Ten-Finger Exercises

Seeing RED

The weather was rainy and c-c-cold, not acceptable for flying to Puyallup today as we'd planned. So, what fun thing did we do? We worked on taxes. Wheee

Bill mentioned he needed to get a new 2007 Quicken, so I looked for one. Staples had them for sale at a bargain priceor $39.99 if you bought Turbo Tax with it. Unfortunately, we'd already bought our Turbo Tax for the year. So I kept on looking, hoping not to have to pay the full price of $69.95.

Have you ever been suckered into one of those websites promising a free dinner at Red Lobster, or, better yet, a free laptop? All you have to do is say yes or no to some special offers and free trials. The trick is, there's no end to them. If any of you have ever reached an end, I hope you'll tell me. Not just an end to your patience either.

Well, this one is worse. HalfMania is the name of the outfit, and their offer of Quicken was only $34.95. Wow, I thought. Woe. They even said, "Want to know how we can save you so much?" or something like that. Their answer was that their advertisers pay for it. That should have alerted me. I looked down the list and thought, okay, I've been wanting to try Blockbuster, so that will be worth it; and I signed up. Ah, but that was only the first page, and they already had my credit card to buy the Quicken! And, the free trials all cost something too: $1 to 9.99 and up for shipping and handling. Nothing was free-- oh maybe one credit card offer. All the rest had strings attached. One was an eBay sellers kit of a CD and I don't know what all, and it was a low price, like maybe $3 something. But... the small print gave them the right to bill you $59 a month for something if you didn't cancel and another $16.50 a month for something else!!!

So, I just quit it all. I'm sure they won't send the Quicken for the low cost without the verifications from the sponsors--I'm sure there were at least three required. And they'd better not charge anything to that account. Our credit card company has been very good about complaints and has even checked with us about the first couple of charges when we were on vacation to make sure we'd made them.

Otherwise, it's been a nice day, and weren't we both lucky to have the day off for Presidents' Day? Hospice doesn't pay like the hospital did, but it's generous with holidays, and that's wonderful.