Category: Mexico

That milk expires when?

Milk expiration dateHere is a picture off the top of the milk my wife bought today. If you can’t do the math quickly, today is June 11, 2007. The expiration date is November 4, 2007. That is 5 months from now!

I was trying to tell my sister-in-law about the box milk here. She said, “oh we got box milk when I was a kid. It did not taste that bad.” I never tried to convince her that this stuff in the box is not at all like the stuff we got in the boxes as kids. This stuff does not taste like milk. Not that I have ever been a milk fan.

Did I fail to mention that you don’t need to refrigerate this stuff? Only after you open it do you need to put it in the fridge.

The yucky thing is that our daughter loves the stuff. It is the only milk she will drink. When she took a trip back to the USA last summer she did not drink milk the whole time.

Finally, a good ISP experience

I have rarely had a good ISP experience. Especially if you mention you are running anything other than Windows.

Yesterday afternoon we started having connection issues with our DSL provider, Prodigy. The way it was coming and going, it seemed more like a network problem than my personal connection to the world. But, I called them this afternoon anyway just in case it might be my modem.

The agent that took my call, Victoria, spoke a bit fast and didn’t seem to care that I was not a native Spanish speaker. If I didn’t understand something I would ask for a clarification. Like most people, she just said the same words but a bit louder. I think people don’t understand that when a foreigner does not understand a word, that saying the same word over and over does not make it clearer. You need to find a basic synonym of the word.

Well, we worked through those issues little by little. Obviously that is not what was good about the experience.

She stepped me through resetting the modem/router to the factory defaults and then we messed with some settings inside the modem and it all eventually worked out fine. In the process I had to get a new IP address assigned by the router. She asked me which version of Windows I was using. I told her I did not have a Windows machine, but I had Linux and Mac available to me. When I said that I was sitting at the Linux machine and it was the one closest to the modem, she asked me to reboot so that I could get a new IP. Most of the time I get told by other ISPs that they do not support Linux and therefore I would need to do the configuration on Windows, or they would not be able to help me. She did not mind that I was using Linux nor that I manually requested an IP address from the modem instead of rebooting.

I have even been told by a DSL provider (many years ago) that their system would not work on Linux and that I would have to cancel my service with them if I wanted to use Linux. I had been using their service for 10 months at that point with Linux, it was just that I was having problems with the modem for some strange reason. I ended up hanging up with him and figured the problem out myself.

So, Prodigy in Mexico did not seem stunned that I was running Linux and Victoria did not mind that I actually used my own brain to do what she wanted me to do. Usually you have to go through their exact set of steps or they don’t know how to proceed from there.

It is always nice to have a good customer service experience.

Sad, sad times

I had posted a few weeks ago about the joy and excitement I felt over getting a source of Diet Dr Pepper. I ran out of the last one that I had been hoarding a couple of days ago. We were able to get them pretty readily for a while. My wife would grab 10-15 each time she saw them in the store, whether we had a ton of them or not.

It has been well over a week since any sightings have been made. *Sniff*

I can guarantee it is not because there was too much stock sitting on the shelves not being sold. Each time we would see them there would just be a few. My wife was gracious to the other people in town and would try to leave 3 or 4 for them. Then she would call everyone she knew and tell them that there were some still on the shelves. So, I know they sold well.

When we were in the country of Granada (an island in the Eastern Caribbean), the missionary there told us a great story. The stores would stock stuff unless it got to be popular. When it became popular that would create too much work trying to keep the shelves stocked, so they would pull the product. I think they forgot to teach supply and demand in their economics classes there.

For now, we are Diet Dr Pepper-less. Maybe sometime soon we will get more. We were told they did the same thing with Mt. Dew. Except it was around long enough to be sold in the mom and pop convenience stores. Then one day, it just all disappeared. Hopefully that is not the case with the Diet Dr Pepper. Maybe they did a test batch and found out that it went over well and now they are ramping up production to be able to supply all the stores in the country. Yes, that must be it. Or, that is at least what I choose to believe.

The gift that wasn’t

Today I hit the post office for the first time in a couple of weeks. We don’t have much mailed to us, so we only check when we are expecting something. I have been eagerly awaiting my microphones which probably will never arrive. That is based on the conversation I had with the post office lady today.

Today I had a nice pretty brown package slip in my mail box. I was thrilled until I saw from whence it came. It was not the state that the microphones should have been mailed from.

The package cost me $35 in custom’s fees. It was a box that had a music CD and some CDs of sermons from a conference. All of which I very much appreciate. The music CD I would probably have paid money for. The conference CDs I might have paid for, but not at the end of the month when I don’t have any money. But the deal at the post office is, I either pay it, or they destroy it. I have 2 weeks to pay it. Since I have not been there a while, I have already passed 1 week and won’t get paid for a few more days. So I took all the money I had in the gasoline fund in the glove box (don’t tell anyone I keep my gas money in the glove box) and paid the custom’s fee.

Fortunately customs did not open the package and steal anything out of it. The custom’s form that was filled out by the church which sent me the CDs had all the information written out. So customs just used the information on the form instead of pawing through the box. The problem is that they said there were 1 audio CD and 45 DVDs. In fact, they were all audio CDs. So I had to pay the custom’s fee on 45 DVDs instead of CDs.

They also listed the value at the full retail value of the items. While they could sell these for $200, it certainly did not cost them that much to produce. They should be honest on a custom’s form, but couldn’t they put the actual cost instead of the retail value? The form just asks for “Value.” It does not specify retail or actual value.

So, anyway, I had to pay $35 for a gift today. Last year it was $50. I was so torqued last year that I never listened to them. They still sit on my shelf waiting to be loaded into my MP3 player. Maybe I will catch up on last year’s and eventually get around to this year’s CDs.

An email might have to be sent to tell them that I would actually appreciate NOT getting the “gift” next year.