Customer "service?"

I have a home phone, but only about five people know the number. Almost everyone calls me on my mobile, the number of which has remained the same for almost ten years. Yet I get many calls on the home number, usually collection calls for a "Juan Vidron." Sometimes I get 20 a day. All are automated, and it's not easy to get them to stop calling me. Today I decided to hell with it, just cancel the damned thing and save $50 a month.

Being the e-whiz that I am (or was), first I tried canceling via Verizon's website. It tells me I have to register. No problem. I fill out all of the information, only to be told that it can't validate my "12-digit" account number. I try a couple variations, because the account number on the bill has 15 digits. No luck. Oh well, I'm canceling anyway, so after navigating about a dozen screens I find the customer service number. It's an automated voice recognition system.

"Are you calling about 301-xxx-xxxx?" It asks.

"Yes," I reply.

"I'll pull up your records. Ok, how can I help you?"

"Cancel"

"Just ask a question."

"Cancel my account."

"I'm sorry, I didn't get that."

And so on. Eventually the thing recognizes what I'm trying to say, then quizzes me about details. After a few minutes of this, I apparently pass the test, because it says it'll connect me to a human. Ten rings. Then the same voice pops up. "Sorry, but due to caller volume your call cannot be answered. Please try us on the web at www.verizon.com. Good bye."

WTF?

I try it again. Same drill. Same result, no human, no way to leave a message, same encouraging words about the useless web site.

So now I've tried to email them. Will it work? My hopes are not high.

I am reminded of more than a few online services that do not have a way to cancel online. The most notorious is of course AOL; "on-line" is part of their name, and you can conduct just about any transaction with them online... except cancel your service. I'm not the first to notice this bit of irony. MSNBC reported on it last year. In my case, I gave up and just had my credit card provider change the number. Should work great, right?

Wrong. AOL waited three months, then sent my three months of bills to a collection agency. So Verizon isn't quite as bad as AOL, but I'll be they're working on it...

MSNBC's interview with a blogger who was smart enough to record his conversation with an AOL employee:


The original unedited version of the recording:

Holy war

We're not sure, but most of my college buddies seemed to agree that I was the first person at Mary Washington to have a computer in his room. Not a terminal -- lots of folks had those -- but a fully operational computer. It was a Commoder VIC-20, with a cassette tape drive and an old TV for a monitor. The display was 22 characters wide and I think it had about 3,500 bytes of memory. Not megs. Not kilobytes. Bytes.

Not long after, my Dad got a Commodore 64, which orders of magnitude more powerful. But Commodore was an evolutionary dead end, and even before I graduated I could tell that the MS-DOS world was going to be king.

My first personal computer was bought an XT Turbo clone by a local company called Win Labs. 7 MHz processor. Woohoo.

Bought an AT clone a few years later, 486DX/50. Actually I still have it, down in the garage.

Next was a Gateway Pentium, about 400 MHz.

Another Gateway was purchased a few years ago, 1.6GHz.

A Toshiba laptop came onto the scene in 2003. A year later, a very fast, very heavy, and incredibly hot Compaq laptop was added to the fold. That marked 19 years of Intel/Microsoft machines.

Until last year.

The first Mac was a dual 2.7GHz G5. I use it as an editing platform; I'd been running Avid on the Gateway, but wanted to move into Final Cut Pro. Apple has not yet ported FCP to Windows (and probably never will). The machine is amazing. It's even a joy to look at, with a case that looks like it was sculpted out of a solid chunk of aluminum. So a few months ago, when I needed a new laptop, not for video editing but for general purpose work... email, web, writing screenplays, writing my blog... I bought a MacBook.

Apple has done an amazing job of branding, at every step of the process. From their stores, to their web site, to their industrial design, even their tv ads, there is a clean, uncluttered, sensible look. Nothing is left to chance. Consider my old Compaq: A decent-looking case, packed to the gills with processing power and a nice graphics card. But it sounds like a diesel engine. The power supply is an enormous, big black ugly device; Apple, in contrast, recognized that the brick for a laptop is something people deal with every day. It's an odd little white cube, with feet that fold out. The feet allow you to wrap the cord around the brick. And at the end of the cord? A little plastic tab that hooks onto the wire. No clutter. My Compaq has a short in the power connection port. Unless it's held perfectly straight, the power plug will slip out. The apple plug is magnetic. It grabs onto the side of the computer and holds snugly, but if you accidentally trip over the wire, it pulls harmlessly out.

There are so many little design touches. Heck last week I discovered that it has an accelerometer built in, and if it detects that it is falling, it automatically parks the heads on the hard drive to help prevent damage. Incredible.

I am reminded of a Saab I owned a few years ago, a 1996 900S. The last of the truly Swedish Saabs, designed before GM ruined the company. Every detail of the car was thought out. The shape of the buttons on the dash. The typeface used on the gauges. The exterior door handles were made of a non-conductive material, so when you touched the car on a cold day, you didn't get an electric static shock. Ever wonder why Saabs have the ignition switch on the center console? It's not just to be weird, it's because studies show that drivers suffer injuries to their right knees from hitting the key in a crash. So. Put it in the middle, out of the range of a flailing body. Sensible.

Of course, the analogy is similar in many ways: Saab sold something like 25,000 units in the US back in the 90s. That's about two weeks worth of Ford F-150 sales in the US. Likewise, Apple remains a tiny niche market. Sure, the company is doing well, but that is largely because of iPod and iTunes.

Is there a market for good design? Will consumers pay a little more for it? Or does the price at the BestBuy trump everything...

I miss LP's

The first album I ever owned was "Wings Over America." It was Christmas 1976, and we were spending the holidays in Florida. Fortunately for me (since we didn't have a turntable in our hotel room) the album was huge, with oodles of artwork to look at. Imagine my disappointment as I started my album collection, in finding out that not all of them had three fold-out pages.

For those of you under 30 or so, you've probably never unwrapped an LP. Instead, you started out by wrestling with the cellophane on a CD, and now just buy them digitally. I do too -- I'm listening to my new "One X" CD from Three Days Grace as I write this, having just added the CD to iTunes. Most of my new music today comes from iTunes. It's so bloody convenient.

But it's not the same.

The LP came wrapped in shrink wrap, but not the hard cellophane that encases CDs. Instead, it was a softer, plasticy-feeling sort of thing, that you could cut with a thumbnail. Maybe the softer wrapping was akin to the fragile vinyl disc instead, while today's CD's are tough polycarbonate, encased in hard plastic.

You bought the album at store, like Harmony Hut (it was a mall-based music store in the 70's. It's long gone. Even Wikipedia's never heard of it). In my case, being a country boy, it was a long ride back home before you could play it -- we didn't even have a cassette deck in a car until I was 18, and I only knew one person with a turntable in his car, and he was insane. So instead you'd fiddle with the album while Mom drove back, hoping for liner notes or something cool inside. And the smell... the smell of new vinyl was like magic. Echoes of a musical world that existed somewhere Out There, but now you owned a little of it.

The covers were huge, about a square foot. All kinds of real estate for artwork. Some were bifolds, giving you four feet of canvas, plus the sleeves. Not everyone put effort into the album packaging, but a lot of them did. Boston's "Don't Look Back" seemed so lush and colorful, the perfect match for its dreadfully overproduced sound.

Album etiquette was big. You wouldn't lend your discs to anyone. To a wannabee audiophile like myself, how you stored your albums told me if I should lend them out; people who had five feet of them in a row, the ones on the end leaning on a cinder block, were off the map. Those of us who used an anti-static disc brush on a crackling new album, and who agonized over the counterbalance of our tonearms, we knew better.

CD's were such a revolution. I bought hundreds over the past twenty years, my first being a Beatles CD that I won on a radio show (The Harris Challenge on WCXR 105.9; the question was "What county was Georgetown originally part of?") But even with my then-young eyes, it was very hard to read the tiny type inside. Manufacturers quickly started printing little booklets that fit inside the jewel case, but it still wasn't the same. And is anything uglier than a cracked jewel case? I don't know why it's so bothersome...

But the intangibility of an online purchase is somewhat unsatisfying. I recently purchased a Green Day tune. Clicked "download" and Apple took 99 cents from Visa, and we were done. If my Mac ever crashes I'm not sure what happens to my purchase. I guess I wanted a nice 12" chunk of cardboard to magically come out of the screen...

I still have my 250 or so 12" LP's, even though I don't even own a turntable anymore. Five of my favorites are housed in black picture frames, hanging in my living room. So maybe it was the album art that was the most appealing aspect after all...