WiGo Wireless’ Incompetence (i.e., Commerce Is A Difficult Thing)

I understand exchanging goods for services is a difficult thing. And WiGo Wireless, a Falls Church, Virginia, reseller of cell phone plans that I have recommended in the past, struggles with this exact problem. The point of this post is tell you never to interact with WiGo Wireless, or at least its sales person Paul Jaeger. If you understand this, then there is no point in reading further.

The simple version of the story is that Paul Jaeger and WiGo Wireless actively lied to me in selling a phone that does not sync with my computer and in selling me a more expensive service plan. Once I realized both of these deceptions, I demanded my money back. They refunded me all but $15, saying that this $15 is a non-refundable upgrade fee. Besides the fact that my decision to upgrade was based upon Paul Jaeger and Wigo Wireless misleading me, they (1) never filed the paperwork to actually upgrade my service (i.e., I asked for a refund before they actually upgraded my service) and (2) their bill did not specify this was a non-refundable fee.

In the end, I filed complaints with my bank and the Better Business Bureau, and received the refund in full. The lesson, as promised in the first paragraph, is do not do business with WiGo Wireless or Paul Jaeger.

Three last tidbits:
(1) The repetitious use of WiGo Wireless and Paul Jaeger is meant to assist with search engines.

(2) If you want the long version of this story, which has even more instances of lies and deception on Paul Jaeger’s and WiGo Wireless’ parts, I can e-mail you my four-page single-spaced letter.

(3) I also had the pleasure of paying a “migration fee” when I moved from ATT to Cingular, a fee I doubt Cingular will refund me now that they are ATT (again).

Presentation On Follow-up Research On Second-Order Election Model Posted

I have posted the PowerPoint file Nils Ringe and I presented in New Orleans at the 2007 Southern Political Science Association conference. The presentation–titled Refining and Redefining the Second-Order Election Model: Protest or Pure Preference Voting in Central and Eastern Europe–may be difficult to follow, especially if you are not familiar with the second-order election model (SOEM) or our earlier research.

As you can read on my Projects page, this research is a follow-up effort to our earlier work that finds the SOEM does not hold well in eastern and central Europe. Unfortunately, we are having a data and small-n problem, which is leading us to have little to report. The project is on hold at least until later this year.

The Indie Kids Cry For Fed Help

The FCC is considering requiring boredbroadcasters dedicate a certain amount of airtime to the indie kids. The problems with this plan are too many to list (okay, here are some: what is independent music, how will this help independent music, stop whining about corporate radio, how would this possibly stop payola) but that won’t stop an FCC that is 99 percent clueless, and a music industry (including the so-called independents) that is 100 percent clueless.