was missing in action and whose promises were stuffed so full of lies they were busting at the seams. I encourage you to read about what I had to say, but more than that, to also read the comments. You see, my story struck a chord with other users who were lied to and swindled out of their money by the thieves at GISOL, and they left poignant comments detailing their plight.

Today, another poor soul left a long comment explaining what happened to her, and I was so incensed I needed to do something more. I dugg my own post, and if you have a Digg account, I encourage you to digg it as well. Also, forward the link to my post to your friends and other folks who you know. Let’s get the word out about that rotten apple called GISOL. They should NOT be in business. They’ve got an F rating from the Better Business Bureau, tons of complaints have been filed against them, yet they’re still around. It’s just not right. Let’s tar and feather them, and let’s run them out of town.

At any rate, the next time I’m constipated, I’ll keep Red Bull in mind. I think it’s cheaper than Ex-Lax. And if I need a pick-me-up, I’ll stick with the usual half-cup of coffee, which works just fine, tastes somewhat better and is a lot less expensive.

These same crooks have been calling me from private phone numbers, harassing me, and trying to intimidate me into letting them post responses on my website. They’ve tried repeatedly to post comments on this post and on my other post about them, and I refuse to let their lies go through to the live site. They need to be in jail.

This is one web hosting company you should not touch, not even with a 10-foot pole!

I signed up with them back in January of 2006, because I was attracted by their many features and low price. They were offering over 35GB of space, and unlimited bandwidth. While that last hook should have had me turning away, I fell for it. I anticipated increasing traffic to my sites, and was worried about bandwidth fees. Their many features blinded me. See the attached PDFs for the details of the hosting packages (Gisol Windows Hosting, Gisol Linux Hosting). Sure, there were signs this was a shady operation right from the start, but I ignored them. The cheesy site design should have clued me in, as well as the script, which is still running, and says there are so many more hours left until the “blowout sale” expires… As of the date of this post, that script’s been running for at least 6 months (January to June 2006).

I took the bait, and signed up. That’s when my problems started. I knew I should leave right away, but I was hooked on their Control Panel, which let me do everything easily. They were, and they still might be using the H-Sphere Control Panel, which lets one do just about everything (add/manage domains, sub-domains, DSNs, MIME types, databases, etc.) You name it, the control panel can do it. Unfortunately, that’s the ONLY thing that Gisol has which works well. Everything else is broken in one way or another.

Let me give you a few examples:

Their web servers always go down! By always, I mean always. It could be daily, it could be a few times a day. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, your sites will stay up for a few days, which is nothing short of a miracle when it comes to GISol. The funny thing is, they advertise 99.999% uptime on their site – look at the plan specs, linked above, or this beauty: Gisol Uptime Guarantee. I’m still not sure how they compute the percentage they list in the plan specs, but I think their formula automatically eliminates the downtime to the third decimal point…

Their web servers don’t store session variables. Yes, you heard me correctly! I used session variables for logins on one of my clients’ sites, including a couple of my own. I’d log in, and the site would kick me out, because I had the web pages look for the variables, and they couldn’t be found anywhere. I had to argue with their tech support for days, and finally appealed to management. They kept accusing me of being at fault, when their pathetic servers wouldn’t work right. Finally, they switched me to another one, and wonder of wonders, no more session variable problems… but of course, other problems awaited.

Their tech support is outsourced to India. Normally, I don’t really care where the tech support is located, as long as they can do their job, but when they can’t speak English, are obviously reading packaged phrases off some sheet, are rude to me, don’t solve my problems, and lay the blame on me when they’re at fault, I tend to get a little upset, and I think you would, too.

False advertising: they say they have millions of customers on their site. I doubt it. I think their real number of customers is somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand. Why do I say that? Because:

• They only had 1 mySQL server. Seriously. I’m not kidding. The name of that server was was mysql1, and they couldn’t move me to a new one when I asked.
• I signed up for a Windows Hosting account, and my server’s name was win2k8. When I had problems with that, they moved me to win2k9, then win2k10.
• I also signed up for a Linux Hosting account, and my server’s name was web16.
• When I called Tech Support, I kept speaking to the same 3-4 technicians all the time.

I had numerous – and when I say numerous, I mean plentiful, as in plethora – database connection problems. Just about every time I tried writing to one of the mySQL databases, I’d get timeouts or connection problems, and they simply couldn’t solve them.

The user testimonials on their site are false. They have to be. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s had problems with them. Besides, the problems are so blatant that anyone but a blithely unaware novice would know they’ve got serious problems.

I made the mistake of buying a domain through them. When I wanted to switch to another web hosting provider, they held the domain hostage. It took several emails and phone calls to get them to release it. I kept getting bounced from one “department” to another. Welcome to Indian-style bureaucracy, right here in the States!

I cancelled my web hosting plans. On their site, they say they offer refunds any time, for any reason. That’s the biggest crock of crap I’ve ever seen. It’s now three weeks since I requested a refund, and I’ve still to get it. I spoke with their Billing “department” – and I use the term loosely. They passed me off to the Refund “department”, and told me I could call them at certain phone numbers – one was a toll-free number, and the other was a long-distance number. I called the first number, only to be disconnected right away. Then I called the second number, only to have it ring endlessly, then get disconnected. No, not even an answering machine. Finally, I wrote to their email address (refund@gisol.com). I’m still waiting for an answer. I’ve already started fraud proceedings with my credit card company.

All in all, I think I don’t exaggerate when I say you should beware of Global Internet Solutions (aka GISol). If you value your sanity and your wallet, stay far away from them!

Then someone at TechDirt picked up on the story and wrote a post about it. Well, people from CipherTrust posted anonymous comments bashing Joel Snyder. This is silly! People at a computer security company ought to know their IP addresses can be traced, even with anonymous comments. Makes one think twice about purchasing anything from CipherTrust, doesn’t it?