November brings the election and winter, a challenging
season.
My best consumer experience: The election of
consumer-oriented public officials
I was generally pleased with the outcome of the election.
Pres. Barack Obama has been a leader in getting important consumer
laws passed, for example, the Affordable Health Care Act and financial reform
legislation.
With Elizabeth Warren in the U.S. Senate, American consumers
will have a consumer champion to work for them. Warren envisioned the U.S.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and was its acting director.
See my article, “How Will the 2012 Election Affect
Consumers?” for more information on election results and their impact on
consumers.
My worst consumer experience: Trying to apply caulking
When the pest company came for a routine inspection recently,
the representative said I should caulk around the front of my house where the
sidewalk meets the foundation.
A friend said 100 percent silicone caulking works well, so
on the way home from buying groceries, I stopped by a hardware store and bought
some. Not being experience, I bought a small tube, the size of a tube of
toothpaste.
Immediately, when I started to apply it, I could see that it
wasn’t working well and I’d purchased the wrong thing.
I looked in my garage and found some caulking and a caulking
gun a contractor had left for me. However, I couldn’t get it to work.
I went back to the hardware store to return the tube of
caulking. I asked for help in getting the caulking gun to work. An employee
showed me that you have to poke a rod down into the caulking to break a piece
of foil that keeps the caulking in when you cut off the tip.
I went back home and applied the caulking. It was difficult
to do. It looks like frosting trim that you put on the bottom of a cake. And,
one tube only covered half of the job.
I had to go back to the hardware store a third time to get
another container of caulking.
All in all, it wasn’t a fun experience.
