Ali Hassan

I’ve just watched a report on NBC4 about cramming, a scam in which companies fraudulently or deceptively obtain your credit card information and begin billing you on a regular basis for services which you have not received. The report describes how a DC woman was charged $9.99 a month for 13 months. It also makes some recommendations on what you should do to get your money back. The woman in the story got $10 refunded.

This happened to me last year and I got all my money back, so I thought I might post what I did here in the hope that it might be of some help to others in a similar predicament.

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One more flight and I will be home. It will be good to get there, but right now all I am is tired. I’ve been flying since 4 pm today, which wouldn’t be so bad except that there have been two todays today and I started traveling on the today that was yesterday.

But it will be very good to get home.

Tourist attractions wouldn’t be so had if it weren’t for all the tourists.

Last week I took a tour of the Speight’s brewery in Dunedin. It was interesting. The brewery is old — parts of it date to the nineteenth century and a fair amount of old copper brewing equipment has been retained (see photo).

But the whole experience was marred by a woman in the group I was in. The thing that irritated me was her incessant questions. She had so many questions for the guide you would have thought she was planning to open a brewery of her own. And she’d ask them at the worst possible time, so we go stuck in the “time tunnel” looking at dioramas or in the theatre after the video presentation. Her little interrogations kept us from spending more time looking at the things we’d actually come to see. And, more importantly, it reduced the amount of time we spent in the bar imbibing free samples of the amber nectar.

Not that she cared: she drank lemonade.