Every once in a while, you encounter a situation that is so outrageous that you want to shout about it from the roof tops. Here are a few of those issues that really pissed me off...

• Sears Roebuck & Company has a good reputation, but when I purchased a microwave from them, my opinion changed. The microwave causes Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) with the radio receivers in my house, but the technicians from Sears were unable to resolve the problem. Not only that, they did not have the equipment to measure the leaking microwave radiation. The oven might be defective, but they will never know, nor will I. The fact that leaking microwave radiation is a possible health risk seems to be of no importance to Sears.
• I contacted the Federal Communications Commission (via their web site) about the problems with the Sears microwave. A month later, I received an email about a different, unrelated topic. When I replied to that email, explaining that the original response had been inadequate, I received no response at all. The FCC seems hell bent on keeping evil like Howard Stern out of our homes, but seems unable to enforce the regulations regarding RFI. They appear to be a bloated, useless bureaucracy. Who'd have figured?
• Speaking of bloated bureaucracies, it took Verizon over ten years to stop sending me multiple copies of the phone books. I called and complained every year. Every year they said that they had taken care of the problem. And every year the extra copies appeared. This year, four months after I moved, they continued to send phone books to the old address, but not to the new one. A friend of mine, who has a farm, discovered that they had delivered phone books to every dirt road access path to every field that he owned: the books were just dropped on the ground near the road. Amazing bureaucratic achievement.