Message to Credo Mobile
[Edit: Please note that as of 5:51pm my phone service was restored by an act of excellent customer service. Credo will be contacting me next week with a corrected billing statement, and my cell phone service will go back to normal. After having spent about 10 years of my life with a recurring participation in the customer service industry, I've decided to leave the following blog post up, unaltered except for this preamble, with the following caveats:
1) If you read the blog post, please also read the comments. Mark from Credo kept his promise and got my phone turned back on immediately. That scores MAJOR POINTS for me. As a customer, I know businesses are run by imperfect humans, and that I am also one of those imperfect humans. I don't expect humans to treat me like I'm right all the time, because I'm not right all the time, or even most of the time. I do expect human beings that are part of companies to treat me as a human-being-customer to their company, one that has feelings and emotions and a real life apart from the dollars I give in exchange for goods and services.
2) If you are a customer, and we all are at some point, please remember that the people in a business are also human, most of us just trying to get that mortgage and rent paid for. There are plenty of awful customer service experiences that I've declined to post about for various reasons. But if something bad has happened, blog it, or youtube it, or write letters, or take that crappy toy back to the store, or whatever! It's up to us, the customers, to make sure our society works like it is supposed to.
Enough soap boxing. Thank you again to Credo for the speedy response, and for making sure that we both doing our best to make this does not happen again.]
Dear Credo Mobile:
Life has been peaceful for the last few days since you turned off my cell phone. Someday when a truly better alternative to cell phones appears I’ll give it up, but I still find it necessary. I’ll admit I only really miss talking to my wife, my mom and my dad, and I being in touch with them is necessary to me.
Thank you for allowing me to switch my plan last month and not once informing me that the moment I switched my plan to a lower minute usage that my phone bill would sky rocket to around $450. Yes, I’m clear that $150 of that is for my wife’s canceled phone, but I figured a person who actually understood customer service would warn me that my new, requested $49.99 service plan was really going to net out to a $300 fee due to minutes accrued previously in the month. I can see how you might think that by asking for a less expensive service plan I actually wanted to pay you more money.
I know I’ve checked my address with you on 3 separate occassions, but I have yet to receive a bill from you since I’ve moved to my new home. I should understand, after all I live on a street with a Spanish name–Escuela–and it’s given your agents angst, given how many times I’ve had to re-spell it to them. I have faith that your bills will make it to me someday, or that someday you’ll grant me access to log-in to your website with what I could swear was the email address I provided to your agents.
But I really can’t wait for someday and I’d like to just wire you the money. However it seems that by shutting off my phone, you’ve made it completely impossible for me to contact you and get the dollar amounts I actually owe you. I know, I’ve tried to call you every way possible today. I’ve even gone to your website, clicked on that orange “Click to Talk” weblink and attempted to get your operators to call me. Nope, looks like not even your operators can reach my phone.
And, to be fair, I did just find your customer service email address, and I will be emailing them right after I post this blog. You’re lucky, not many people read my blog, and those that do are a bit desensitized to my whining in moments like this.
Here’s to hoping we can resolve my problems with my phone service soon. I have no problem paying you what I really owe you, as my previous year and a half of on time payments should prove.
Take care,
Jeremy Osborne
PS. You should make sure you train the agents to never again tell a customer the following, “Yes, Credo may have overchaged you, and they might reverse their charges, but you will still have to pay for the extra [utilities] taxes due [to our mistakes].” Tsk, tsk, that’s a big customer service no-no.
Two and Red
My job status will be changing in a few days. Not exciting, not terrifying, merely an opportunity to fulfill some male fantasies of mine. Along those lines, I decided it was time to start my own (small) open source project, something that appeals to my testicular need to build things from the ground up.
The problem seemed simple at first: the project is called wordinary: a cross-language, public domain, word-tionary–no definitions, just words (free morphemes, if I have the terminology correct) accompanied by a simple interface that allows for quick retrieval of multiple languages with a single query. Kind of like a Rosetta Stone, although I doubt I will ever create something remotely as useful as the real thing.
Self deprecation aside, looking at one of the ISO language definition standards, I chose a subset of languages for the prototype:
Arabic, German, English, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nederlands, Portuguese, Pashto, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, and Chinese
and two words to populate the initial database:
the number ‘two‘
the color ‘red’
From here, let the fun (no sarcasm intended) begin: learning to deal with Unicode (UTF-8); using the Python I’ve learned for something constructive; learning to ask for help.
I spoke to a linguist this morning at a great coffee shop (Firefly) in Santa Cruz. After speaking to her, I realized what an idiotic, suicidal project this is. Fine, I’ve done dumber things, and have succeeded at even dumber things that are not worth mentioning here. This would be a crazy project worth succeeding at.
So I ask for help, those of you who read this blog. I knew I would need to turn this into a wiki like project in the future, but I didn’t think the future was here already.
I need help translating the following:
The number ‘two’ in:
Japanese
Korean
Pashto
Somali
The color ‘red’ in:
Korean
Pashto
Somali
I’m also looking for bilingual speakers of these languages, preferably those who speak English and one of the languages I’m listed above… but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
And, if you are willing to help with my translation of ‘two’ and ‘red’, just copy the characters into a comment field within this post. If you understand Unicode or UTF-8, I’ll also gladly take the string of UTF-8 codes for these words in the comments of this post.
New Site Design
Recently my favorite blog to read has been Russ Beattie’s blog, and not for any particular reason other than I can relate to him. I stumbled onto his blog sometime ago, not sure when or how. He is the impetus for the semi-minimalist site redesign-made possible by finding someone else who did a wordpress design, downloading it and installing it (thanks to Scott Wallick). And he’s looking for a job. I won’t quote his skills here (they’re listed in the link to him above), but his “strengths” made me laugh.
He inspired the next post I’m going to make. It should show up in less than an hour…but if you actually read my blog, you know you can’t trust my promises.
I’m just british and, well, you’re not
Well, Alan Rickman is british and I’m quoting him. And he’s starring in a movie centered around the year of my birth:
http://www.bottleshockthemovie.com
Fine, if Alan Rickman doesn’t do it for you, throw in Eliza Dushku and you should be set.
At least I am.
Flashback to the ’90s web browser pop-up attacks
Trillian, the multi-client Instant Messaging program I use, had a disagreement with the Jabber protocol this morning and attacked my computer with ghost message notifications. And for just a moment, I thought all those make believe groupies were real!
Gay Marriage
This was going to be (yet another) rant on my blog. I deleted the rant part.
Here’s all I have to say about same-sex marriage:
Anyone out there who is gay who needs an officiant let me know. I’ll get myself ordained (Universal Life Church) and marry you. If you want a domestic partnership, I’ll go become a notary and grant your wish. For free.
I’m not going to fly my ass all over the globe, but if you come to me, I’ll marry you.
Why? I just had another friend tell me they were getting divorced for no particular reason. Perhaps if we allow same-sex marriages, we might actually start lowering the divorce rate.
Money, Food, or something else?
I’m unable to get to sleep tonight. Maybe it’s my screwed up sleep schedule after a week in China–I left Shanghai at 1pm, yesterday, and arrived in San Francisco at 12:50pm, yesterday. Maybe it’s been too much Neal Stephenson followed by Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. It could also be that I avoided my pile of work today because I needed at least one non-work, non-travel day, and now I’m tossing and turning thinking about all the stuff I have to do tomorrow… I mean today.
Whatever the reason, I can’t sleep.
I keep thinking about the following scenario:
If we taught a requisite curriculum, and truly educated, on Money in schools
then People, as in the population of Human Beings as a whole,
would do far fewer stupid things
because today
money = food, shelter and care
and
money = happiness
For just a moment, leave philosophical arguments aside, because believe me, I will side with you about how universally incorrect the above statements are.
but…
Today, even for the incredibly crappy value of my nation’s dollar, currency is life. I don’t hunt and forage. I didn’t inherit a cent. Like most other people I know, I work.
I work in what I like to call not-my-parent’s world.
There is no job security.
No one has ever offered me a pension, and ignore the horrific time bomb called Social Security.
Layoff is now a polite term for being fired permanently.
Inflated real estate prices–yes yes, I agree with you real estate is, and always will be one of the greatest investment, but take a moment and Zillow.com Mountain View, my current town of residence. I can’t say that if I could service a million dollar plus mortgage I’d jump at the chance at grabbing a 2,000 square foot home.
Just some thoughts.
Thanks for reading. I finally feel like I can go to sleep.
Curious of others’ thoughts on the topic of Money Education.
Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 3 of 3)
It’s such a lie to call this Part III. Feels like part 33, but I wanted to close out with a couple of final notes.
There’s only three:
1. DO NOT PUT EVERYTHING UNDER REVISION CONTROL
Really, it’s a bad idea. Everyone will make up different rules about this, but no matter what not everything should be placed inside the repository. I came up with the following couple of rules to prevent my habitual tendency to just Subversion stuff:
- Only put relatively stable drafts and projects under revision control.
- Only put things into Subversion that need change or version tracking. If I don’t care about previous revisions, keep it out of the repository.
- No images. Keep images someplace else unless they won’t be changing much and somehow need to be associated with a certain project like a web page.
- No program applications. Never, never.
- No “published” documents (aka. PDF or Microsoft Word Documents or OpenOffice Docs). XML, HTML, and even sometimes Rich Text Format (RTF) are all acceptable, but where possible, only check in the human parseable source of published documents.
2. Subversion is not a backup system
Subversion can make backing up extremely easy, and in my case, shrink the size of all of my documents (my repository hovers around 6 megabytes).
Once you put all your hard work into building your repository, make sure you have someplace located away from your computer’s hard disk to store a backup copy of it. There are loads of free online storage services available. Do yourself a favor and backup your work on one.
3. TortoiseSVN and Windows Vista don’t always play nicely
I don’t know why Microsoft had to go and be such a bunch of dick-bags and make Vista so different on the inside but so annoyingly not so much better on the outside. Case in point, every now and then TortoiseSVN seems to crash Explorer.exe. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bad Open Source community player by not submitting my crashes to either Windows or the TortoiseSVN group–admitting it in this article will probably shame me into doing something about it.
My friend Steve pointed me to this article about fixing a problem with TortoiseSVN on Windows Vista (e.g. Problems with errant File Locking). This wasn’t my problem, but I hope this can help someone else out.
Crashing Explorer.exe on Windows Vista does not have near the bad impact as on previous versions of Windows, but it’s still annoying. But it’s not too bad. I’ll be using Subversion long after I’m done using Windows.
That’s all I have to say right now. Hope you’re having a great weekend!
Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.6b of 3)
Branching. You haven’t really used Subversion until you have branched something.
I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).
For the direct link on YouTube, go here.
That’s all the videos for now. Must resolve hosted video quality before I’m willing to put the effort into making anymore.
Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.6a of 3)
A final few notes for now. This part deals with Subversion’s revision numbering, and how to access previously stored versions of a saved document.
I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).
For the direct link on YouTube, go here.
