cellio | Entries tagged with customer service

After returning a DVD, on Friday I was a little surprised to see that Netflix was sending me the second item on my queue even though the first was marked as being available. But shrug; Netflix never promised a strict queue and that's fine. So long as they send the discs in multi-disc sets in order I have nothing to complain about (and this failure is unlikely given how I structure my queue).

Saturday I got email from them saying "you may have noticed that we did that" -- it was because while the disc is available, it wasn't available at my nearest distribution center. So while sending me #2 they were also going to send me #1 from farther away and I should expect it in a few days. This means I will have more DVDs out at a time than is supported by my subscription. It's a very small cost to them to provide this, but many companies wouldn't so it makes a good impression that they did.

In a similar vein, when I downgraded my subscription after getting the Roku streaming device (don't need as many DVDs at a time when there's plenty to watch via streaming), I didn't expect them to replace the DVD that arrived at their distribution point a day before the downgrade was to take effect. They sent it anyway, so I had an extra DVD for some days past when I had paid for that privilege.

Tangent: Roku sent email Thursday saying I could now watch Social Network through them (for a rental fee from, IIRC, Amazon). I observe that the DVD will be available through Netflix on Tuesday. Is there really a market of people who (1) can't wait five more days but (2) didn't see it in the theatre, or (3) have Roku devices but (4) don't use Netflix so they can't get it that way? I'm puzzled by the business model.

I have a mechanic I like but scheduling routine stuff like inspections with him is kind of tricky, so last week I called the Honda dealership in Shadyside and made an appointment for this morning (confirming that I would wait for the car and they could do it quickly enough that that would work, oh and that they have free Internet access).

I was ten minutes late getting there this morning; traffic was worse than I had expected going in that direction, plus finding the service entrance was challenging and involved a trip around the block in said traffic. Nonetheless, Greg took me right away and was still done before the time he'd predicted. He also took care of two outstanding recalls he'd noticed I had not responded to, and washed the car squeaky-clean. (Aside: why is "squeaky clean" a positive thing? I'm glad the squeak went away after a mile or so. (Between shoe and pedals, in case you're wondering -- nothing I should have been concerned about.)) Greg was exceedingly polite in all of my interactions with him, from the initial phone call onward. I will be asking for him by name in the future.

In addition, they had a range of drinks in their waiting area, not just coffee, and also pastries. There was a TV going, but it was possible to retreat to another room and not be bothered by it.

I felt well-treated by the folks at the dealership where I bought my Honda (Monroeville), and am glad to have another very positive data point.

Back in June we had a big storm, and a large stretch of sidewalk along my route to my synagogue became covered in a thick layer of dirt. After a couple weeks passed without the now-packed-down dirt being cleared, I left my first polite note. (No one was ever visibly home when I was walking past.) Time passed, and summer rains turned that packed dirt into occasional mud deep enough that you really couldn't walk through, especially if wearing nice shoes, and even if it weren't that deep, it would still be slippery. I left another note -- referencing the first one, but still polite.

Time passed with no action. It was dry for a while. Then fall came and with it more rain. A few weeks ago when I tried to walk around the mud, by walking on the strip of grass by the sidewalk, I found that that was too swampy too, and I had to walk in the street. The combination of night and rain makes it hard for me to see stuff like this; I found out the grass was unsafe by slipping and nearly falling. If I had trouble I can only imagine what the elderly are going through. So I wrote to my city councilman, Doug Shields, through the council web site.

Friday night the sidewalk was clear. Gloriously clear! It rained this weekend and I didn't have to care. I have now sent Mr. Shields a nice thank-you note. (I'll probably never find out whether city council caused the owner to fix it or just sent workers over. As a taxpayer I care, but not enough in this case to stir the pot.)

We saw Cirque du Soleil a few years ago and enjoyed the show, so we were planning to go again when we saw that they'd be in Pittsburgh next month. However, we've been overcome by a truly obnoxious ticketing process.

We were chugging along with the not-very-well-designed web site -- chose our show, accepted the offered tickets (which we could only kind-of sort-of locate on the seating chart), filled out all the info including the credit-card security code, were irritated at the $10/ticket service fee (for using the web site) but went ahead anyway, decided the $7/ticket insurance against "lost in the mail" was sleazy and we'd invoke Visa if necessary, and thought we were done -- but no, it then routed us to a page where we had to sign up for some security service "for our protection". That was one annoyance too many, so we fell back to ordering via phone.

The first attempt to do so ended after half an hour on hold with no sign of progress. A later attempt reached a human, who informed us that there'd be a $10/ticket fee (for using the phone), which prompted us to ask where we could just go buy tickets in person, and that turned out to be "nowhere in town". And, of course, they couldn't guarantee delivery without another $7/ticket. And only at this point did we realize that the venue is a stadium, not a smaller place like the last show, and I was pretty dubious about actually being able to see from the seats that were available. I really expected better from a base price of nearly $100/ticket.

So the heck with that. Maybe we'll buy a $20 DVD instead.

Dear Pittsburgh CLO: I gave you my phone number so you could contact me if there were problems with my theatre tickets. You lost points by calling to ask for a charitable donation, and you lost lots of points when your agent argued with my labelling of the call as a solicitation. His claim: you're not selling anything but asking for a donation, so that's not a solicitation. I recommend you buy him a dictionary. Unfortunately, you'll be doing it with your own money, not mine.

I'm used to size variation in women's clothing. (Why oh why can't women's jeans use waist and inseam like men's?) And I'm used to minor variations in shoes in US sizes (I seem to wear a size 7.75, which doesn't exist). I had not realized that there is significant variation in sizes on the (tighter) European scale. The size-38 Naot sandals I just tried are nearly half an inch shorter than the size-38 Birkies that fit (and that I bought). They're both the same style, your basic two-strap slip-in sandal.

Dani's company watched searching for evil recently. It's an overview of Internet security issues -- probably nothing new, but he spoke well of it so I want to bookmark it for when I've got a spare hour.

IANA considerations for TLAs was making the rounds at my company this week.

Via goldsquare comes this bizarre story: a man lost parental rights to his younger child, appealed, and was then killed in a car accident. Now state child-welfare agents want to support the appeal, so the child can share in his estate. The court says this is uncharted territory.

Specialized seasonal question: can anyone tell me, in the next 8 hours, if I use high-holy-day melodies in Hallel for Rosh Chodesh tomorrow morning? It's the last day of Av, not the first day of Elul (so we don't blow shofar yet).

( funny image and video behind the cut )

Dealing with Verizon has gotten less excruciating since I acquired the direct-dial number of someone in tier-3 tech support who seems to have a clue. We are definitely into the second-order problems now.

Muhammad (who I spoke with last week) did not approve of our modem, so he sent us a new combined modem/router (including wireless). It came today; if any paper it shipped with had included the modem's user name and password, I might not have needed to call for help in setting it up. The internet side of this is fine.

So far we have been unable to get the wireless to work with either Mac in the house (the only wireless devices we have). With WEP turned on, the password is simply not accepted. If we turn WEP off and go to MAC authentication instead, neither machine can see the network. If we turn off all security everything works fine, but we're not interested in doing that.

Right now our solution is to leave the wireless turned off unless we actively need it, but that's a short-term solution. To his credit, Muhammad said he would research this and call me back tomorrow. (I think he will; he also called earlier today to confirm the modem had arrived.) Muhammad isn't a Mac user (he called back to say "what OS?" and when I said "10.4" he asked if that was sufficient ID), so we'll see what happens. So far what Google is telling me is that other people with iBooks have had this problem.

Wireless is new to me (I've used other people's networks but never administered one). I thought it pretty much just worked out of the box these days, but I guess not.

( finally connected )

A while ago I asked about opticians. Thanks for the pointers. On the basis of the feedback I got from a coworker, this morning I took my prescription over to Optometric Associates of Pittsburgh, who seem to have the right amounts of customer care and attention to detail (and proximity doesn't hurt). So far, thumbs-up. (Of course, the real evaluation won't be possible until the glasses come in.)

The optician I met with, Jan, asked me what I was looking for in frames; I said my priorities were lens size/shape, fit, and "not garish", and all other properties were solidly second-tier. I said I wanted lenses no smaller than my current ones because these are my do-everything glasses (not into separate reading/computer glasses), and asked her to turn those comments into recommendations.

I was pleased that for every frame she pulled, she started by having me put it on so she could check the fit of the bridge and withdraw any that weren't right. (I have a small bridge, apparently.) Of the four frames she handed me three were good candidates, and my explanation of why the one wasn't led to some of the other options.

She had been doing this much just by looking. At this point she measured the lenses on my current glasses and the top candidate; the new ones are exactly one millimeter bigger in each of length and width. Score; the current ones turned out to be 1mm smaller than specified. :-) (We had been talking about the size-weight tradeoff; too small and I wouldn't be able to see, but I was mindful of being too heavy, too.) The shape of the new ones is pretty similar to that of my current ones.

I told her that bifocal placement was very important to me (had problems with that in the past), and that one of my current lenses is good and the other is a smidge high. She said the difference was obvious, though the folks who made the glasses had claimed it didn't exist; it turned out to be a difference of half a millimeter. She measured the distance between my pupils with a machine rather than a ruler, explaining that it was more precise. (Having now read a bit about it, I'm glad to see that it "reads" my eyes rather than depending heavily on my maintaining focus in one area. One of my eyes wanders and is hard to keep on target sometimes.)

She was very friendly and accommodating when I explained past problems I've had and would like to avoid. She explained the quality-control process ("you won't even see the glasses until I've confirmed all these measurements are exact"). Even if that's just part of the patter, I left feeling confident. Now I just have to wait a few weeks.

( stats )

On Sunday I helped a friend paint her house. (Well, priming, actually -- painting commenced today.) Painting isn't hard; why is my body complaining about it? It's as if some key joints woke up and said "hey, we're in our 40s -- the warranty has to have expired by now!". Sheesh.

I've had a loaner cat for a few days, while a friend was out of town dealing with family stuff. The visitor is a very easy-going cat; two of my cats need to learn to chill. :-) But, he's gone home now and all is well. (When I wasn't home I kept him in one room lest there be trouble otherwise, and this had the effect of turning him into something of a puppy-dog when I let him out. Very friendly cat...)

Someone named Darter, who does a lot of photography in the SCA, posted his Pennsic pictures recently. Hey, I recognize that singer. (Seriously, I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see a reasonable picture of myself, because I can't do decent posed pics no matter how important it is, and I'm rarely the subject of candids.)

Speaking of Pennsic, I had to call a number of trailer-repair places before I found someone who would talk to me about the damaged axle on the Pennsic house. About a week and a half ago I talked to someone who promised to go take a look soon. I sure hope he got up there this weekend. (How did I find repair places? After several false starts trying the referral path, I started working my way through the listings here.)

Thursday I got a phone call from the "retention manager" at the Trib, who assured me that they are trying to solve my delivery problem. In the last few days I haven't missed a paper, which is good; I do wonder how long it will last. We've done this before. Well, she asked me to call her Tuesday with an update, so I can ask her about the long-term fix then. This is, by the way, the first time someone has called who has left a return number, so that's progress.

I still enjoy reading a paper newspaper -- not for the national news, which I can get more efficiently online, but for local news and features, and for the tactile experience of reading it with a cat snuggled on my lap.

Pittsburgh has two newspapers, the right-wing one and the left-wing one. Both of them are oftentimes offensive to me with their editorial slant, but I find that the right-wing one is more moderate in its wing-ness and is generally less annoying to me. And, face it, I'm not going to find a paper in wide circulation whose editors I'll usually agee with. So, all things considered, I like getting the Trib, and I've been getting it ever since the now-defunct Press went on strike in 1993.

I understand that delivery can be challenging. The pay's probably crap, which makes it hard to keep good people, and someone has to get the paper to my house every morning anyway. I take this into account when tipping my carrier. For the last couple of years I have had excellent service.

Then, at the end of June, the Trib outsourced its delivery service -- to, it turns out, the Post-Gazette. My delivery service has degenerated badly; I would estimate that in the nearly two months since then, I have missed almost as many papers as I've received. Every time the routine is nearly the same: I call to complain, they (optionally) promise me a replacement paper, said paper (if promised) does not arrive, they promise that a circulation manager will call, and it doesn't happen in a timely manner. I have received two calls -- after stretches where papers were missed nearly every day, there'd be a good stretch for several days and then someone would call to ask if things were ok now. Both times I've said "so far"; the second time I said "but it didn't continue last time". I have yet to receive a call for the current run. The folks who answer the phones are not authorized to put me in direct touch with someone higher up, of course (or so the script says).

I'm fed up. The whole point of getting a daily paper is to have it show up without me having to do anything. I am not going to go to the trouble of seeking out a paper to buy every day, or on the days when the paper doesn't show up. If I can't shake a manager-type person loose, I will probably just cancel.

Is anyone else in Pittsburgh having delivery problems -- with either paper, since it's apparently the same people now? It might seem in the PG's interests to slightly degrade the outsourced service compared to their own, but I assume they're smart enough not to try that (it would get them a short-term win and a long-term loss). I'm curious how widespread the problem is, and if anyone else has been able to solve it.

My house isn't hard to find, and it has a nice wide porch and an uncluttered lawn -- a big target area, in other words.

(If I do cancel: can someone point me to a customizable web-based comics aggregator? Ideally I want to go to one page that displays today's strips from a list I specify. Following forward/back links for my subscription list would be acceptable. Having to find each strip in a menu/list is not. I don't want to syndicate to my LJ subscription list; I want them all in one place in a batch.)

Why, oh why, is tulip season so short? It feels like they just showed up not long ago, and now they're fading. Oh well... on to something else, I guess! (I think the lilac bush is next to bloom, but I'm not sure.)

This weekend Dani and I joined some friends for a last-minute gaming get-together. We played La Cita (my third time, I think), which split interestingly: the winner had 35 points (would have been 40 if he hadn't starved his people in the last round), another player and I had 32 and 33, and the other two were in the high teens. It didn't look like that in play. (I thought I was doing worse and those last two better.) Then we played Rum and Pirates and all clumped within a few points of each other (something like 62-70). I like both of these games and will happily play more.

A few weeks ago I ordered a used DVD set via Amazon Marketplace. (I decided to see what all the Heroes fuss is about.) I chose a seller who had only a handful of ratings, all positive, figuring that someone like that is motivated to give good service. (Also, I noticed that the DVD would ship from PA.) A few weeks passed with no DVDs, so I sent email a couple days ago. This morning the seller wrote back with profuse apologies; he (she?) had accidentally sent my order to someone else who'd ordered on the same day, but now had the set back in hand -- "so I'll drive it over this afternoon". It turns out the seller is in the greater-Pittsburgh area. As promised, the DVDs were waiting for me when I got home from work, so everything worked out just fine. (I never order anything from third-party sellers that I actually need in a hurry.)

Speaking of TV, the BBC might bring back Blake's 7 (link from caryabend). Woo hoo! I trust that this will eventually find its way to DVD and, thence, my TV. Since it's been more than a quarter-century, I do wonder what they'll do for casting. Of course, they could well do a "25 years later..." story, even though the final season left things on a cliffhanger.

(Anonymous) quote of the day, after interviewing a job candidate: "He has a lot of learning to do, and I don't want to pay the tuition".

This sign in a shop made me laugh.

Reusable printer paper looks like an interesting idea; I wonder if it can be developed economically. I'm surprised by the claims about what it costs to (1) manufacture and (2) recycle a piece of paper.

Quote of the day #2 brings some much-needed context to the flap over Obama's ex-minister. Excerpt (compiled by dglenn): "No one likes to hear someone, especially a preacher, criticize our good country. But Donna Potis [...] and so many others who decry presidential candidate Barack Obama for having attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church while he preached prophetically have very selective memories." The whole thing is worth a read; it's not long.

Somewhat relatedly, osewalrus pointed me to this post pointing out that all the candidates and the voters have a bigger religious-leader problem than this. Excerpt: "[I]f I wake up and find that I'm in an America where certain pastors and certain churches are openly denounced from the White House's presidential podium, I will suddenly get even more nervous about freedom of religion in America than I already am." Yes.

I found this speculative, alternate timeline of the last ten years by rjlippincott interesting.

Question for my Jewish (and Jewish-aware) readers: Thursday is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust rememberance day), so instead of my usual "daf bit" in the morning service, I'd like to do something on-theme. It has to be a teaching, something that would qualify as torah study, which rules out most of the readings that tend to show up in special services for the day. Any suggestions? I could probably find something in Lamentations, if that's not cliche, but I'm not really sure. And naturally, I do not wish to offend with a bad choice people who are old enough to remember.

Dear Giant Eagle,

You have made it abundantly clear that your parking lot is for use only by your customers while they are shopping in your store. Even though Kosher Mart is across the street from you, I try my best to honor that: if I am shopping at both stores, I will park on the street if I can do so within a block or so. It is true that when I've planned to buy a whole cart-load of stuff from you and just a couple packs of meat from across the street, I have used your lot anyway if there is no street parking. But I have at least tried to honor your policy, because I understand about slippery slopes.

I also acknowledge that you apparently have a problem with the theft of shopping carts. Your signs about this being theft are apparently not doing the job for you.

However, it was still a surprise to me today to find that you had -- with no posted notice -- installed some sort of electronic security system such that it was impossible for me to move the cart past your walkway and onto the public sidewalk. I was not thrilled to have to shuttle my groceries from your door to my car down the block in several trips. (Mind, at least I can, unlike some of your customers.) No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

Well, now I know: I should just park in your lot, at least until you install the sensors that will detect bags from Kosher Mart being carried through your airspace.

But to end on a positive note, I would like to commend you for being open today, unlike your larger store in Edgewood. I guess being in a Jewish neighborhood is good for something. :-)

I want to switch the prescriptions for my maintenance drugs to the community pharmacy that has been providing such good service with prescriptions for my cats. I have a mail-order option, but they're kind of a hassle to deal with and not that much cheaper (especially since prices went up this year). I'd rather patronize a local establishment -- which, by the way, will deliver to my door, so it's no less convenient.

First I called the pharmacy to give them my insurance information, and the owner took the call. Then I called my ophthamologist's office to ask them to call in the prescription, and my doctor took the call (and recognized my voice before I told her who was calling). Heh. I didn't expect that degree of personal involvement, but it's one of the reasons I like dealing with small businesses.

Wednesday night our DSL was out, not for the first time (we get little glitches, and occasionally outages of an hour or so). This one ran longer than usual, so around 10PM I called to report it. I got the same person I've always gotten when I call, no matter what time; it's the same person who sold me the service in the first place.

Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Our service has been out for a couple hours. I've done the usual debugging and power-cycling.

Him: It seems to be you. Happen much?

Me: We get this from time to time. Is it likely to be our 1999 modem?

Him: Yeah. I'll send you a new one, or you can come pick one up.

Me: I wouldn't have expected our service to come with a free modem. I was going to buy one.

Him: I'm happy to send it.

It came in today's mail, so as soon as we hit Radio Shack for some filters, we should be good to go. Kudos, Nidhog!

Dani and I have had a (family) cell-phone plan with Verizon for more than two years. This means we're elligible to upgrade phones, but we hadn't done anything about it because our plain old phones are mostly fine. Our biggest complaint has been battery life (if Verizon would just send us batteries we'd be happy), and a couple weeks ago we bought batteries.

Wednesday Dani's phone died. (Mine is fine so far, so we don't immediately suspect that the battery did damage.) We have no particular reason to change providers, so Thursday over lunch he went to a Verizon store downtown to look at phones and ask some questions (namely, is this a use-it-or-lose-it upgrade event for me too if he upgrades?). He came back from that with the information that there would be financial benefits to upgrading together, so last night we went to the Verizon store in Monroeville to do that. That's where the trouble started.

( Read more... )

Verizon is currently sending me small Amazon gift certificates in exchange for customer feedback, so I think I'll see what they have to say about this. I wonder if I'll still be welcome in the focus group next week. :-)

I understand that sometimes DSL service fails for hours on end. It can happen to anyone.

But. You should answer the damn phone when people call to report problems, or say that you're closed (though at 7:30PM that would be unreasonable for a local ISP). What you should not do is have your voice-mail system claim to be routing the call to a representative and then go our to the movies or something while the customer waits. (And, psst: doing this after offering someone a rep for "new sales" is especially braindead.)

Telerama used to have clues. I hope to learn in the morning, via my then-working connection, that they still do and that they've been somehow hacked. That's not how I'm betting, though.

It is, of course, not in the least Telerama's fault that access from work is severely curtailed (even if I bring in my own machine so I can't possibly expose corporate assets to the wilds of the net). This merely adds to the frustration. There's a free hotspot at Pita Pit near work, so I think I know where I'm getting lunch tomorrow. :-) (Suggestions for free hotspots near Squirrel Hill welcome, in case this goes on for a while. I already know about T-Mobile at $6/hour.)

Kudos to Franck's Avalon Community Pharmacy, recommended to me by my vet.

I have never actually been to this pharmacy. Truth be told, without consulting a map I couldn't tell you where Avalon is. (It's, um, a suburb, somewhere.) I have never met my pharmacist. However, even though they are not especially local, they deliver. One of my cats is on a maintenance drug that has to be compounded; I call them, they use the credit-card number I have on file with them, and two days later the drug fairies being a bag to my door.

The same cat was recently diagnosed with a new malaise. My vet told me that it's best if he gets half a tablet twice a day, but if that's too hard for me I can just give him one tablet once a day. (Breaking pills can be hard.) However, when the drug fairies did their thing, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had sliced all the tablets neatly in half for me. I asked my vet about it; she did not ask them to do that. They looked at the prescription and did something to help me out.

I currently get my own maintenance drugs through a mail-order program through my insurance. I'm guessing that a regular pharmacy won't be able to give me the discount the mail-order place gives (two months' co-pay gets three months' medicine), but I should ask. And while I don't often need other medicines, I know where I'll call when I do. These guys are great!

In the past I have recommended NeoVision to folks in Pittsburgh. Put that on hold for a while, ok?
( the adventure continues )

When I got that suspicious DVD, I sent email to the publisher (Anchor Bay Entertainment) asking about their packaging. They responded yesterday (by which time I'd resolved things with the seller), saying roughly "sounds like a bootleg; mind telling us where you got it?". I responded that it was an Amazon Marketplace seller who said he was unaware the disc was a bootleg, and that he'd given me a full refund and I'd destroyed the disc. They wrote back this morning, thanked me for my dilligence, and said they'd send me a new copy of the DVD. That was unexpected!

I'm not out any money at this point (just a little delayed gratification, and if that mattered I'd have tried to buy locally), so I'm certainly not entitled to anything. (Arguably the seller is; he's the one who got taken.) However, they seem to be offering me a freebie because I chased it down and took the disc out of circulation, not because I'm out any money, so I said sure. :-)

In a world filled with manufacturers who say things like "if you're dissatisfied with this 20-pound bag of flour, send the unused portion to us for a full refund", I really didn't expect a free DVD when the problem was completely beyond the publisher's control. Sure, it's probably good PR (I posted about it, right?), but it's still a lot more than I expected.

The DVD is in fact a bootleg. I sent email to the seller (via Amazon) pointing this out and asking for a refund (and return postage if he wanted the disc back). He wrote back last night (points for promptness) saying he didn't know it was a bootleg, thanks for bringing it to his attention, and he has no use for the disc given that. I received email from Amazon confirming the refund a few minutes later.

I don't know if the seller is being truthful about not knowing; it feels like it could be true, but that could of course be a standard "oops, got caught" response. It has the ring of truth to it. I responded and gave him a subset of how I knew it was a bootleg, saying that if he's buying DVDs from others to resell he might want to look out for stuff like this. (I did not mention all of the problems with the disc, in case he's in the fraud business but just not very good at it.)

I don't know whether I should now notify Amazon; were it obviously fraud I would of course do so, but this seller might just be naive. (Also, if he had asked for the disc back I would have notified them.) I'm also not sure what to do about feedback; I'm leaning toward 3 (neutral) and a terse description of what happened, good and bad (fast delivery, bootleg DVD, very prompt response, seller said he didn't know). I want to be fair to both future customers and the seller, and I don't have much information to bring to bear on the question.

I bought a used DVD through Amazon, and I'm a little suspicious that what I got was a bootleg. I'd like to do a little detective work before asking the seller about it, because I'm only suspicious and it could be completely legitimate and why stir up trouble unnecessarily? But my Google-fu is failing me. What I want to find is a photo of the DVD label for the published DVD. Anyone have any ideas?

I received an obnoxious phone call from an obnoxious institution today. I will now attempt to give them the public humiliation they deserve -- well, at least as public as a journal with under 200 readers can be. :-)

Their machine called my cell phone saying approximately thus: "Please do not hang up. This is not a solicitation. We have a Very Important Message for you. Call 800-967-2070 for your Very Important Message." (The message is not important enough to be available at all hours; they went on to give times to call.)

I didn't recognize the number and Sprint used to do this sort of crap for things related to my phone service, so I assumed Verizon might be similar. I called. ( Read more... )

Today's mail brought a package for me, which initially puzzled me because my only pending Amazon order came yesterday.

A while ago (year? year and a half?) I called Del Monte to complain about the pull-top lids on their individual fruit cups. I keep these at work as a convenient no-hassle snack, and for three out of the four in the current box, the rings had broken off before opening the lid. (I'd had this happen occasionally before, too.) I do not keep a can opener at work, so that was a hassle -- and a friend who works there told me that they often send out piles of coupons when people complain, so I reported the problem. They seemed apologetic and sent me something like a 50-cent coupon, which was underwhelming, but *shrug*.

Today they sent me a box of fruit cups, along with a letter explaining that they'd redone their packaging and a postage-paid survey card with which to report back on whether this worked better.

They kept my complaint on file for more than a year, and followed up with something that specifically addressed that complaint. I'm surprised.

We're having a bunch of people over on Saturday, so I placed an order from the hot-foods section of the kosher market. I picked it up tonight, and the amount of chicken (in sealed pans) seemed light. So I asked -- this is a dozen breasts? Yes. I was dubious about the weight, so even though it hadn't been in the plans, I picked up a bag of frozen buffalo drummies to supplement.

When I got home, I found there were seven breasts. I called them to ask about it, figuring they forgot to give me a pan. (There was other stuff in the order, not just this one pan, so it could have happened.) No, they said, they gave me all the breasts they had; they didn't have a dozen.

You know, when I picked up the order would have been a fine time to mention that oh, we ran out, so do you want something else to supplement? (Or even, do you want something else instead?) Failing that clue, responding correctly to my direct question would have been a good idea.

In this case I'll be fine because I was suspicious and got something else on my own, but people often place larger orders where they just hand you a box. If you don't dig through that box in the store, you might not even notice enough to be suspicious until it was too late. I will certainly inspect boxes I get from them while still in the store, in the future. And I'll open sealed pans when I'm suspicious, too.

For a few weeks now, we've been having intermittent electrical glitches at home. They take the form of really quick power flickers; we see lights dim but not go out, and the UPSs click and maybe beep once while switching to battery and immediately back to current. When it happens it often happens several times in an hour, but it also goes long stretches without happening. We wanted to call an electrician, but wondered how we would demonstrate the problem on demand.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, we got this sort of thing frequently for about three hours (sometimes at 5- or 10-second intervals). The UPSs were what woke us up (they beep when on battery power); while awake I noticed that our alarm clock would usually flicker in time with the beeps. (The alarm clock has battery backup, so there was no reset.) This was pretty annoying. I was awake enough to realize that unplugging the UPSs would do nothing at all (that being the point), but not awake enough to realize that UPSs have on/off switches (duh). It sounded like it was pretty windy outside at the time, so I figured something was jossling the line to the house. Eventually we both got up and went to work.

When I got home at the end of the day the power was out. Well, mostly out; I discovered that the lights in the living room worked (but not in the hall or kitchen), and that the oven still had power (but not the microwave). We had a problem like that a couple years ago and it turned out to be related to work Duquesne Light was doing, so I decided to call and report it.

Every single time (before then) that I've reported a power outage, it has appeared to be mere data collection. No one has ever followed up. So I called them, and then the power came fully back before Shabbat started (yay), and I figured that was that.

Boy was I suprised when a worker from Duquesne Light rang the bell. I told him what had happened; the automated phone system didn't give me a way to describe the partial outage, so he probably just got told "out" (and then when he showed up our lights were on). I asked if the behavior we'd been seeing could be a problem with the line in, or if he thought it was internal. He said "well, let's take a look", and within a minute he was standing in the basement taking the breaker box apart to poke inside. He tested the connections on each breaker and tightened one that was a little loose, while I said that I didn't expect the power company to fix my internal wiring but I was grateful for the examination. Apparently if they make a service call they're required to do some minimal safety inspection, so this really was part of his job. He then went outside to look around, and reported that there's a tree branch that might be bumping a wire in high-enough winds, and maybe that's our problem. So we'll prune that back and see if it helps. He was very helpful and friendly. I regret that I didn't get his name so I could send a "your employee done good" note.

This far exceeded my expectations of customer support from a utility company.

Monica

pleasant surprise from Netflix

good experience: Shadyside Honda

[Pittsburgh] kudos to my council rep

Cirque du Fail

random bits

Verizon, round N

DSL followup

ordered new glasses

short takes

[Pittsburgh] anyone else having problems with newspaper delivery?

random bits

when policies collide

personal service

good customer service

customer disservce, thy name ist Verizon

gee, thanks Telerama

good pharmacy

glasses again

Anchor Bay Entertainment: class act

bootleg DVD

piracy detection?

rude business practice

customer support

score -1 for Murray Ave Kosher

fun with electricity

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