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Does anyone use the voice command feature of customer service phone calls? I ignore those and always press the keys.

I find myself annoyed at them, because it takes the lady long enough as it is to go through the prompts normally. But when you add having her say the phrases that you need to say for the option you want, it about doubles the time you have to sit and listen.

I understand that some people might have physical limitations that cause them to have problems with keypresses. For those people, the call system could have that as an initial option. Like they do for English and Spanish. They could say “For English, press 1; para Español, marque dos; for voice commands, please say ‘voice commands’.”

That would also work for the people who are multitasking by calling customer service lines while they are driving and can’t or won’t press keys (or key-like sections of a screen).

Dear customer service representatives: please end your conversations with “Have a good day” not with “Thanks for calling such and such”. Because people will want to respond with “You too” and your final words must allow for “you too” to make sense.

The worst case is when the agent says “Have a good day, and thanks for calling us” because the first part gets the caller’s brain primed to say “You too” and it’s hard to switch gears that quickly. So the end of the conversation ends up being “…and thanks for calling us.” “You too.” Click.

It doesn’t have to be exactly “Have a good day”. It could be any other sentiment to which a response of “You too” would be appropriate.

Related to my Trip Booking Tips on credit cards: I thought I’d let you know my credit card strategy for life in general.

I have multiple credit cards. Not too many, but enough to spread the risk around. Or rather keep the damage limited if something does happen.

I have one credit card that I use for swiping at physical locations (grocery store, gas stations, etc.) The problem is reduced by the new chip cards, but there are still plenty of opportunities for skimmers to steal my information from swipe machines. Which means that I don’t use this card for other things, especially recurring charges.

I have another card I use for online transactions. This is the number I enter just about every time I buy something online, so I have it memorized and haven’t touched the actual card in months.

If I were doing it right, I would have a third card for recurring transactions. But I don’t want to juggle too many cards, so I put these on the online card.

And one more thing: if I know I’m going to be going to a restaurant, I take enough cash so I don’t have to use a credit card. I’m suspicious whenever someone takes my credit card away where I can’t see it. Plus, it makes leaving the restaurant easier – I don’t have to wait for the waitress to come back with my card. I just hand her the cash (bill plus tip, rounded up to the nearest dollar), tell her it’s all set, and then I can leave whenever I want.

Another thing I do is not trust telling someone my credit card information over the phone. Booking websites, yes. Most of those are automated and there’s no chance for a rogue employee at the establishment to walk away with my information. Losing information to hackers is a possibility, but that’s at another level. I can’t do anything about that.

My credit card was compromised a couple years ago. The CC company caught on and did not fulfill the fraudulent purchase, but I still had the hassle of cancelling that card and getting a new one. No, that wasn’t the hassle. The hassle was remembering all the places that used that card for recurring transactions and updating them with the new card info. The monthly transactions weren’t that bad – just a glance at the previous statement told me those. But there were some annual transactions that were trickier to find. And one I didn’t find until the company notified me that they were denied.

I have a pretty good idea of what happened to get into that mess. It happened shortly after I called a place to book a reservation. It was a smaller operation, one that did not handle reservations online. And it was a seasonal operation, meaning that a lot of the staff were college age, or maybe even high schoolers. My guess is that I happened to get one of the untrustworthy ones. He probably entered my information into their booking system and also wrote it down for himself to use later. Maybe he tried to use it himself. Maybe he was just a runner who got paid to gather information for someone else. Doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that I now use a Virtual Account Number if I have to give a credit card number over the phone. Not every CC company has them (mine does but my wife’s does not. Yes, we have separate cards. For risk mitigation purposes).

When I see that a place says “Call for reservations” I go to my CC website and generate a VAN with a limit slightly over the expected cost and an expiration date just after the expected time. I tell the VAN to the suspect place, so if my CC is compromised, I can tell the CC company those are not real purchases and I don’t have to do any more damage control or scramble with giving a new CC# to companies that I do want to have it on file.

Continuing my series of how to play board and card games, I now present Splendor.

I don’t have this game yet, but was introduced to it by my brother-in-law. And now it is on my birthday present wish list.

1. How do I win?
You win by being the first player to reach 15 points.

2. How do I get points?
You get points by buying cards with point values on them. Not all cards have point values, but you might have to buy some of those in order to afford more cards. There are also a limited number of Nobles available, which you can win by having certain combinations of cards. So the pointless cards can help you get points that way.

3. How do I buy cards?
You buy cards with gems. Each card displays its gem cost. You pay that combination of gems and you get the card.

4. How do I get gems?
You draw them. On your turn you can either draw 3 gems or buy a card. If you don’t have enough gems to buy a card, then your choice is simple.

Another thing to note: the cards you buy not only have a gem cost but they also have a gem value. You may pay 4 gems for a card, but then that card is worth a gem later. Gem chips are drawn and paid – the chips physically move from the bank to your hand and back. But cards count as gems and do not leave your hand. As you accumulate cards, you accumulate their gem values and can thus afford higher-worth cards.

5. How do I play defense?
I simplified the rules earlier. On your turn you can do one of three things: draw gems, buy a card, or reserve a card. If you think someone is going for a particular card and you want the thwart them, or maybe you want the card but can’t afford it yet, you take the card without buying it. This has the added benefit of giving you a piece of gold (a wildcard when it comes to gems). It has the drawback of costing you a turn, since you must use one of your later turns to pay for the card. Or you can hold it in reserve indefinately, in which case it never counts toward your hand. You could consider that a draw-a-wildcard-gem turn.

Not related to the question, but related to the simplification of the rules: on your turn you may draw gems – either 3 gems if they are different colors or 2 gems if they are the same color. But you are not allowed to draw 2 of the same color if that will result in there being less than two of that gem in the bank.

There, now go play Splendor.

I don’t trust booking websites not to adjust their prices based on activity and interest. So when I’m planning a trip, I never enter my actual dates until the end. During planning, I add or subtract a couple of weeks to get an idea of ballpark figures.

Only when I’m done planning and doing the final booking do I use the real dates. A little paranoid, yes, but you never know.

And if I were really paranoid, I would use a different computer to do the booking. That way the IP address and cookies would not show any history of looking for prices.

Having hard water, we go through a bunch of softener salt. That salt comes in 40 or 50 lb. bags. The nice people who make the bags tried to make my life easier by putting perforations near the corner of the bags so that I can open the bags and dump them out without needing tools.

The only problem is that they didn’t communicate that well with the graphic designers who arrange the printing on the bags.

When this bag design started appearing around here, I took the claim at its word and attempted to rip open the bag starting at the edge directly above the end of the arrow.

However, due to either the miscommunication or someone’s trying to be funny, that’s not where they put the perforation. So when you try to rip it there, it does not work.

Now I know to grab and rip where the arrow does not point. The arrow is just a decoy. Aim for the perforations.