Artificial Familiarity?

[caladon]

Unsurprising: June credit card statement has $9.99 charge for Xbox Live. They were using the same trick as everybody who offers a free membership. Auto renewal. Yeah, it's only $10, but I can't let people think it's okay to start taking my money

Comments

[caladon]

I considered "coincidence" to be extremely unlikely, and I generally hate artificial people. Similar feelings when I go into GameStop and the employees, who often are not football fans, are all wearing football jerseys simply because upper management wants them to help promote a football video game.

I'll have to check out your new blog. LiveJournal seems to be drying up.

[drankthetea]

A buddy of mine used to work in a call center and they were encouraged to surf the web so they would find something to make a 'connection' with the customer over. Because we all know that someone mentioning Briar Hill pizza will get me to say, 'never mind, you are all so great that you can keep my ten bucks. And why don't you take another five while you are at it?'

[caladon]

Ah, a Google (probably Bing in this case) search hadn't occurred to me. I'm so valuable to them that they'll do a 10 second web search to pretend they are my friends! How sweet nauseating.

[cuthbertawiw]

Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!

[caladon]

Thank you for the feedback. I always intend to write more. It requires free time and a creative mood, but these two infrequent events rarely coincide.

[caladon]

And now, the shocking conclusion to this story...

Microsoft didn't actually refund my money. I had to file a chargeback through the credit card company.