Consumerist, a pox on thee

A few months back, I came upon a website called Consumerist, which fancies itself as a sort of watchdog website for the jilted consumer. Stories of woe about unbelievably bad customer service experiences and other general head-scratching news about the consumerist society we live in are posted regularly with plenty of room for comments. I've read some doozies on there, stuff that seems impossible until you read it through.

There's another trend I've noticed, however; a rather disturbing one. Maybe it's the popularity and clout of the site, but there seems to be a tendency for people to write in about their bad experiences and paint themselves entirely as the victim, when in fact they either screwed up, were ignorant, or ignored common sense in the first place. It becomes easy to jump on the big giant corporation as the evil doer when everyone has your back on the site. But then little details start to come out, about how you'd have to be blind or willfully ignorant to not see some obvious print about a company's policies or the like. It's not HP's fault, for example, that you send them a laptop for repair (granted, an external repair) and get it back with a wiped hard drive because you didn't bother to back anything up. There may or may not be a policy stated somewhere in the forms that it could happen, but really, why risk it?

I suppose it is an extension of the entitlement lawsuit frenzy of the last decade or so; we obviously deserve everything we ask for and a shitload more, so anything less is unacceptable, someone else's fault, and hey why not add a few days to our yearly vacation?