Apr
22

My neighbors have the most annoying barky dogs in the world

Categories:

by Jean

It’s true, I live next to the most annoy small dogs in the world…maybe they are just the most annoying neighbors ever! No one in my house can go outside in the backyard without being harassed by the loud, high pitched barking of our neighbor’s now 5 small dogs.

They used to have 3 of those taco bell dogs, Chihuahuas and they were super annoying with their constant barking at the fence. At times they would let them run around outside in the front yard off leash and they would run out into our yard barking at me getting into my car. Mad

In the rare instance my neighbor would walk his litter of terrors, he would allow them to pee and poop anywhere they want without cleaning it up. We don’t own dogs and should not have to deal with dog poop in our yard.

They also have annoying cats that they let out to roam loose. We have flower beds and a huge vegetable garden in our yard and everyday we go outside to find the neighbor’s cat has dug up small plants and have pooped and peed in our garden and flower beds….which destroys all our hard work.

These neighbors are the most disrespectful people I’ve ever encountered. If you own pets, you should be responsible for them and not let them continuously be a public nuisance to the people you live near. I seriously doubt we are the only neighbor’s their pets have inconvenience since their dogs bark at anything and everything.

Sometime last year, we noticed that one of the barky dogs were gone, maybe it died or something, who the hell knows. But the two dogs were just as bad as three with their barking.

A few weeks ago, it seems that they decided to get more dogs. So now, instead of the 2 Chihuahuas, they now have 3 Dachshunds for a total of 5 ANNOYING YAPPY DOGS ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH!!!!!! :faint:

I don’t know what the @#$%! they are thinking. It doesn’t seem like they are responsible enough to properly train their dogs as it was, why the hell would they take on more and more animals??

I went outside in the backyard to do something in the yard briefly and was greeted by a pack of barking dogs at the fence. The neighbors are home, there is always someone there and they just let their dogs bark for a long time. Last week I was outside weed whacking and the dogs barked the entire time I was outside which was over an hour!

Our backyard could be really relaxing and peaceful, especially when the garden is in full bloom, it’s gorgeous! But we can’t enjoy it without the addition of the ear piercing barking dogs.

Today I just could not take it, I can’t go outside for a little while to get something without the dogs barking up a storm. After about 5 minutes of barking, I heard the neighbor come to the door to call the dogs but when they didn’t go to him, he just left it alone. How #$@! LAME!!! After 3 more minutes of barking, I just lost it, I started screaming and yelling at them to shut the hell up. Which I know probably doesn’t help and only excite the dogs more but I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was just totally out of my mind at that point, if I had a bat, I would have banged on the fence making a ton of ruckus just to scare the dogs…ugh!!! :bat: Would have let out some of my frustrations too and maybe freak the neighbors out that I’m unstable or something.

I like animals and wouldn’t want to harm them but man, they stress me out and annoy the hell out of me. It’s the fault of the pet owners that don’t train their dogs properly that is to blame for all this irritation.

I am seriously contemplating on finding ways to annoy them, I wonder if a silent dog whistle would annoy the dogs at all times of the day regardless of when I’m outside or not. I could stand at my backdoor on the inside and just blow on the whistle and get the dogs going with their barking. Maybe if enough people actually complain to them besides me, they would take this matter more seriously and train their dogs or give them more exercise.

Next time, I’m going to video tape their continuous barking to keep as documentation. I know for my county there, there is a pet nuisance law stated at the animal control site, it says I need documentation, etc.

If every time my neighbors went outside, I started blasting loud music, they wouldn’t like it either. ugh, I wish they would move. They keep on putting their house up for sale in the past two years but then month or so later, they remove the sign. I don’t think anyone wants buy that house. It’s probably all junked up like their backyard is. The day they put the for sale sign up, I remember me and my brother started cheering and hi-fiving each other in celebration. So sad they never moved…. Cry

I’m thinking about buying those stop dog barking audio devices but they seem to get mixed reviews. UGH!!!!! Mad

This post has no tag

1 comment

Mar
28

Bad experience today at Petsmart

Categories:

by Jean

The other day I received an email from Petsmart’s Petperks offer with coupons inside. Today I actually checked them out and printed them off to use in their retail store.

Just to backtrack a little, I have been thinking about adopting a kitty from one of those rescue shelters and have been slowly buying my cat supplies while I search for the perfect kitty for me. I’ve already gotten 2 litter boxes from biddycat.com which I will review in a separate post once I actually get around to using it, litter scoop, bowls, cat bed, a few cans of wellness food for starters, and a cat tree. I also picked up one of those pedi-paws so it will be interesting to see how that works out for me and my future kitty.

When I saw those petsmart coupons for such a great deal for this weekend only, I thought I would go and pick up the rest of the supplies I would need which include the litter, a pet carrier, some feathered toys, toy mice, and balls, a brush or two for grooming, maybe a collar and possibly some cat grass and catnip!

I really didn’t need to buy the rest of the stuff right this moment and could have waited til I found the cat first. But $15 bucks off of $50 is a decent savings, considering I have already spent close to $300 bucks so far on cat stuff and will probably cost me another $150-$200 for the cat adoption fee and first vet visit.

Ok, maybe I go all out sometimes (most of the time) when I do things but I like to get things right the first time around or as right as possible. I’ve been doing lots of cat research and have been online being obsessed with looking for my cat and learning how to take care of them. I’ve been reading up on raw feeding and am leaning towards feeding my new kitty a prey model diet as the way nature intended. :good:

So let’s get back to my awful experience today. With coupons in purse and shopping cart in my hands, I picked up most of the stuff I wanted to total to about $50 bucks. I headed to the register as it was about a half hour til closing time and proceeded to pay for my stuff with coupons, petperks card, and my credit card.

The cashier tells me in a not so nice way that my coupons are fakes and they are not accepting them at all. So I told her that I got these sent to me in email by petsmart….what do you mean they are fake? :faint:

She then proceeded to say in a loud manner with all these other customers in line behind me how they’ve been warned that the coupons are fraudulent and their store will not accept fake coupons. At this point, some other worker who seemed like the closing manager comes over to say the same thing, telling me that the email I received was not from Petsmart and that I was fooled and how I shouldn’t click any link within the email because they are fraud.

I started telling them that the email looked really authentic and it said to click for printable version which took me to a link on a site at petsmart-mail.com which apparently is owned by Petsmart and is what they use to send out their petperks offers/newsletters.

Needless to say I was embarrassed by this whole thing as I was not out to use fake coupons. All I did was print off what appeared to me as real coupons from their company to use in their retail stores for this weekend only. I ended up not buying a thing as I am not in desperate need for those things yet and was only buying them now to take advantage of THEIR coupons.

The whole thing didn’t sit right with me on the drive home empty handed and when I got home, I started doing some research on the legitimacy of the email and these coupons. Here’s what I discovered:

1. The email header is sent from petsmart-mail.com and it looks like it was sent from a generic address by them for probably their mass mailings….but I know that emails can be spoofed.
2. petsmart-mail.com appears to be owned by petsmart according to their domain registration information. That info I know can be faked to a certain extent. What is peculiar is that the registration year was 2004 and not a recent registration which in most of these cases are a sure sign of potential fraud.
3. sign up subscribe page at petsmart.com say to add petsmart-mail.com to your email address list (white listing) so that further confirms the legitimacy of petsmart owning petsmart-mail.com
4. the output url directed for printer friendly coupons go to a page residing at petsmart-mail.com so if petsmart owns petsmart-mail.com why wouldn’t a page on their site with coupons be honored by their retail stores?

It took me a few hours of ranting and chasing down info to come up with mostly positive conclusion that these coupons are legitimate. It’s not like they are half off or expires 3 months from now. They are reasonable discounts for a very short limited time of just this weekend.

I just did not appreciate the way I was treated in that store and if I can help it, I probably wouldn’t shop in that particular store again. There’s another petsmart on the other side of town and there’s a petco down the road too.

Every time I go into that store, Petsmart in Glen Burnie off of Ordnance Rd, I try to check out that cats up for adoption but they are really strict about it, saying I would need to fill out an adoption application just to be able to go inside and look at the cats. I’ve gone into other petsmarts that are happy to let people inside to give the cats some attention!! And never have I been in there looking through the glass at the cats has someone come up to me to ask me if I needed help. I seriously would stand there peeking through the glass for a good 5 minutes and no one will approach me or bother to even walk by. There’s been two times the workers had been inside the adoption area and did not come out to offer assistance…and the people who volunteer to clean the cages and feed the cats never offer any help either. It’s like they just want the cats on display but not adopted. With the way the pet population is multiplying and cats being in desperate need for homes to go to, one would think they’d take more time and initiative to move things along.

There is one store that I have driven to a few times that’s a good 25-30 minutes away and they are the best store I’ve been into. The Petsmart in Columbia, MD has staff that is attentive and pleasant. They even have a pet hotel at that location! They always say to go ahead and see the kitties….and the girls that work there tell me their turn around is really good on the cats, meaning they adopt out a lot more cats than any other petsmart in the area. I really believe that’s due to customers being able to freely interact with the cats instead of having them behind sound proof thick glass about 5 feet away. You can look but you can’t touch Neutral

The more I think about it, the more irritated I am that they didn’t accept their own coupons. It really seems like they are legitimate and I have printed off all the papers showing the url and my email. I think I may go back and talk to another manager there tomorrow. I have already sent an email via their website to someone, I have no idea who actually reads those emails.

Now it’s the principle, not just about a savings. They basically said to me and everyone within earshot that I was trying to use fake coupons as if I was some scam artist. Mad And if I wasn’t trying to defraud them, then I was a fool for not knowing the difference between a legitimate email and the one I got which by my research seems pretty legit.

I’ll try my coupons again tomorrow as I want to go to the spca to look at a cat in the afternoon and want to at least have my pet carrier just in case I find a match.

I mean, it’s not really about being a cheapskate or looking for a deal. People who know me know that I can be extravagant and generous. I pay full price on tons of stuff and it is what it is. I just don’t find integrity in a company who will give me coupons to use and then say, oh we’re not going to let you use them afterall.

I am however kind of proud of myself for not buying any of the stuff in the cart. I think in the past, I would probably just went ahead and pay for all the items at full retail price just to save face from embarrassment. I think most people would…or they would raise hell or walk off. I stayed relatively calm and I put all the crap back in the right places in the aisles probably because I somehow felt it was my fault. That part is not as progressive as I’d like to be but I take what I can get, my little win is that I didn’t cave and just bought the stuff. If I were to buy it at normal price, I wouldn’t have picked out some of the toys I did just to hit the $50 mark to use the coupon.

This post has no tag

1 comment

Mar
06

Ooma has worked perfectly for 2 months so far

Categories:

by Jean

It’s been about two months since I purchased and activated my Ooma Core Voip Phone System, I’m happy to report that it’s been working flawlessly! :good:

If you’ve been following along on my ooma progress in previous posts, you’ll see the numerous updates on the number porting process. Other than the half a day of hiccup during the completion of my number porting, ooma has been working with no problems for both incoming and outgoing calls.

The call quality has remained excellent, better than my original verizon landline! Recently, ooma added the ability to alter the ooma dialtone/chime within the lounge area so I just disabled it. It wasn’t really that annoying but I’d rather not hear it at all if I had the choice and since I didn’t need to make a call to customer service to do it, I just took advantage of the feature right online, very easy! :clapping:

International calling continues to be clear and trouble free for us calling China and Hong Kong. In fact, we’ve made several calls over the past 3-4 weeks since getting our international calling credit for activating ooma in January that I am confident to say that we’ve tested it out with great satisfaction. The rates are very good and I don’t see us even using up the entire $50 credit within the 90 day period. So far, we’ve made about 6 hours of international calling which is a lot for us and we still have over $43 bucks left.

Earlier I logged into my verizon account online to see what the final bill would be and to check if I could still log on. I was surprised to see a $6.53 credit due to us! My ooma premier trial ends in 3 days and I’m still up in the air about subscribing to the premier features. From my understanding, as long as I subscribe within the trial period, I would be able to get a reimbursement of my number porting fee which really means that I would get the premier service for $60 the first year verses $100 for each year thereafter. It’s tempting but I have found that we don’t really use all the features. I’ve only blacklisted two numbers so far but I wonder how often those two numbers are actually trying to call the house, haha and get the blocked message. I guess we shall see…if I get some extra money mysteriously show up for me in the next 3 days, then I will subscribe to it.

The newest “export to excel” feature for the call logs work ok. I’m not totally sold on the idea of having to export to a spreadsheet just to calculate my call totals but I appreciate the ability to keep record of my calls via excel. When you download the spreadsheet, it says for March but in actuality, it’s for all calls since activation which in our case was restarted from the time our number ported over because our login changed to our ported number verses the temporary ooma number. And within the ooma lounge, the call log keeps on going for pages and pages. We really don’t use our home phone that much so we just have 6 pages. I think it would be much better if they were able to split up the logs on a month to month basis and allow each month to be downloaded in excel separately.

For a household who uses their phone like crazy, you’d have to sift through 10, 15, or even 20 pages of call logs to see a particular date. If this continues the way it is for a year, it wouldn’t be very efficient to go through 100+ pages of logs to find call information for 6 months ago. I hope they will update that for the future and have the ability to sort out call totals within ooma lounge for each type of calls, whether it’d be incoming or outgoing or international or long distance, etc.

They are still working out the kinks and adding new features on an ongoing basis, I am confident at this point to say that ooma will be around for awhile…most definitely for me to recoup my initial investment which stands at $260 cuz of the number porting fee. Break even point for me based on my previous verizon $50.00 a month bill is scheduled for around July of this year….since we had to continue paying our landline during the number porting which took a little over a month. If I end up subscribing to premier, break even would be around September.

I am really amazed at how things came together. With finding ooma, taking the plunge to get it, realizing that I can cut back our verizon service during the porting time to a lower message rate service with caller ID, finalizing the number porting, flawless call quality with no interruption, and being able to cancel the verizon service and still get a small credit back. Not to mention the international credit from ooma which came right around the Chinese New Years when we make the bulk of our international calls…..and also venting here about my huge landline bill and wanting to cut costs on our utilities resulted in assistance from the wonderful gentleman with our cable tv/internet company helping to renegotiate our bill to a lower rate with the same service.

I must say that ever since then, my Broadstripe service has been running fantastically! I am amazed at how good the cable and internet service has been in the past month and a half. The internet has been consistent, I’m not getting the fluctuations in speed as I had gotten before nor am I getting the overnight downtime that would happen periodically throughout the month, this was important since I am a nightowl uses the computer mostly at night and into the wee hours of the morning. Even my flaky issue with my digital box seems to have resolved itself, maybe it WAS because of mercury being retrograde that was causing all kinds of havoc, who knows! It just all works now, everything just works, I’m amazed by how it all just came together.

I’m really amazed and grateful for how things have worked out…I’m saving about $100 a month just on home phone and cable, I’m sooo happy…the rest is smooth sailing from now on Grin Next thing on the list to cutting costs around the house is a programmable thermostat. I had bought one a couple of weeks ago but it wasn’t the right type for our heater so back to the store it went. One day at a time :good:

Tags:

Leave comment

Older posts «

» Newer posts