R is for Rant #1

I've decided to designate Thursday (R) for my rant day. This may become a trend, since I oftentimes come across products that aren't quite up to par with my standards and I need to blow off steam. I love sending a good complaint letter to companies that make crap products and such, but I also love sending a nice praise letter, too.

For this week, I've got two bones to pick and the recipients of my frustration will most likely be seeing some sort of correspondence from me. What's a bored SAHM supposed to do during nap time? Tops on my list this week is the City of Sacramento Parks and Recreation District. For starters, they've closed or shortened the hours of many of the public pools due to budget cuts. It gets hot here and when the sun is blazing and I want to hop in a pool, I don't want to wait until 3-5 pm on odd days of the week. Worse yet, boy is usually napping during prime pool time. They've also closed down the restrooms in most of the parks. But I digress. The point that's really bugging me this week is their restroom cleaning techniques. Today, I visited one of the two parks left in Sacramento with open restrooms. While I feel like I should be happy to have visited an available restroom that was clean, I'm sitting here blogging about my frustration. It takes all kinds I guess. Actually, the restroom was, to my surprise, sparkling clean (if there were enough light in there to see it) and reeked of bleach. I could tell in the darkness that the floor was wet, but I figured it had just been hosed out and the toilets cleaned with bleach. I had boy with me and convinced him to give the potty a try. Being that he's three years old, he's got definite opinions and a process for each and every time he uses the restroom. One of those opinions is that his pants must be pulled down to his ankles every time he goes. No exceptions. So, I always oblige because its enough of a fight to get him to use the toilet as it is. Now, we've walked out of this same restroom many times with him having a wet hem around his pants (which totally makes me cringe) from the chronically wet floor in that place and today was no exception. Flash forward ten minutes to him playing in the sandbox and I notice that his pants were totally bleach stained around the bottom. So, the City is cleaning the floors with straight bleach and not even rinsing it away. Who does this? Yes, I know, besides the City of Sacramento? I was lucky enough to run into a maintenance person who had little advice for me and told me he was the guy I needed to talk to. Okay. Nothing doing. Now, I've got to figure out how to deal with this:





My next beef is with Pur water filters. I have such a love/ hate relationship with Pur, its almost parasitic. I need them, but I don't think they need me. Their product is shoddy and cheaply made, but I can't live without it. I believe I'm on my fourth faucet mount filter in less than 10 years. To some, that may be acceptable, but if I spend $50 on a product, I want it to last a more than two years. My faucet mount filters keep breaking around the faucet mount and leak all over the place. Usually, it just leaks unfiltered tap water into my tap water, completely defeating the purpose of filtering water. This time its spraying water all over the place. I've had this complaint with Proctor and Gamble's Pur division before and, believe it or not, they sent me a voucher to replace my entire faucet mount with any model I wanted. Of course, I chose the most expensive stainless steel look unit. Less than two years later, its doing the same thing my last one did.







Hopefully, they'll be as generous with a replacement this time.