Antler-Candling
It is an infuriating fact that the web sites of large commercial firms are missing most of the items you would like to see( this is increasingly true as the firm approaches monopoly status). Examples include: a way to reduce your level of service from a utility (mobile phone, land line, cable service); obtaining a refund; an FAQ for questions that The Company only permits to be addressed by phone or email. The worst of these is cancellation of service, which is almost impossible to do on the web. The reason for these omissions is pretty simple: if you have to talk to a customer service rep to get anything useful done, they may just be able to talk you out of it (and they will certainly try).
I have endured two examples of this lately. Case One: I switched
from Anthem Blue Cross last spring to (the much superior and less costly)
Kaiser. I called Anthem to announce that fact and was told that they
couldn't take cancellations over the phone, and please write a letter, which I
did. Three months later, I noticed that a credit card had three more
Anthem payments on it. I called Anthem and asked "Wassup?" to which they
said that I had sent the letter to the wrong Anthem address. I was
stupefied, and asked, "So what, you just threw it away?" To which the lady
repeated that I had sent the letter to the wrong address. I then faxed and
called and emailed for the next two months, including the original letter,
subsequent letters, a history of my phone calls, and a photocopy of my Kaiser
card (issued 6 months ago). In the course of 4 months I did not receive
one phone call, fax or email back from them.
Case Two: For 14 months, I mistakenly overpaid my Qwest phone bill, having
set up an automatic payment from my bank. I noticed that the credit
balance was at $800 one day and called for a refund check. This is
something that I've done many times with credit card and other companies and I
couldn't imagine it being controversial. The customer service rep was nice
enough, but said that they would have to "wait to make sure my last payment
cleared", which made no sense to me at all, but OK, I gave them a month.
Of course, I heard nothing in the interim, so I called again. Another
customer service rep told me the exact same thing: "we need to make sure
your last payment cleared". I said "but, that's what you said last month",
and she repeated the mantra to me. She then said that if I would get on
the phone with her and my bank and we could "see if the last payment was honored
by the bank", we could clear this up. She got the bank on the phone, who
didn't recognize my account number (!), and I hung up in disgust. The
third time I called Qwest, I pointed out: 1) I have been a customer for 15
years and never missed a phone bill payment, 2) I was now on Qwest's
auto-payment plan, whereby they just suck the money out of my account when they
want, 3) I have had a credit balance for 14 consecutive months -- if you're
"waiting for the last payment to clear", just write me a check for the credit
balance I had last month. None of this, of course, did any good.
I then went to the web site of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies
and filled out a complaint against both companies, briefly stating the
situations. Within 5 days, I got a phone call from a nice lady who
confirmed that DORA was working on it. Within another couple of weeks, I
received a letter from DORA indicating that Anthem had written a letter of
apology over the misunderstanding and their check was in the mail to me. A
week later, I received another letter from DORA with an attached letter from
Qwest saying they couldn't imagine how this happened and their check was
in the mail, too.
I've got more I could say about this, but I need to leave now and join a
local Tea Party gathering. We're protesting big government and its zeal to
over-regulate the business that make this country great.
~~~
I currently have two Android-based phones (a T-Mobile G1 and a Verizon Droid),
and have also been working on a couple of Android-based devices for work.
As I have never had an iPhone, I can't make a comparison, but there are
certainly things I like about the 'droid phones, and things I could live
without. Like, when you want to make a phone call, you really want to just
make a phone call. It's great if it auto-fills in the rest of a frequently
called number, or responds to voice commands, but at the end of the day, I want
to get my sweetie on the other end of the line. I find that one out of
every 100 calls on my 'droid phones cause the device to lock up for a while and
become unresponsive to touches. Another weird symptom (at least with the
Verizon Droid) is that, quite suddenly, my end of the call has been "muted", and
I must listen to my sweetie say "Are you there, hon?" a dozen times before I can
back up enough to find the Mute icon. Said Mute icon is not "on", BTW, but
if I cycle through mute and un-mute, I get my voice back (so to speak).
The things that are most useful about the 'droids (and probably the iPhone) are
the location-related applications. It's great to know you can forget the
address of the restaurant where you are meeting someone, as long as you can pull
over and Google it. And, it's nice to be able to plug a really big (like
16 GB) memory stick in these things and carry all your music (and videos, if
you're so inclined) with you. And then there are some absolutely
mind-blowing applications. To wit: Derek and I were on the waiting
list at a Cajun restaurant recently and started talking about our Droids (he has
one, too). Der said, "Watch this" and clicked on an application and moved
his Droid over to the nearest speaker, which was busy blaring out some kind of
Cajun music. In a matter of seconds, the application (Shazam) -- which had
been "listening" to the music -- displayed the album cover of the music. I
was blown away. Having had my fair share of AI courses, and having taught
a couple, it doesn't surprise me that CDDB can recognize a song by listening to
the beginning of it. All you have to do is sample a zillion tracks and
come up with a hash code for the digital signature. But, what Shazam was
doing was recognizing a song with only a piece of the song available, from a
random place in the song. Yikes, how do they do that?
~~~
Currently reading: a zillion magazines sold to me by those urban kids that
show up with their little green pads and doe eyes;
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into
the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body;
Mister Skylight (recommended by GC);
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo;
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for
the Ultimate Theory; a random Spenser mystery, in honor of Robert Parker,
who died yesterday at his writing desk.
~~~
Like many of you, I've sent a few dollars to groups helping in Haiti.
Yesterday, I read an excellent article by an executive at The Red Cross.
His advice was not to send money earmarked for a particular tragedy, but
instead send it to the general fund. If the most important place for your
money is Haiti, that's probably where it's going to go anyway, and any remaining
monies can be used to alleviate suffering somewhere else in the future. As
an illustrative point, he noted that almost a half billion dollars still remains
in the fund for the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami, and it can't be used for any
other purpose (like Haiti), because of the restrictions placed on it by donors.
~~~
I leave you with some lines from GC's poem, "Like A Fire From Which Sparks
Emitted Do Fly Upward":
"Shocked from sleep in the midst of a storm I think antler-candling.
. . . I don't know whether antler-candling is about deer or about illness or
about exogamy, about folk ritual or petty entrepreneurs. Poetry takes
language's idea of ornament and replaces it with a beating heart, not knowing
sleep stole the heart from some other dreamer."