Rules vs. Recommendations

My daughter loves playing at the play area at the mall here near the house. This is usually a great thing, 'cause it's designed with kids in mind - little kids. Has a really cute picture of a bear, holding out his hand, showing you the maximum height of the kids allowed. Easy peasy, right?

Today, we're there and there's a kid, probably 13 years old, and easily 2 feet taller than the cutesy bear's hand. My daughter comes in - and she's not even the youngest kid there at 3 - and this kid goes running past full bore and brushes her, knocking her over.

I'm not a hot head. Really. Read other posts where people have PISSED me off, and you'll see it. I swear. But my daughter is something else here.

"Hey," I call to the kid. "You're too old, too fast and entirely too big to be in here. You're gonna end up hurting one of these kids... and they're all smaller than you. Get out."

He glares at me, and sulks his way off to his mom. She gives me the go-to-hell look as her ne'er-do-well kid goes and slouches next to her. All the other parents in the play area? Give me "Oh thank God someone spoke up" looks.

Am I an ass? I mean, really, are rules there to be followed, or is the mentality of the kids today (Oh, lord, I said it) right, they're just *recommendations*?

Customer Dis-service

FROM:
ADDRESS:
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55117

Acer America
P.O. Box 6137

Temple, TX 76503-6137

Re: Service Request: 1-3XXXXX

Service Request: 1-3XXXXX

Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

August 8, 2008

To whom it may concern:

On June 11, 2008 I set up a service request for my Acer Aspire 5100, serial number noted above. There were three issues with the machine at that point, referenced in Question Reference #XXXXXX-XXXXXX:

[T]he optical drive is not functioning or recognized - OS, or BIOS.

Left click button is unhinged on left side - must click on right side of button nearest scroll pad or it doesn't work.

Newest issue: I plugged in the computer this afternoon, took out the battery as I always do, and went to work. When I put the battery back in to move the computer to a different location, the battery status light began to blink, but thinking nothing of it, I unplugged the power adapter and it went dead. Rebooted, the light was green for about 4 seconds, then it began to flash amber again.

On June 21, it was received by your location, and on June 24 it was shipped back. When I received it in my house on June 27, I immediately attempted to boot it, but was thwarted as I realized that the power issue had not been addressed. I plugged it in, called customer service, and explained what was happening. A new battery was sent out that day.

A couple of days later (June 30), I realized that the optical drive was not functioning either. I called customer service again, and spoke with an operator who was exceedingly rude. After explaining to him the issue, his response was curt and snide. I explained to him that I am an A+, Network+ and MCSA certified technician, and that I’d been through all the different areas that might give some indication what was wrong with the optical drive – BIOS, System Properties, Device Manager, etc. He responded with a question intended to make me look foolish – an entry in the Registry that doesn’t exist. I then informed him that this was my business machine, and that it had just been returned to me from being repaired. I asked him if there was a way we could expedite the return repair and his response was, “You could take it to a computer repair depot in your home town if you want, but don’t expect us to pay for the repairs.”

At this point, I requested to speak with a supervisor, and his response was along the lines of, “We don’t pass calls along to supervisors, and even if we did, I wouldn’t transfer you.”

Eventually, he authorized a return of the system – again – and I sent it out again on July 2. It arrived in your facility on July 10. On July 16, I called to get a status update on my system, only to be told that the motherboard had to be replaced but that its replacement was on indefinite backorder. I then informed the operator that as this is a unit I use for my work, this was an issue. His response was that this was standard procedure, and I’d get it back when I got it back.

I began calling every few days to see what the status was, and it was always “motherboard on indefinite backorder”. Eventually, on July 30, I received a phone call from an operator at (254)555-4000 who informed me that as it appeared the motherboard was never going to arrive, a replacement laptop had been authorized. I told him that my only issue at this point was that the replacement be comparable to the one I’d sent in. He didn’t know what any of the specifications were on the replacement machine, save the hard drive size, the memory allocation, the presence of a built-in webcam and the manufacturer of the CPU. He told me that it would be sent out “next week”. I told him that it’d be fine, and decided I’d call the next day to see if I could talk to someone who knew a little more about the system.

However, when I called again, I found that the customer service systems were down for upgrades, and that there was no record of the discussion I’d had with that operator. As a matter of fact, on a couple of occasions through the following days, there was no record that my system was even in your possession. I called again every day through Tuesday, only to find that the system was still down, and variably that you had or had not received the laptop in question.

Tuesday morning, 0010, I received an automated email informing me that the system had been sent back to me. This got my hopes up until I noticed that the SR# was from the original first round in June, and when I double checked the FedEx tracking number, I found that this was indeed from that service.

Eventually I got through on Tuesday afternoon, but the operator with whom I spoke said that it was obviously a fluke, the system of course had been sent back, and to “watch for FedEx to deliver it on Thursday or Friday.” I told her that if this was true, I wanted to know the correct tracking number so I would know the location of the shipment. Sorry, I was told, “I don’t have access to that.”

I called again Wednesday, and after explaining the received email was told I had to talk to an escalation group. I sat on hold for 45 minutes, but I couldn’t wait any longer as I had to go to work. Finally, Thursday morning, I spoke with an escalation operator who was able to tell me that the system’s specifications were indeed, comparable, but that it was unknown where it was.

Now, it’s Friday, it’s approximately 1400 Central Daylight Time, and after being on hold for 40 minutes, my system – or its replacement – is in limbo. Apparently the system which had been authorized as a replacement is not in stock, and I was told to call back “mid-next week.”

I am very disappointed in this level of customer service. I understand that the system I sent in is not one of Acer’s flagship systems, I understand that at $500 this is not exactly a high end system, but I also understand, first as a consumer that this is no drop in the bucket for me, and second as a person who works in customer service that every customer deserves to be treated politely, and in my industry, every request is VIP. If I told my superiors that something was on indefinite back order, I would be expected to find another way to fix the issue. If I told my supervisors that I couldn’t find a customer’s product, it would be a priority one issue to find it.

As I have expressed to your customer service operators, I will not be doing business with Acer again.

Sincerely,

NAME

Oh, Vanity!

You know sometimes, that a new idea is going to be awesome, sometimes you know it's just going to be ... wrong.

Don't get me wrong. I post here (not regularly) and I'm on Twitter and Pownce...

But I've just spent (wasted?) 10 minutes of my life - when I should be sleeping - watching someone drive their car around CA live. Just because I could.

Jason Calacanis talked about doing this just the other day on TWiT and I fell prey to his vanity.

Oh, vanity!

Okay, maybe it's time...

I know last post (what, a month ago?!) I said that there's no reason to hate Vista. Now I've been using Vista on my desktop since I replaced it in February last, and after a while, it started feeling a little sluggish. But then I added two more gigabytes of RAM and it was a speed demon again.

Then my wife bought me a laptop for our anniversary. I love it. It's got 1 gig of RAM, and a dual core processor. And it takes about 6 minutes to boot from cold to usable, excluding the time it takes me to type in my name and password.

Then one day, my desktop started blue-screening. Regularly. Twice in an afternoon. Worried for the health of my computer, I downloaded Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Live CD and ran the memtest86+ utility. The screen went from blue (okay) to bright red (not okay) in less time than it took me to press Enter. So I started testing each stick separately, and it was my new sticks of RAM. Crap. So I sent them back to the place I bought them. They're replacing them, very nicely and very quickly.

But now I am back to 1gb of RAM in my desktop. And I've got to be honest, I'm a little spoiled after that time spent as sir speedy. It's freaking molasses. So, I installed Feisty Fawn, then updated to Gutsy Gibbon.

You know what? I liked it so much, I installed it on my laptop.

You know what else? It's set as the default for both machines now. When you've got a 160GB laptop hard drive and you keep most of your important stuff on the desktop computer, you can dual boot a laptop easily.

I still like MS products. I'm hoping to get a copy of XP to replace Vista on my laptop. But when I can boot in to Ubuntu in a matter of less than 2 minutes, still access all the same files and formats on my Windows partitions - hell, I save all my data into the Windows partition and if I have to I can still boot into Vista and have that data available.

But it's clean, it's secure, and damn, it's pretty. And that sells a lot of people over.