Tube or Argyle?

I have a couple of housekeeping things to take care of here.

Someone, and he knows who he is, abruptly stopped posting and may be in witness protection. He claims to be in jail, but I'm not buying it. Come back now!

Thanks to Frugalrosie for pointing me to the link about the guy who sued Dell over a bad repair job. He served the papers on them at their kiosk in a mall and then won a default judgement in small claims court when they didn't respond. How great is that?

Dell, like most companies, doesn't let their employees actually solve customer service problems, because they can save money by making the customers jump through hoops to get what they pay for. Many give up and just go away. The management of major corporations are mostly weasels in case you wondered.

Take Circuit City...please. They always have mail-in rebates rather than just discounting prices. The reason is that they can give the illusion of lower prices while secure in the knowledge that most people don't ever send in the the rebates forms. It bumps up sales and puts the burden on the customer.

At my company this month, we are very concerned with SOX, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. It is also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002. If you are unfamiliar with the SOX and want to read more, be my guest. Don't say I didn't warn you though.

Allow me to give you my version of the story. The guys running Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Anderson and a bunch of other major US companies were thieving crooks. They stole from their investors and laid waste to the retirement plans of their workers, leaving them broke and working at McDonald's.

These sacks of human debris are now mostly in jail, cooperating with the authorities to avoid or minimize their incarceration, or in the case of Ken Lay, quite dead. To that I say, good riddance, one and all.

Anyway, Sarbanes and Oxley, a couple of US legislators, cooked up legislation to insure that these sort of hijinks don't happen again. The bill basically says that you have to record financial transactions accurately and stealing from the corporation is frowned upon. I thought we all understood that, but apparently not. I have no confidence that this will deter the thieving bastards one whit, but it does put a major burden on the honest corporate citizens and their powerless lackeys, like me.

At my company we are receiving serious, in-depth training on complying with the SOX law. We were told that the training was mandatory and failure to pass the test would result in our dismissal. We got to spend several hours memorizing crap that has nothing whatever to do with our jobs. Plus, since guys like me can't spend one cent of the companies money anyway, the chances of me scoring big at the company treasury are slim, even if I was so inclined.

My favorite part of the training was when the 100th person pointed out that a lot of what they were teaching us was about stuff we don't have anything to to with. The trainer earnestly explained that upper-management thought it quite important that we know all the material. Hey, did you understand the question? You guys got us into this mess to begin with.

So, I took the training, took the test and got my certificate. Now I can forget the whole business until next year and get back to my job, because you see, I am not a crook and I got the paper to prove it.

Isn't this the way it always works? The bigshots get caught cooking the books and we all have to get religion. Can I get an amen?

Merle.




Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky


Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor