Back during the dot com explosion at the turn of the century, I heard a story about some guy who received such poor service from Dunkin Donuts that he started a website called dunkin donuts sucks, or something like that. Shortly after, it was rumored that the happy donut people bought the domain for millions of dollars so they could shut the site down. Now I’m not sure if this was motivated by greed or by a deep routed hatred for the brand, but it stuck with me.

This winter my wife and  I went on a Carnival Cruise from Fort Lauderdale all the way to Panama and back. It was our seventh cruise, and we expected it to be just like all of the previous cruises… absolutely wonderful.

Well that was not the case. Through some venting issue on the back of the boat we had garbage compactor smell pumped into our room through the A/C about three or four times a day. The smell was so foul we had to open the door and kill the A/C making it unbearable in the room. Despite repeated complaints, and seemingly weak attempts to solve the problem, Carnival was unable to do anything. Final on the last day we were granted a meeting with the captain of the hotel division. He was of course apologetic but powerless to offer compensation.

To make a long story short, we ended up with an insulting compensation offer, and were left pretty unsatisfied. In the spirit of revenge, I hatched a plan to buy a domain like, CarnivalSucks.com or something of the sorts, and start my own site to post our experience on. Unfortunately, other web projects tool priority and I was unable to find the time.

Anyway, this is my solute to those who use the internet to keep big corporations with terrible customer service in check.  Greed may be their ultimate motivation, like our D&D friend, but I’m okay with that.

DMNews reported last week about a new round of attacks from the lovable spammers. This time Symantec was warning about a Valentine’s Day spam. Apparently the spammers are sending men (or anyone who has a pulse… no scratch that, anyone with an email address) an email with the subject line “Get your Valentine’s Gift bag from ghd”, with an image that the user should click on. These type of “retrieve your message” spams are nothing  new, but it’s nice to see they’re getting sentimental. I was beginning to think all they wanted to do was relive all of my sexual dysfunction, but apparently they’re concerned about my relationship too.

Thanks for your concern, buttheads.