Blessed by the Potato

So I saw my urologist yesterday, and while all the signs point towards me having a kidney stone, they couldn’t actually find one on the CT scan. So that means it’s possible that another rare disorder is causing the same symptoms, and he wants to rule those out with some further tests. Sounds like a good idea, and I was all for it.

The first test is to make a visual inspection of my bladder’s lining. This involves sending a camera up my urethra and poking about. Sounds awful, but I figured it’s better to be safe than sorry, you know? So I went and looked up what it involves:

“The cystoscope is as thin as a pencil”

Ye-gads! A pencil is not thin when we’re talking about my urethra and ureters! We were looking for a kidney stone the size of the ball bearing in a pen that was causing me the worst pain of my life, I do not think an instrument the size of a pencil is going to help my condition any!!

“Ah, so that’s where that pack of rusty razor blades went.”

“You may have a mild burning feeling… to relieve the feeling, you may be able to hold a warm, damp washcloth over the urethral opening.”

I don’t like the sounds of “may be able to” when talking about holding a damp washcloth. It’ll be too painful to hold a washcloth?

Right now I’m trying to sort through a sorry debacle resulting from ordering goods from the states.

What happened was: I ordered some stuff from Disney Direct (the Nightmare Before Christmas houses that I got Wayfare for Halloween) via their phone-ordering system, since they were sold out in stores throughout southern Ontario. They were on sale, so I got them for $60 CDN, and ended up having to pay $44 for shipping. Ouch.

You’d think that at that rate, the shipping company would have it here overnight, take care of customs clearning, and all that jazz, right?

Nope.

DHL has got to be the worst courier company I’ve ever seen. After charging that ludicrous amount, and making no mention of the fact that I’d have to pay additional Canadian tax on the order, they shipped it to me a week later (not a long delay, but certainly not $44 quick). Over a month later, they sent me a bill for another $13.80, claiming I had to pay GST on the item, and that there was a small checkbox on the delivery sheet that said by accepting shipment I accepted the charges. (The box simply says “Destination Duties” with a box beside Receiver and Sender, with Receiver checked). The delivery driver never mentioned additional charges.

And this is Disney, giant consumer conglomerate motherfucking Disney. How could they not know/tell me that there would be GST charged for ordering their crap? Keep in mind, when I called them they immediately transferred me to a Canadian representative (the lady was in Texas, but supposedly all she did was handle orders from Canada).

Compare this with Home Star Runner, where I bought a few T-shirts last year. Shipping was pricey, at $15 (again off a ~$60 order), and I had to pay GST: but they warned me twice before completing the transaction that as a Canadian customer, that would happen. They shipped via USPS/Canada Post, and it arrived faster than my DHL couriered Disney crap. And to top it all off, the GST charge was COD — I paid my very nice postal worker on the spot (I even had exact change ready since I had been warned about it) and that was that. No bills in the mail, no wasting an additional 50 cents on a stamp to send my payment, and no service charge. And this was from two guys in their basement and their Yahoo storefront (well, they’re a bit bigger than that, but no where near the level of business Disney must have with Canada).

And that’s the thing that’s really getting my ire lately: these ridiculous service charges for things. So as I was saying, I get hit for this $13.80 bill for the GST on my Disney order. Yet doing the math will clearly tell you that the tax on $60 (including PST, actually) is only $9. There’s also a $5 service fee for the priviledge of getting this BS bill in the mail.

It’s not just this, either. For a long time I was actually paying London Hydro more to “maintain my account” (read my meter, type up and mail me my bill) than I was actually paying for electricity! I swear, that ridiculous $20 service charge was the single greatest inhibitor of conservation behaviours in my apartment. “Turn the lights off? Hell, I pay more in service charges than I do for electricity. Why don’t I pull my other computer out of storage and leave it on 24/7 so I can have some background tasks running without interfering with my gaming system…”

So what is with these excessive processing fees? Why does it cost more in many cases to charge me for a service that it does for the service itself? Why do I need a membership and photo ID to buy unhealthy quantities of tomato soup and paper towels at Costco? Are they afraid of roving bands of consumers coming through and picking the store clean of its warehouse-packaged goods and leaving behind naught but the asking price?

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

On an unrelated note, I’m a switcher (though to a Shadow Priest).