Happy New Year to all my friends, and here’s to wonderful things in 2007!
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Month: December 2006
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As if there were any doubt
Your results:
You are Green Lantern
| Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.  |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test
I had the displeasure of visiting Prestige Toyota of Ramsey, NJ yesterday with the family. We were looking at the Rav4 since it has an extra row (making it possible for us Soccer Moms/Dads to take a few extras when we go to events for the kids.
However, the sales guy Harry was really, really annoying. After insisting on taking the car out of the dealer lot before allowing one of us to drive (ok, I get it, don’t hit any other cars) he drove us straight to their repair facility down route 17 to show it off. We promptly got stuck behind someone dropping off or picking up a car and had to sit there for 5 minutes.
He had that annoying sales-guy way of using sales ‘tools’ like “Well, let me answer your question with a question.” Ok, I get it. You’re trying to sell me a car. But it gets really annoying after a while. And it took a while. More than 2 hours before we were done with our dealer discussion and test drive, and frankly I wasn’t in a mood to negotiate at that point. However, he thought my desire not to negotiate was a negotiation. Which I kept stating it was not.
However, they had done a cleaver thing (from a dealer point of view). They offered to appraise my trade in (never do this, I found out, until after you have a price for your car. Thanks Brian).
Therefore they had my keys when we wanted to leave. Even asking for my keys back became a negotiation until I walked past the receptionist (who promptly freaked out “YOU CAN”T GO IN THERE!” and got some sales guys to follow me) to the manager office and said “I want my keys. I am not negotiating I am leaving.”
Oh, well, they could have possibly sold me a car. But if this is the way they treat people, it’s indicative of how they treat people after the sale. There’s another Toyota dealer a little farther away, and if we want one instead of the other cars we’re looking at, we’ll probably go there. Bye, Prestige.
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New Apple Software for Hannukah!
In the spirit of Hannukah, The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted some great new programs for your Mac.
iGevalt: Apple’s new data recovery program. It doesn’t work particularly well, as the software has a tendency to dramatically throw up its hand and sulk in the corners of your desktop so you’ll feel guilty about having forgotten to properly perform your backups.
iVey: The companion software to the iGevalt, the iVey (also known as the iVeyIstMir in early product releases), is the next generation of Getting Things Done. It reminds you about all your appointments at least a day after you’ve missed them.
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Blog On, On Blog!
The unstoppable Nancy Shenker* has laid down a holiday challenge: She will donate to charity $1 for each visitor to her blog, $2 for each person who subscribes to her blog feed.
So fire up your RSS reader, (or use the subscription capabilities built into Firefox or Internet Explorer 7.0) and empty her wallet. It’s all for a good cause.
(*disclosure: Nancy teaches in my program at NYU)