AVOID Hauser Group/Hausernet Mail Decoy Program - they won't pay you

UPDATE: May 15, 2013 - I did receive a payment from them on May 9th for January 2013 entries, but I still wouldn't recommend signing up to Hausernet because they still owe me a lot of backpay and are still slow to pay.

ORIGINAL POST:

I'm not going to bother linking to them because I don't think anyone should join this company if they ever expect to be paid, but here's the information about them in case you want to copy and paste to your browser:

hausernet[dot]com/opportunities[dot]html

Just replace [dot] with .

I've been a decoy with Hausernet for over 11 years now. At first, it took a while to receive my first payment because I didn't meet their minimum requirements because I wasn't getting enough volume.

From 2002 to 2009, I was getting paid on time. Then from 2010 onwards, they started getting behind a bit on payments, and they would make promises, but would only end up paying to people who complained about not getting paid.

Fast forward to today. The last payment I ever received from them was a check for entries I made in June 2010 to June 2011 - this payment was received on January 2012. This is the longest I have ever gone without them sending any form of payment whatsoever (before, the longest I went without a payment was almost a year, but now this is longer by a few months). And now they're almost two whole years behind on payments, which I still doubt I'll be seeing for a long time.

Back in December 2012, Dave asked me for my PayPal address, which I quickly sent because I thought it meant that I would get a payment soon, but it's now April and I still haven't seen one PayPal payment since they switched to PayPal.

I emailed the person in charge of payments and she told me I would be paid that week. This was back in March and I never received anything. She was replaced by someone else who handles payments now, so I emailed him today and we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, just a warning to others who may be thinking about a mail decoy agent with Hausernet. If you're looking for a little bit of extra cash working from home, move on, because this isn't it. They don't pay on time, if at all. So you would only be wasting your time. All you'll get from this company are broken promises. They have completely lost my trust - I never believe a word that anyone from this company says anymore because it's just going to be another broken promise. I'll only believe what I see, and from my experience in the past couple of years, unfortunately, I haven't seen anything. Thanks for nothing, Hauser.

To be fair, they have paid some people via PayPal, but it's seemingly random as far as who gets paid. I have no clue why some people get PayPal payments and why others don't. But if you're looking for some consistent extra cash, this is far from it.

To any companies who are using Hausernet's delivery tracking services, I would also reconsider and maybe go with someone else who offers delivery tracking. You may be getting the service that you're offered, but Hauser isn't paying all of their contractors for the work they do.

And yet another thing breaks...

Seems like everything around here is falling apart.

This morning when I went to turn on my laptop, absolutely nothing happened. Well, not nothing. The power light comes on and the light that shows that the laptop is plugged in came on too. But no POST, no display, or anything (no hard drive activity or fan noise or anything). Before you suggest any fixes, here's all that I've tried:

• Connecting to an external monitor and my TV - still nothing comes on the screen
• Holding down the power button for a minute without any power source (battery or adapter) plugged in, then trying to turn it on after that - still nothing
• Taking out RAM - tried turning it on with no RAM, testing one stick at a time in both slots - still nothing, not even any beeps or error messages
• Cleaning it with compressed air

The computer doesn't even show the Acer screen that you see when it starts up, so I'm guessing it's a faulty motherboard. But I don't want to spend money on a motherboard since I'm not sure if that will really fix it - I don't want to waste money on something that might not work because that money could go towards buying a brand new one. Plus, I kind of wanted a new laptop anyway. :P

But still, it's not a very good time and I hate unexpectedly having to spend money on things like this, especially since a new laptop with the specs I want don't come cheap.

Here's what I DON'T want:

• Windows 8 - kind of hard to avoid this (along with the other things I'm trying to avoid) unless you custom configure one
• Integrated Intel graphics - no thank you! I plan to play games and most don't work so well with integrated Intel graphics
• A touchpad without buttons - I want a real button for right clicking, not to use a multitouch gesture of some sort
• Something prone to overheating - I think this might have contributed to the death of my last laptop (it lasted about 2 months shy of 3 years). My Aspire 4540 would always overheat and shut off whenever I'd do anything graphics intensive. It would even sometimes overheat with a Cooler Master Notepal X2. I always had to keep an eye on my core temperatures to make sure I stopped what I was doing as soon as it got anywhere near 107 degrees Celsius (not sure how hot that is in Fahrenheit because it was easier for me to look at the degrees in HW Monitor in Celsius)

So that's all I don't want. Even just ONE of those in ANY prebuilt laptop configuration that I look at is a deal breaker. I'll probably end up getting one with Windows 8 though - I'm looking at maybe getting the CyberPowerPC GXX6-9220, but the prebuilt configuration of it comes with Windows 8. It's cheaper to get it prebuilt from a retailer than to custom configure one through their website. Just the shipping cost alone on their website adds $49 to the price of anything I configure - I can get the prebuilt one from a few retailers with cheaper or even free shipping. Plus, if I custom configure it, I'd have to wait a lot longer to get it, which is why I might end up settling for a computer with Win 8 even though I'd rather have Windows 7.

I'm so glad our sprinklers are fixed!

For a couple of months, I've had to water the grass manually because several of our sprinkler heads were broken. They're pretty easy to replace, but for some reason it took a while for us to buy new ones and then take the time to put them in.

Now that they're in, I really appreciate our sprinklers so much more. It's so tedious to stand out there and water the grass. Sure, the water feels nice on a hot day, but still, I'd rather not have to be the one doing the watering. I did buy one of those oscillating sprinklers that you connect to a hose, but it hardly seemed effective. I still ended up manually watering our trees and the parts that the sprinkler couldn't reach, and also the front (I let the cheap plastic sprinkler water the back, while I took care of the front). It would take me between 30 minutes to a little over an hour depending on how much I felt I needed to water it on any given day. I even got a nice tan in the process. :P

I'm not able to use our sprinklers on timer though because one of the valves still needs replacing. But manually having to turn them on and then back off is still loads better than watering the grass by hand.

I dislike having a lawn in general. If ever move to another place, I definitely don't want somewhere with any grass at all. I hate having to water and mow it. Meh. No more grass for me. Hardscaping all the way! Or maybe some bushes or something that requires less upkeep than grass.

A dying buffalo!

No, not a real buffalo. The wireless on my Buffalo WHR-G125 is slowly dying. About a week ago, I took a chance at ordering a refurbished Linksys E2500. I've had good luck with refurbs in the past and I used to have a Linksys WRT54G prior to the Buffalo, so I thought it would work out fine.

The E2500 only came with the router itself, an ethernet cable, power cord, and installation CD. It didn't come with any manuals at all. I used the CD, but it just got stuck on "downloading updates" for well over half an hour, so I manually went to 192.168.1.1 to set up the router. Thankfully, the manual setup worked.

Unfortunately, the E2500 got very poor signal to the same room compared to my WHR-G125. Even after a firmware upgrade and reset, nothing seemed to help much at all. The only place with excellent signal was in the same room as the router, which defeats the whole purpose of using wireless. So, I sent the E2500 back and in its place, I ordered an Asus RT-N10+.

The RT-N10+ isn't a dual band router, but after using the E2500, I found out that my laptop doesn't support the 5 GHz band anyway, so I have no use for a dual band router since all of my devices are 2.4 GHz.

I haven't received the Asus router yet, but hopefully it'll work a lot better since I'm back to using the Buffalo again until it gets here, which sucks since my wireless connection keeps getting dropped or is extremely slow that I can't do much of anything unless I feel like plugging in and being wired (which still works excellently).