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It took me less than 5 minutes to sign up for a NetZero dial-up Internet account. But after canceling that account, I spent a week trying in vain to reverse a charge that the service levied after my cancellation request.
I had to call NetZero a total of five times, holding for several minutes and then enduring long and fruitless conversations with company agents every time I called. According to the NetZero representatives that I spoke to, I needed to talk to a supervisor to arrange a credit, but none was ever available when I called. In the end, I gave up and let NetZero keep the money.
To evaluate how difficult canceling an online service can be, I signed up for and then canceled 32 accounts, each at a different site. About a third of the services in my sample made the seemingly simple goal of canceling very hard to achieve (see the "Big Hassle" entries in "Want to Cancel That Service?").
Not all of my experiences were negative. Services such as a monthly New York Times TimesSelect online subscription and a monthly Consumer Reports Online account took only minutes to cancel and without lingering strings. But some others made me feel as though I'd joined the Sopranos' family business: Once I signed up, there was no quitting!
There are two types of earwax, wet and dry. Wet earwax is common in Africa and Europe, while dry earwax is characteristic of East Asian populations. South and Central Asian populations are half wet and half dry. Native Americans tend to have dry earwax. Nicholas Wade of the New York Times reported in January of last year that Japanese researchers have isolated the gene responsible for earwax differentiation. The curious thing is that earwax doesn’t seem to be terribly important to human survival:
Ghost was nice, but I'm done with it since symantec took over. The king is dead, long live the king etc.-f0dder (December 25, 2006, 09:43 AM)
Thanks!i(when was the last time you saw a humamoid figure in the tray)?-nudone (December 21, 2006, 02:57 AM)