Excuse the Rant—Plagiarists, Web Hosting Companies and Other Rip Offs

This has been a week of feeling like I am getting ripped off by everybody. The only difference between a street mugging and a business mugging is nobody gives a good damn when the business does it. That and when they do it, they issue one of those worthless apologies where they state “how sorry we are for the inconvenience this may have caused you.”

First, there is my local paper. Being born and raised here, the paper has always contained a TV supplement on Sunday as part of the home subscription. You know, the same home subscription their system should tell them you have when they call you every month to see if you would like to subscribe. That TV supplement is now going to cost extra on our home delivery subscriptions starting December 12. That means we actually have a $3.00 per month price increase to keep the product WE HAVE NOW! A surcharge for comics? A surcharge for the Sports section? Tell you what paper folks----ditch both the insipid Fashion section and meaningless Friday Guide and give me back my TV deal and we can call it even.

Then there is my local cable provider (who will also remain nameless due to their stupidity) who recently decided to drop a couple of more channels for those of us on expanded basic. We can, of course, can get one set box free for a year to get the channels we ALREADY PAY FOR NOW before being charged for it later at whatever outrageous rate they want to charge then. Setbox also requires a new remote with its own fee. Since I now have two fewer channels, my cable bill just went up. AGAIN.

Then there are the fools at my local phone company. I had to write the Texas Attorney General’s office about six weeks ago and file a formal complaint because; because while my local phone company can “they rule the air” they sure can’t fix billing issues. I finally managed to get an addition to my phone bill taken off thanks to filing a complaint with the state of Texas only to have the bill arrive last week with an “early termination fee” of $60.00 added on. Not only was the product cancelled within two hours of sale because the sales representative lied to us in order to upsell my DSL service, one would think that if the customer would complain about what you did the first time, he damn well will complain about this too and might send a copy to the Federal Trade Commission. I did.

If they aren’t stealing my money by giving me less than what I signed up for¸ they are stealing my intellectual property. Three different plagiarists have lifted my copyrighted reviews this week to run them on their own sites where they sell stuff from Amazon. One webmaster argued with me as to whether or not my review really should come down because I was getting “great exposure.” Not only was that bogus you know what that comes out of a bull because the site was a spam site listing lots of reviews by lots of people, I have been reviewing for ten plus years. I average between five and ten queries a day from authors, not to mention materials from major publishing houses and publicists that are drop shipped in every day. I don’t NEED EXPOSURE. What I need is a review venue that values my work enough to pay me for it.

But, what really set me off were the issues with my site again this week. Kevinrtipple.com is back up and working fine after being falsely accused yet again earlier this week by Google of being an attack site. My hosting provider, who can spend lots of money on television ads, can’t seem to do a decent job with customer service or hosting duties. Google diagnostics reported, when they blacklisted my site and said mine was not the problem, that over 200 sites had the same problem. I don’t know whether it is because my web host is hosting infected domains or their network is bad. At least this time, I have it in writing from my hosting provider that my site came up clean when they scanned it yesterday. So, since they could not blame me for the problem despite several form letter replies to my complaint or really help me in any way, they finally just did another form letter and stated “how sorry we are for the inconvenience this may have caused you.”

INCONVEINCE? MAY HAVE CAUSED ME?

THIS IS MY BUSINESS---INCONVIENCE DOES NOT BEGIN TO COVER IT!

I get very little time to write these days thanks to my health problems. I spent nearly all of it and then a heck of a lot more yesterday dealing with the customer service folks at my webhost as did my webmaster. Neither one of us needs this crap.

So, the site is back up---at least for now. Hopefully it will stay that way.

And this is just Thursday. With the way things are going, not only am I due to get ripped off a couple of more times this week, no doubt there will be hail storms and twisters. It is supposed to be mid November, but it feels more like early May.