Wouldn’t you know it? After writing that entry about the Sephora lady last night, I woke up to find a zit on my chin this morning. I guess I should’ve bought the dang blemish extractor after all. Grr.

Self-Portrait

Originally uploaded by Champuru.

I admit that I’m a snob about a few things; although some will venture to say that I’m a snob about a lot of things. One of the things that I’m a snob about is tweezers. Yes, I said “tweezers.”

A good pair of tweezers is an essential component of my toolbox. I am generally not very high maintenance about make up and such, but I insist on owning a pair of high quality tweezers. So, you can imagine my horror when my favorite pair of German-engineered tweezers fell missing.
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I was surprised to see that my negative review on Amazon.com caught the attention of the Keurig Kustomer Service. The Director of Customer Service, even. I received a courteous e-mail of inquiry the day after I posted the review, thus launching an e-mail dialogue.

The Director was eager to learn more about the problem. She offered me an upgrade to the Special Edition B60 and some free K-cups for my trouble. While the offer for a better model certainly was appealing, I declined. Our Best Buy Replacement Plan enabled us to handle exchanges at the local store should the unit break down within two years. Heaven forbid we get the “new and improved” B60, have it break down and it cost me money to ship it back to the company. I did, however, happily accept the offer for free coffee.

I am genuinely pleased by the effort that Keurig is putting forth to compensate us for our time and trouble. I am confident that this story will have a happy ending. Of course, in appreciation, I will gladly edit my review on Amazon.com and epinions.com to reflect their actions to resolve my issues.

Ahh… ya gotta love the Internet.

So, the mission for today was to obtain a replacement for the defective koffeemaker. This makes replacement #4 since December 11. Seeing a disturbing trend in the unreliability of this model, we purchased the 2-Year Replacement Plan at Best Buy when we picked up unit #3, only three weeks ago.

The customer service agent was very professional and handled our exchange efficiently. We left with a new Keurig and a satisfied feeling that we can have our gourmet coffee and tea from the convenience of our home again — at least until it breaks down again.

We’re thinking that we should just pencil in a trip to Best Buy and lunch at Bravo every 2-3 weeks since that’s been the consistent track record of this machine:

Keurig Ultra B50
#1 - 12/11/2005 (Original purchase date)
#2 - 12/22/2005 (11 days)
#3 - 01/08/2006 (20 days)
#4 - 01/28/2006 (20 days)

Let’s hope there won’t be a #5 anytime soon.

I can’t believe it.

The Keurig B50 Coffeemaker that we bought ourselves for Christmas broke. Again. This is the third one that has failed in a little over a month. It seems that the unit goes into self-destruct mode after 2-3 weeks of use. We’re becoming well-acquainted with the return and exchange policy at Best Buy as a result of this piece of shoddy workmanship.

I was so annoyed about this most recent episode that I actually wrote three negative reviews for the Keurig B50. I even registered on epinions.com just so that I could proclaim my displeasure with the product in hopes of deterring others from making the same mistake.

Before you start shouting “user error!” see that others are having similar problems and shared them on this review.

It’s frustrating, to say the least. We’re thinking about asking Best Buy to give us store credit instead of an exchange so we can get a different brand. The only problem is that we still have about $50 worth of K-cups which are proprietary and cannot be used in any other type of single-cup coffeemaker. I suppose we could donate them to our friends R&R who are the happy owners of a Keurig, which oddly enough, has not broken down on them once.

I guess we just have a propensity for picking lemons. Too bad the Keurig doesn’t make lemonade.

Monday, January 16, approximately 9:30 am
A lazy holiday morning, I allowed myself to sleep in. Around 9:30 am, I dragged myself out of bed and went to the kitchen to have breakfast. I checked the fridge and found that Hubby had eaten the last of the cereal, so I went to the pantry and grabbed a new box.

As I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I noticed something curious: the cereal in my bowl did not contain any dried fruit. The cereal was supposed to include blueberries and strawberries, but all I saw were flakes. Thinking that perhaps the fruit had settled to the bottom of the bag, I extracted the bag from the box and found that it was absolutely devoid of any color except for a smattering of black sediment on the bottom of the bag, which I deduced to be blueberry particles of some sort.

I harrumphed to myself, annoyed that they had gypped me out of a good box of cereal. Continue Reading »

This is pretty embarrassing. You would think that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to an IT professional, but it does. At least it does to me.

My HP LaserJet 1012 which has been serving me faithfully for about 2 years now suddenly stopped printing. Whenever a print job was received, the printer would fire up, rollers would spin, click 3 times, and give up, unable to pick up a sheet of paper from the tray. I figured maybe the rollers had worn out since I had sent some high volume print jobs for my last few classes, pumping out the equivalent of 3 textbooks on that little low-end consumer grade printer.

Luckily, I work in IT and am friends with a vendor that repairs office machines. I told him about it and he instructed me to bring my printer in to the office where he would take a look at it.

Well, I brought it in today. He had a befuddled expression on his face as he disassembled the printer. “Have you ever seen this before?” he asked me, holding up a comb that I had lost track of some time ago. Incidentally, it was of the same color scheme as the printer.

A blush rose to my cheeks and I laughed nervously, “uh, yeah… that’s my comb.” I mumbled some lame explanation about how it was sitting next to the printer and how I had no idea how it got inside the printer.

He said that it’s common for foreign objects to get mysteriously sucked into printers. I’m guessing that the comb got placed on top of the manual feeder, pushed inside inadvertently and sucked in when I tried to run a print job. It was funny because he was just about to consult his manual to identify this strange part. After all, it looked almost like it belonged in there with the same colors as the printer itself. Maybe that poor little comb thought he was returning to the mother ship.

Now I know how our computer users feel when they realize that their problems are a direct result of “user error.”