A brief note about how companies should do business. While on a call this afternoon my UPS shipment arrived. A couple of cable/remote releases for the Nikon were to be inside. Unfortunately when I opened the box only one of the two items were inside. Checking the manifest it showed both should have been there. "Oh great," I said dreading the afternoon of phone calls that was about to come. Would they send an inspector to the house for this ten-dollar item, I wondered? How many hours would it take. I punched the numbers in and dreaded what would become of my day. Here's what happened then:

Amazon call center: Can I get your email or order ID?
Me: Sure... and gave her my email address.
Amazon call center: How may I help you today?
Me: Well I just got my box that was to have two items but it has just one was in the box.
Amazon call center: I'm sorry about that which item was missing?
Me: It was the wireless remote the ML-L3. I even took the box apart to make sure.
Amazon call center: OK. I can do two things I can either refund the item or send you a replacement.
Me: I'd like a replacement.

Now at this point I'm pretty happy but still a little sad. I'd ordered the remote in time to have it for the fireworks this Friday and now knew that wasn't going to happen. Would I have to wait for a new one to be manufactured and then shipped via snail?  Read more »

A couple of disclaimers to start with. First I've already been called an Apple apologist for the analysis I'm about to present here. That argument may makes it easier to dismiss what I have to say but it isn't the case and in fact I still get much of my search traffic to this site from my criticisms of Apple which I'm derided for on Apple fan sites. Second, I'm the owner of an iPhone and at one time I may have had ringtones on it that weren't Apple sanctioned, rather weren't RIAA-sanctioned but we'll get to that in a minute.

Background

To be certain Apple is a publicly traded company. As such it has one real motive at the end of the day. Like all companies in a capitalist society it is in the business of making money for share holders. There are companies that pursue this goal in different ways but the profit motive is what keeps the board in place and Steve Jobs in the CEO chair.  Read more »

Wikidumper has the definition of Gray's Law which is being considered for deletion from Wikipedia. Gray's Law states:

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

This describes perfectly an experience this week at Del Taco. I pulled up to grab a drink from the drive through. The line was long stretching from the window back to the car in front of me at the ordering position. One by one the cars ahead advanced except for the one in ordering position. Eventually I realized the car in front of me wasn't engaged in ordering and the line was empty. With no-one behind me I backed out and pulled in to a parking space and went inside. Once inside I observed two employees talking on the phone on apparently personal matters. The two clerks who were manning the front, including the one with the "drive-through headset" on were huddled in the corner talking and laughing. Eventually while I was getting my drink the car at the drive-through ordering station pulled up to the window. In a brief exchange the kid working the front told the driver that the person taking drive-through orders was busy and the driver left.

One can safely assume the driver won't be back for a while at least. He might even swear off DelTaco in general. But assuming he only holds the shabby treatment against the one store it is reasonable to figure these employees probably cost this store a couple hundred dollars a year. Assuming my observation of the incompetence was the norm it is easy to say it is "sufficiently advanced incompetence". Let's say they do this once a day to one car at the drive through. Assuming they only manage to anger single-occupant cars this daily incompetence would likely only cost the business tens of thousands of dollars a year. Throw in a couple of multi-passenger vehicles and one is soon talking about much larger amounts of cash. So in this one instance sufficiently advanced incompetence certainly does seem to rival malice in the losses it's causing this one store.

Chronos the makers of SOHO Organizer have posted a paid upgrade to version 6. I spent time troubleshooting the last paid beta the company released over a year ago. Presently while I am not in the market I have to wonder at the fact that the Chronos technical support forums have been "discontinued". On January 26, 2006 Chronos had posted a policy that helped make the forums ineffective when customers, tired of delays, broken software and broken promises, took to posting comments that revealed the incomplete and broken nature of the software. Evidently sometime between January 2006 and mid-2007 the forums were taken down. One wonders if the reason for this was to help prevent would-be purchasers from discovering what past buyers thought of the money they'd spent.

Credit card companies frequently are coming up with new ways to sucker customers. The beleaguered industry is certainly not without its benefits but the methods used by many companies are outright slimy. Consider the advertisement in the mail from Bank of America. The ad for Zero Balance tells how I can get an unsecured loan of "up to $50,000* at competitive non-variable rates."

There is not even one little footnote symbol next to the "non-variable rates" portion that is highlighted in yellow for would-be borrowers. What does a non-variable rate mean? Is it the fixed rate that many would commonly think it might be? Well, no. While there is no footnote indicator there is an explanation in the fine light gray print on the back it explains:

By "non-variable rates" we mean that the APR will not automatically vary with an index, such as the Prime Rate. We reserve the right to change your APR, fees, or other credit terms at our discretion.

So it turns out that "non-variable" means they aren't tied to a somewhat predictable index, the economy or any of the normal things that most outrageously priced credit cards are tied to. Instead Bank of America can decide, at their discretion, to increase your rate to the maximum the day after you sign up. In fact if you sign up with a 10% maximum APR the next day they can change it (changing the credit terms) to a low 33% APR.  Read more »

Throughout my decades of being a student of public education I have been taught that ignorance of the law is not a defense. It seems even some attorneys don't get it. Though I am not a legal scholar or expert in any way the logic of Russo & Hale's motion in a case against a former client is simply baffling. Perhaps the firm should change it's name to Bottom & Quince. Though it is hard to imagine even Shakespeare's most comical players playing this skit.

This drubbing of a customer makes me think of an experience we had a few days ago. We went to a nice, expensive restaurant for dinner. It was not as good as it had been about a year ago when we were last there but it was still good and fun. The trouble started for us when we ordered desert, the chocolate course. We each asked for coffee and placed the order. And we waited. And waited. And continued to wait. Finally a manager shows up, slings the chocolate on the table, drops off the fruit plates and says "is there anything else you need". We asked for the coffees we had ordered. It is then that the manager tells us that our server got a big table. At this point I'm thinking "here's a manager that doesn't get customer service".  Read more »

After a recent post about problems with Spanning Sync there seemed to be hope. Alas it was not to be. Following my post there was a comment indicating that Spanning Sync desired to try to make their software work. I spent another several hours getting the data they needed and emailed it away as instructed.

At the end of the day it is yet more time wasted on this product. There are people who test it and never have a problem. So it seems it does work for some, but if it doesn't work you're stuck. Now the trial has ended, the product has been uninstalled (itself a 45-minute process that hangs at every turn) and I'm only haunted by the ghosts of Spanning Sync. Although it's not installed it is still causing sync errors. Fantabilous!

Oh and now sync seems to be completely broken.