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A Couple of Strange Business Taxes

The city has some strange taxes for businesses. The first tax is the sign tax. They actually charge me a tax for signs on the building that I rent. It is a flat fee plus 12 cents per foot. The fee came to $21.84 which isn’t a lot, but it is still a nickel and dime fee from the city that doesn’t make any sense to me. The second tax is the what I like to call the furniture tax. The tables, chairs, desks in my business are all taxed based upon their value. Now this isn’t the sales tax when I purchase them, but a yearly tax on their value. The city used to tax us on hazardous waste which we don’t have any of, but they taxed all businesses for this. They dropped this tax finally after enough complaints from businesses. The small businesses in this country help to pay most of the taxes and the various governments seem to be coming up with various ways to take the maximum amount of income from us.

Dell Problems

I received my credit card statement today from the bank and I am checking it over and I see a charge for $213.41 from Dell. Now I know I didn’t buy anything from them since last year and I am trying to figure out what this charge is for. So I call the Dell phone number on my credit card statement and I get India techs support. I go through 3 people on the phone and no one can tell me what the charge is for. They keep transferring me hoping that I will get aggravated which I did. I finally hung up and called the credit card company instead. I filed a dispute. I was told it takes 60-90 days to process the request. In the meantime I have to pay the amount on the credit card and wait to be reimbursed or I will get charged interest. Awesome, its like money grows on trees.

Update on this: I received the money back from Dell by disputing the charge. The lady from the bank called the number on my credit card statement and she couldn’t get anywhere with them so she put through the dispute for me.

Bought Phone and the whole Sprint Network Died

Purchased a brand new HTC Hero phone last night 11/3/09 and left the store and sat outside the store to play with the phone at around 7:45 at night. The store closes at 8:00. I noticed that I could not connect to the internet so I went back inside the store before they closed to get the phone checked and they managed to fix the internet. I left the store and sat outside again to check the phone and I couldn’t make a phone call. I know the phone part of the phone was working because I checked it before going into the store. The techs must have disabled the calling function when fixing the internet. By this time the store had already closed. The next morning at 10:20 I took the phone into the store to get checked again and the whole sprint network was down. All of the computers in the store were down and I couldn’t make a call from my old HTC Touch Pro or from my new HTC Hero. So I sat there for a few minutes and the network came back online. Sprint fixed my calling capability on my phone, but they said to check my internet throughout the day to make sure that it is working correctly because of their network difficulty.