Tag Archives: service

Losing My Cool

Posted by anachostic on October 10, 2026 No comments

Boy, do I have to unload on this one. Here’s the story in a nutshell, then I’ll detail the whole experience, then I’ll document all my grievances at the end. So yesterday afternoon, I noticed the house was getting warm. I went over to the thermostat and found the display was dead. That’s not a good thing. So I went to the breaker box, checked the HVAC breaker (good), went to the compressor and checked the shutoff (fine), went in the attic and checked the overflow pan (dry) and finally the shutoff for the air handler (fine). So what’s the problem?

I turned to Copilot and asked. The general answer – there’s something wrong with the 24v power supply somewhere. It suggested I check for a fuse that commonly blows inside the air handler. I found it and it appeared blown, tried to pull it out and it sort of broke apart, so I couldn’t completely confirm its failure. It’s a 3A fuse. I don’t have an exact replacement, but for troubleshooting purposes until I can get to the auto store and buy a 3A, I put in a 10A fuse (this is relevant later). No change. Copilot says to check voltage to the wires running to the thermostat. I detect no voltage. Copilot says it must be upstream, possibly a transformer.

I’m not messing with transformers and I don’t know exactly where I’d buy a replacement anyway, so I call the pros. I have a service company that I pay a monthly subscription to for HVAC and plumbing to do my work. MUCH more on them in part 3 if you stick around. I call and get a tech to come out. He’s a ways away and has to fight nasty Friday interstate traffic, so ETA is about 2 hrs. He arrives, I give him the the full details and let him go off to do his work. Two hours later, we don’t have a solution and I tell him to get the fuck out. More on that in part 2 if you stick around.

Saturday morning with a fresh head, I get breakfast, get a proper replacement fuse and after replacing said fuse, I notice a secondary safety shutoff near my drain line. I check it and it has standing water. I suction out the drain line and flush it with fresh water, then drain the safety shutoff. Suddenly, my thermostat works. A few minutes later, the compressor kicks on and the house begins cooling. Shortly after, my house is back to its set temperature. My problem is fixed. 10-15 minutes of work, not two hours. I call my contracted company and immediately cancel my subscription with them. It’s an AI system (that won’t admit to being AI), so they just make a note that someone will call me back.

Now in part 2, we learn what all happened in that two hours where nothing got resolved. The tech arrived at my house and I explained the symptoms – the primary one being the thermostat did not have a display. I explained what I did – swapped the fuse and tested for power. We went inside and checked the thermostat. He commented that he’d never seen one like that before. I should have taken that as a HUGE red flag – it’s a Honeywell, one of the biggest brands. Now that he’s seen the problem first-hand, I let him go work.

Before starting, he asks if I’ve seen "the book". I have, and I have a lot more to say about it in part 3. I tell him I’m a "member", so I get the discounted rate. Satisfied, he heads off. He comes back shortly after and says that his first recommendation is that since I had a blown fuse, I need to install a surge protector device. I explain that I already have a whole-house surge protector. He says, yes, but surges can come from the ground as well, the device I have only protects against surges from the power mains. Is he correct? Technically, yes. Is it the cause of the blown fuse? Very unlikely since nothing in my house, nor my unprotected pool system sustained damage. Whatever. It’s just a recommendation and I know I’m going to decline it. Off he goes again.

He comes back with more news. He takes me out to the compressor outside. He says the capacitor should be changed because the date on it is like 8 years old. He also says the relay should also be changed because of age. He explained that every time the compressor cycles, the relay switches and it arcs and burns and blah blah. Yeah, that’s exactly what a fucking relay does. These are more recommendations. Now also, he needs to show me that my system must have a leak, that it’s losing pressure. He demonstrates this by jumping the compressor so it kicks on, then shows me on his digital gauge how the pressure is dropping steadily.

This is where things started to get ugly. This is not an electrical problem. I’m getting a little pissed that he’s not investigating the reported problem. But, as he explained to me before he started, he’s going to do a full system evaluation and now he’s found multiple potential problems. I go back inside.

I jump back to my copilot chat and explain what’s going on. Copilot is telling me this is typical pressure tactics and importantly tells me, you cannot test pressure on a compressor in isolation, as he is doing. The pressure drop is completely expected without the full system running. So from here on out, I’m in total scam-protection mode. He has lost all credibility

He calls me back. Now he’s taken the fan off the top of the compressor and says he’s found the leak. He uses his leak detector tool and points it two different places where it flashes and beeps. One is in a corner joint and the other is in a puddle of water in the middle of the base. He tells me the puddle is Freon or maybe oil. I know it can’t be Freon because you can’t have liquid Freon in a puddle. I check the liquid with my finger and it is not oily, just watery. But he has me nearly convinced. I had been weed whacking around it recently and maybe I kicked a stone into it and nicked the line.

While I’m still expressing a lot of skepticism to him, he throws another issue out to bolster his argument. The fan motor. See how the housing is rusted? That means it’s been running overheated, so it’s going to fail. That needs to be replaced. This is a claim I can’t accept, but he’s trying to beat me down, I know it. So I’m devastated about the Freon leak, but then, I had a glimmer of hope. This leak is inside the chassis. I couldn’t have nicked it it must be a defect, and this unit is still 2 years under warranty. He verifies that the unit is under warranty, but still cautions me that it’s going to be a level 5 repair. And it’s 7PM on a Friday, it’s not getting done for a little while anyway. I’m not a happy camper.

I go back inside and relay it to copilot, who said that the leak detector is pretty good evidence of a leak. (Later, Gemini would tell me, based on how the tech was behaving, that those tools can be faked to give positive readings and to be very distrustful of what he was saying). So I’m thinking this through, a warranty replacement is going to take days to order and ship the part, I have to pay for labor and a full recharge, still looking at a grand or more, plus downtime.

Finally, he’s now up in the attic and he comes back with more news. My ducts are undersized. There is growth on the blower fan and elements. And the drain line is completely clogged (Holy shit, this is the actual diagnosis! But he didn’t know that). And I am literally at my breaking point. NONE of this is relevant (well, one piece was, but unknown to me at the time). We’re two hours into you evaluating my system and you don’t have any answers. You have a shitton of recommendations and a hypothesis that lightning came through the ground line and damaged my system. Then he flipped the switch – "you never should have changed that fuse to a 10A fuse".

When he tried to turn this around and even SUGGEST that I was at fault for this, I saw red. I cursed him up a storm. That somehow in the 3 hours since I changed a fuse to a higher rating it’s going to leave my system exposed to an event that hypothetically happened? And every time I tried confronting him, the response was always, "I didn’t say that." And if there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s people that say something knowing they have plausible deniability. It caps off every dis-trustworthy thing he had done up to that point.

I told him to pack it up, we’re done here. Leave everything alone and end the job. I’ll pay the service call fee and I’ll be cancelling my subscription tomorrow. Then he was confused. "What did I do wrong?" I don’t even want to get into all the things that I told him, because that’s basically part 3. So, he put everything back together, packed up, asked again for an explanation, which was given, and he left.

And guess what, the system turned on and started running. I was already two hours late for my usual dinner so I immediately left and I saw his truck pulled over just down the road. I couldn’t resist. I pulled up alongside and rolled down my window. "Guess what? It’s working now."

Since you know the rest of the story and the ending, this is now part 3. The Festivus Airing of Grievances. And as I told him, I don’t think it was his fault (I’ve kinda changed my mind on that. He’s a shitty tech.) The problem lies with his company. This HVAC company bought out my previous HVAC company, with whom I had a pleasant and trusted relationship. This new company has been out a total of 3 times and every time, it’s been a high-pressure pitch and bunch of exploratory nonsense. When I signed up for the subscription, I did it for two reasons, I could get the discounted price immediately, and on that first call, they did a lot more work than I initially wanted (more missed red flags). The other reason was that twice a year, they would come around and do maintenance and a routine check. I knew deep down it was just them inviting themselves in to look for problems they could fix, and sure enough, they always did. But each time, I was able to say, I decline. And then I did the work myself. I thought that was fair to have a professional come in and do the evaluation, then I could decide what was in or out of my skillset. This arrangement does NOT work when you can’t trust the professionals to be honest.

Now, "the book". When I was first presented with the book, it was mostly promoting their subscription plan and the savings I could get by joining it. But there’s more to it. Here’s the meat:

This is expectation setting. When the tech comes into your house and the first thing they show you before doing any work is the price sheet, it’s a change from "I’m here to fix your problem" to "I’m here to charge you money." Straight-forward, yes. Customer friendly, compassionate, partnership-inducing? Nah. Not to mention, when you come in to do a job and your first task is to educate the customer about the company, the benefits a subscription offers, and basically a massive sales pitch, before any work is started – before any trust is earned – that’s marketing first, quality second.

And psychologically, the layout is fucked. The first number you see is the biggest. That’s your immediate and first expectation. So when the actual number comes in lower, it’s a relief. It could’ve been SO much worse, right? No. This whole concept is FUCKING TERRIBLE. And it’s being sold as being transparent and up-front. Look, if you come in and fix the problem that I called about, I’ll pay you what you’ve earned. If you come in and find a bunch of problems I didn’t call about, no matter how valid, that’s predatory. If I go to the emergency room because my finger was cut off, the ER doc is not going to say, I’m going to send you down for an MRI to rule out lung tumors, which by the way costs $15k to treat. You treat the problem at hand, make the customer happy, and earn the trust to expand the scope. My tech could’ve solved the problem in 10 minutes and said, "ok, you’re working again. I’m going to see if there’s anything that could cause trouble later." In my relief, I’d be like, "Yeah, have at it." Instead, he found a dozen problems before even attempting to fix my stated problem.

If you look at the price sheet, it’s clear that this is a glossy, laminated booklet. Their whole image is very put together. They have full uniforms, fully wrapped vehicles, branding, trademarks (trademarks out the ass!), everything. And you know what, for a blue-collar line of work, that’s not encouraging. Maybe it is for people who don’t know any better, but not after you’ve been around a while. There’s a similar parallel I found in dentistry. I used to think bigger was better. I went to a chain dental place, not Aspen Dental, but similar. You know what these places are? Proving grounds for newbies. Fresh out of school, they don’t have any clients, so they have to work at a chain. Like hair stylists working in mall shops until they build up a clientele and can go independent. And that means, they are unexperienced. My tech didn’t recognize a Honeywell thermostat.

Finally, there’s something icky about a hands-on profession adopting hands-off technology. The previous company had people that you could talk to and would call you with status updates. This new one has text alerts, emailed invoices, and an AI call center. It’s highly impersonal.

That’s finally off my chest. Now to wait for Monday when they call me back.

Botching A Bank

Posted by anachostic on October 4, 2025 No comments

You’d think it would be pretty important to "do a bank" right, right? Well, I’m stuck in amateur hour right now and am attempting to get the fuck out of it by the end of the year. Quite some time ago, T-Mobile had a great idea. Why not offer banking services to our customers? We can offer extra incentives for them and blah blah blah. At the time, the huge draw was a 4% interest, so I jumped on board. And it was fine for a long time. Then the inevitable enshittification happened.

The first change was tinkering with the 4% interest. I blogged about it too, but in short, you had to make a number of transactions per month to get the higher rate. Then, although this should have been seamless, and it mostly was, they switched the bank behind the scenes. So, another bank took over the duties of actually managing the money while T-Mobile maintained a consistent front end. No change in routing or account numbers, no big deal. But that wasn’t the end.

Then, T-Mobile decided they would recreate the site for themselves instead of using whatever software was used as the font-end before. It would integrate into T-Life where it didn’t before. They had some positive changes, like getting rid of the transactions per month. No change in routing number, but uh, you have a new account number. And that’s just the beginning of it.

I got a new debit card in the mail. I don’t know how much weight this carries, but the card is flimsy as fuck. In hindsight, it’s fully representative of the whole change. And so I logged in to the new website, and now for some reason, my 2-factor authentication has become a 3-factor authentication. Every time I log in, I have to verify a code from a text, then verify another code sent to my email. As Ace Ventura would say, "Three factors is too much!"

Once in the website, things are, well, cheaper. The previous website was nothing fun to use, but this version was even more disappointing. But it was whatever. I didn’t care too much how it looked, as long as it worked. And until I had to pay my first bill, it suited my needs.

When I had to pay my first utility bill, which I do manually from the bank site, I logged in and found, what the fuck, all my payees were wiped out in the transition. So I had to look up all my bill information and started creating a new payee. And I found, what the fuck, you can’t use a PO Box as a payment address. WHAT? I assume it’s just some early limitation and because I need this bill paid now, I set up the payment in my other checking account at another bank. I figure I might as well set up my other utility bill there as well since it’s due this month.

The next month I don’t even really think about seeing if the address problem has been fixed and just pay my utilities from the other bank. But then, a couple of weeks later, I get an email from my mortgage company saying, "You need to contact us immediately." You know, scams are always ASAP, world-ending, gotta do it now type stuff, so just to prove to myself it was a scam, I logged in to my mortgage account and saw, what the fuck, my mortgage payment is a month late! Oh yeah, I guess that scheduled payment would have been wiped out along with all my payees… God damn it!

I get all caught up on my mortgage paying through their website and go back to T-Mobile Money to get this all straightened out. They STILL don’t take PO Boxes for payees. So I call them. And I was very calm and matter-of-fact about the problem. And when they confirmed that yes, that is how it works and there are no plans to change it, I was very calm and matter-of-fact that I would be migrating my account elsewhere. Yes sir, would you like to take a survey rating the service you received today? Nah.

Direct deposit is now changed at work. Final bill payments have cleared, now it’s time to move the money out. In a final example of "we haven’t done shit with this website", you can’t initiate a transfer from the T-Mobile Money website. The instructions are to use the other bank’s website to initiate the transfer FROM T-Mobile. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. So I go to my other checking account bank and try to link the accounts. For whatever reason, they say the routing number is invalid. Unbelievable. So I go to another of my banks and set up a linked account. They want me to verify the account by logging in. My credentials don’t work (maybe because of 3FA, who the fuck knows), so I have to do the old fashioned way of confirming trial deposits after 3 days.

So if all goes well, I’ll have most all my money moved by the middle of this month. I’ll confirm my direct deposit goes to the other checking account next month, make sure I pay all my bills from that other bank, then move the final balance out and close out T-Mobile in December. And then I’m back at MidFlorida.

It’s funny, I closed out MidFlorida years ago when I had a plan to move to Atlanta, When that plan fell through, T-Mobile Money became my primary – I had previously only used them for the 4% interest. I have a home equity loan with MidFlorida and they offered me $100 to open a checking account, so why not. Home again.

No One Wants To Play Nice Together

Posted by anachostic on July 7, 2021 No comments

Especially EBay.

I would say I have a love/hate relationship with EBay, but I neither hate them nor love them. They either annoy me or pleasantly surprise me on occasion. One of the more recent annoyances is their acrimonious split with PayPal. PayPal is a company that I am more fond of than EBay. I have some reservations about them, but overall, I think they do what they do pretty well. And EBay deciding to break from them was a step in the wrong direction.

So, EBay purchases are now handled internally by EBay. Whatever. It doesn’t matter to me whether EBay or PayPal charges my credit card. However, when it comes to selling, things get a bit worse. Previously, PayPal essentially served as "EBay Bank" and everything funding came and went through them, including selling receipts and selling costs and whatnot. Now, selling payouts need to go to an actual bank, which is not PayPal. And the payouts are held for a short duration before disbursement (which isn’t a big deal to me, but for some, I can imagine they’d be more annoyed).

To set the stage for the specific issues I’m having, let me describe the general problem with the seller workflow. You sell an item. You get the funds, but you don’t have access to the funds. The funds will go to your bank account at some point in the future, less EBay fees. You have to ship the item. You have to pay for shipping using other funds. Now, I list items with free shipping and include my expected shipping costs in the sale price (because Amazon has trained us that that is the most effective way), so maybe if I had the seller pay shipping, things would be different. I don’t know if the cost of shipping would be in the funds held for disbursement or would be available for use to pay for shipping, but anyway, this is what I’m facing right now.

Now, here’s the problem I’m having. I have a complicated financial configuration of accounts for the primary reason of security. If somehow one of my internet-facing accounts gets hacked, I want my liability to be minimized. To that end, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle only have access to one of my savings accounts, which keeps a low balance. And anything that I can’t use my credit card for, I use PayPal. if I can’t use PayPal, I also use that low-balance savings account. You see what I’m trying to accomplish here.

Back to EBay. I’ve sold some items. I need to pay for shipping. For whatever reason, EBay has been charging PayPal for shipping. My PayPal has a $0 balance, because the funds from my sales don’t go there anymore, they go to my bank account. So PayPal goes to my savings account to get the funds. This has been working out, but has had unintended consequences.

I got an email today saying I have exceeded the number of monthly transfers from my savings account. Apparently, you are limited to 6 transfers a month for online savings accounts. Excess transfers will result in a $10 fee. Well, that’s not going to do me any good to pay an extra $10 for $5 in shipping costs. The solution for this is to move money into my PayPal account so I can cover the shipping costs. But I would have to move a larger amount of money to float the future costs, otherwise, I’m not doing anything different than PayPal is already doing, and I’ll get excessive transfers.

So the bottom line is, EBay has thrown a wrench into my setup because they are not putting the funds into the same account as they are taking shipping costs from. And if I want to avoid that, I need to float the money in PayPal instead of an interest-bearing account.

As a stopgap, I shut down my active listing, so I don’t have any more sales until I figure out a solution. It might be as dumb as me not noticing a payment option when purchasing shipping after a sale. It may be resolved by a setting I changed in my seller account to use the same account for seller costs as for funds release (although that sounds odd, because EBay fees should be deducted before funds are released anyways). In either case, I won’t know until I make another sale and in the case neither of those do fix it, I don’t want to be stuck with a $0 balance in PayPal when it happens. So the plan is to wait until next month to relist the items and I can float some money into PayPal in advance just in case.

EBay just made it harder to make money.

Change Comes Quick

Posted by anachostic on August 10, 2020 No comments

It was only a few days ago I had read about a new Postmaster General and the "improvements" he was implementing to mail delivery. And for the first time ever, I see this message on a package I am expecting.

The clarify that image. I had earlier gotten emails saying my package was due to be delivered Aug 7. When it didn’t arrive, I checked the website and saw this message. Ok, I figured it would be delivered the next day, Saturday. Nope. Monday? Nope. The fucking package was only 2 hours away from me 5 days ago! What the hell is happening?

I want to say, I have never seen a message from USPS saying "Arriving Late". I also want to say that my experience with USPS has been rock solid for as long as I can remember. When you read news stories about new management and their plan to improve profitability by reducing service levels, and immediately you are impacted, what kind of impression are you supposed to get?

I’ve tried to keep politics out of my blog for a long time, but I feel this gripe would be fair to make under any administration. It would only seem biased because one party’s beliefs on the topic run counter to my own while the other party would agree. And so goes politics in the black and white era of America.

Many, many years ago I had the belief that the government should be run like a business. remember Ross Perot? That was the era. And I was in support of Perot for president for that very reason. Make the government run efficiently like a business. It was years later that I realized how wrong that perspective is. And I’m sure there are many people now who felt like I did back then. Although Perot didn’t get very far, we’re finally getting to test the idea of having a business-type government. And boy are we going to pay for it.

Here is the reason is a nutshell so you don’t have to read at length: Government is about helping people, business is about making money. Those goals are incompatible. A business will sacrifice anything, especially people, in its goal for profit. Is that wrong? No, it’s just its nature. No hard feelings, it’s just business, ya know?

And at this point, I was going to lay out a bunch of differences, but it also came down to a single reason, one that is overwhelmingly obvious in these times, from the top to the bottom. It’s all selfishness.

One More Reason To Hate People

Posted by anachostic on December 25, 2019 No comments

This is a problem I’ve been reading about with increased frequency. A person will buy some thing, then fill the box with something else and return it, getting a refund and keeping the original thing. In the cases I’ve been reading about, it’s hard drives. A person will buy an external hard drive, open the case, switch out the large hard drive with a small hard drive (working or even not working) and return it to the store.

What happens is the store looks inside the box (maybe), sees everything is there and puts it back on the shelf for someone else to buy it and discover they got a tiny hard drive instead of what they thought they were getting. That customer brings it back to the store and the cycle repeats.

This is very lucrative for some people, for people that lack morals, anyway. But this happened to me on a less lucrative item, although no less infuriating. I purchased an outdoor LED security light. It wasn’t super cheap, in the $30 range. I got it home and when I opened the box, inside was your typical two-light incandescent light mount, probably under $15.

Now, I am faced with a bunch of bullshit. First is the wasted time and travel to return and replace this item. Second is the thought that the store doesn’t really know that I wasn’t the one that made the switch and am trying to pull the scam off myself. Third is the thought that the store may not actually take any action on this and put it back on the floor to repeat the cycle. Clearly, something must be done here.

It’s easy to put the blame on the store, and I’m mostly in agreement. I can understand the customer service part of no-hassle returns and wanting to make the customer happy, but they still need to verify the item being returned is the same as what was purchased. And I think anything returned should be flagged with a label indicating it is not "new stock".

And while this sounds great, reality says there’s actually very little stopping thieves from doing whatever they want to do. How about the stories of people using self checkout to buy expensive things and ringing them up as bananas? How about the rule that "loss prevention" is actually not allowed to engage with a suspected shoplifter? Just keep on walking, they can’t stop you. They literally can’t stop you. And when shitty people learn this stuff, they just do it.

I had the thought that night that if I had used self-checkout, the mismatched product would probably have been caught because it would have a different weight. The register would have said something like incorrect item in bagging area. That’s great, but you know what really would have happened? The clerk would have just overridden the register and I’d be on my way with the wrong item anyway. Again, it comes back to the store, but they’re just doing whatever it takes to make the customer happy, because self-checkout problems are a sure-fire way to piss people off. If you’re making the customer do the work, you had better make it easy for them.

But let’s just make it clear, customer service is a poor term when the customer is not even a customer, but only a thief.

Micro-Macro McDonalds Views

Posted by anachostic on May 19, 2019 No comments

In an older post, in passing, I wrote about how I sometimes clean up a store where I enjoy shopping at, to make it nicer for me and for everyone else. Tonight, I saw it being done by other people.

I was slumming it at McDonalds. not saying McD’s a slum, but I was really dressed down, something I don’t really do when I go out, even for McDonalds. But tonight, maybe more than usual (I don’t know since I hardly ever eat there anymore), the place was really a disaster. I really shouldn’t be surprised. I bitched about their new kiosks years ago and knew that it wasn’t going to change anything service-wise.

So of course, the place is understaffed, just as it should be. One person at the counter who had to take orders, prep orders, deliver orders to tables, and also keep the whole dining area clean. Fucking yeah. What a load of crap. So it’s no surprise after the dinner rush that all the trash cans were full.

But on top of that, it seems that the customers are… worse? There was trash left on tables, food on tables, food and paper on the floor. It’s something I just can’t get over in any environment. How can someone come into a place, which is in a certain state of affairs and purposely leave it worse off than when you arrived? Doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant, store, house, park, or anything. Ok, I understand accidents, like you drop your drink at a convenience store. But even then, you should make an effort to clean it up until an employee tells you they will handle it.

And that’s kind of what happened tonight at McDonalds. While I was waiting for my food, a woman walked up to the counter carrying a stack of trays. One of the employees met her and seemed confused. The woman said, “I packed down all the garbage cans as best I could, but they’re going to need changing.” They employee replied, “We really appreciate that…” and seemed like he was going to say it was unnecessary, but the woman had to explain. “We come here all the time and blah blah”. I didn’t catch the rest, but I pretty much understood. This was a place they enjoyed being in and they didn’t want it to be a shithole. Yeah, I understand that.

When I did get my food and walked back to my table, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of someone sweeping the floor and knew without looking further it was that woman’s husband. The person working at the counter followed me out and confronted the man. “Sir, our store doesn’t allow customers to do any employee work.” The guy jokingly said, “I forgot my hat.” She replied, “I’ll get it, thank you.” The guy handed over the broom and the floor got a quick sweeping.

What a sad state of affairs, that businesses staff their stores so poorly that customers feel compelled to help out? And maybe I would feel some compassion for the business because taxes and competition and it’s so rough being a small business owner today, but this place is a fucking gold mine. There is rarely a time that I don’t see it busy, with drive-through lines out to the street. This place isn’t hurting at all.

But, back to this old couple, and people like them. It certainly does seem the world is in decline on many fronts. And when that does happen, what do you do? … I was going to say, do you let it go or do you fight? I quickly realized “fight” is not the right word, whereas, “help” is. That word choice suddenly made a lot of things uncomfortable for me. Because, as we know, there are a lot of people who see the world declining in different ways. What is their choice of words for their solution, “fight” or “help”?

That’s something I don’t want to dwell on.

What Has Brown Done To You?

Posted by anachostic on April 26, 2019 No comments

I mentioned in another post that I was expecting a package and got a solicitor instead. So, now on to the story of that package. I was at my computer at around 8:00 and an email came in saying, sorry we missed you. Your package requires a signature and you weren’t home. Bull. Shit. I’ve been here all night. I went to the front door and there was no post-it saying they had been there. There was no doorbell ring (and I know it works because, solicitor dude).

I’m buying a box of wire from Amazon. No shipping notification from either Amazon or UPS said the delivery would require a signature. Why would a box of speaker wire require an adult signature, anyway? I think someone ran late and decided to go home for the night. I’m sure their tracking software doesn’t have an option for “Don’t feel like it”, so the driver flagged it as needing signed and no one home. All done for the day!

Some part of me is annoyed by this, but another part of me isn’t. It’s not like I needed that wire tonight. But what if it was something I needed right away? And this driver, he’s lying. I’m not sure what sort of repercussions he could face if I should call him out on it. He’s human, he’s a lazy American, just like the rest of us, he wants to go home after probably a 12-hr day. And I can’t fault a person for not working hard at their job. I’m a lot of things, but not a hypocrite.

Here’s how that one progressed.

I went to UPS’s site and changed the delivery to go to my nearby UPS Store. I chose this for a couple of reasons. If they were correct about the delivery needing a signature, I didn’t want to miss out again. If they were lying about needing a signature, I wanted a person to confront about it. I submitted the change and stewed about the situation for the night.

I had plenty of time to stew. The missed delivery happened on Tuesday. I got no notifications and the tracking showed no movement for the rest of the week. The next Monday, I stopped by the UPS service center and asked if they could find my package. The manager there took my phone number and said he’d call me with an update. I told him, “I don’t care if it comes to the house, the UPS Store, or here. I’ll get it.” Oh, and I did ask about the signature required. He said that the package probably came back and was scanned incorrectly. So I guess, there is no commitment to deliver everything on the truck for the day. Huh.

I did get a call later from the UPS manager who said the package could not be found and I would need to call the corporate office and “open an investigation”. So I call their number and tell them I need to “open an investigation”. The operator said I’d be transferred to the right department. I ended up getting a voice menu of options that were way above my head, full of international shipper industry terms. I heard “lost” in one of the options and chose that. The person that answered, after hearing the full story, and probably expecting to be talking to a fellow UPS employee, said that Amazon has to initiate the claim, not me. Ugh, fine.

So by this time, I could have re-ordered the speaker wire 3 times over and gotten it delivered. An “investigation” doesn’t sound like it’s going to get me my package anytime soon, so I place a new order on Amazon for the same thing. Then I research my options for filing a claim for the old order. The option I was steered toward was contacting the shipper to file a claim. Great. No one wants to take responsibility here. Eventually I found Amazon’s general chat help link and got a resolution. They refunded my money. But I wasn’t all that happy, because UPS should be paying for this, not Amazon. I apologized that they were being hurt for this, and actually, it’s not them being hurt, it’s the small business seller on Amazon being hurt, because Amazon just won’t give them the money they refunded back to me. It’s a shitty resolution.

I’d already received the replacement and finished my project when, two weeks later, I get an email. My package is ready to pick up at the UPS Store. I jump back on Amazon’s help chat and ask if I should just refuse the delivery and have it sent back to them. The CSR says, the refund has already been issued, take the package as a gift from Amazon.

On one level, I get it. The amount of money already spent on the package to ship it, then again to return it would be a waste of time and money, resulting in a net loss. But that’s Amazon’s loss. Or is it? The seller still won’t see any money for the product lost. UPS is getting off the hook and if I returned it, would be making more money of their fuckup.

But really, we’re talking about a $10 purchase here. This is nothing to a large business. But multiply that by however many fuckups UPS can make, and it could be terrible for some smaller businesses along the way.

In the end, it didn’t matter. I got an email from Amazon saying, “give us our shit back or you’re going to be charged for it.”

It’s Not Always About The Benjamins

Posted by anachostic on April 22, 2019 No comments

The other day, I was at home and the doorbell rang. Yay, UPS has dropped off my package! But, no – That’s a story for another post. I opened up the door and a dude was outside. Yay, a solicitor! He introduces himself as being from Spectrum. I suppose I’m fortunate in that I don’t live in a place where the cable company has a monopoly. Instead it’s a duopoly, between Spectrum and Frontier (formerly known as Brighthouse and Verizon – how weird).

Dude says he’s in the area to talk about their services, and who provides me my cable, phone, and Internet? I reply that I just recently had Frontier drop my cable and phone and now I have 100MB Internet only. Dude wants to know how much (of course). It’s something like $75/month. Jackpot, I can hear his brain announcing.

So, Spectrum offers 100MB Internet for something like $50/mo. Or you can get 400MB for about $75/mo. He’s got his clipboard out and ready to sign me up. But I just said, no, I’m ok with what I have. He had a confused look on his face, which really pissed me off, because there’s no way it was an honest confused expression. It was a insulting, “are you stupid”, reaction. And in a similarly confused tone, he asked, “But… it’s faster… for less money.”

I tried to explain my reasoning, but I don’t think it came out well. I said that it would be a hassle, ending one service, scheduling a new install, then if it didn’t work out, cancelling the new one and setting up the old one again. He tried to defend his company by saying they didn’t have any contracts, so you could leave at any time for any reason. I just replied that if anything went south in my current setup, I had his card and I would definitely call.

After I closed the door, I realized what I really wanted to say. Yes, his offering was cheaper, and I am personally biased against internet over coax, vs internet over fiber, but the point that I really wanted to make was that Frontier/Verizon has been rock solid for me for over a decade and aside from one billing issue after the ownership switch, I have zero complaints. What dude wanted was for me to jump ship to a company I have no history with and no idea of their service or quality. The best I could hope for is going from great to great and saving some money. But, I could be going from great to nightmare and saving money as well. That’s not worth the risk to me. Besides that, there is also the installation fee. Then if it doesn’t work out, the installation fee to revert back to Frontier. Not worth the risk to me.

Ooo, You’re So Slow and Tasty

Posted by anachostic on April 10, 2018 No comments

Provocative title aside, this is just a post bitching about upscaling at eating places. You know, where the normal menu, which has existed forever, just isn’t good enough anymore, so the place has to try new, fancy shit and to hell with what we had before. I’ve said before that I’m a fan of the standards, the basics. When I go to a place to eat, I usually know what I’m getting, so all this new and better stuff doesn’t really appeal to me. Yeah, I suck. Deal with it.

I have read numerous times in articles about how McDonalds keeps trying to attract new customers by making new things. There’s plenty wrong with this. First off, as all American investor-driven companies, McDonalds is not allowed to just be. They must forever be growing. There is no satisfaction in being good. You have to be better, quarter after quarter. So, to that end, McD’s tries to grow their customer base by selling different things. The problem is, these different things are more complex. They take time. They fuck up all the efficiencies that made the McD’s of olden times great. You want a plain old quarter pounder? Well, it’s going to be a bit because the party in front of you ordered Flapacheetos and McDonkles and we have to specially prepare each of those.

The exact same thing has happened the last couple of times I’ve been to Dunkin Donuts. The party in front of me doesn’t want donuts or coffee. They want, “An everything bagel, toasted, with butter, and bacon and cheese. And then another one just like that, but a plain bagel. And what do you want? Ok, a croissant, no wait, another bagel. What kind? They’re all right there. What’s that one? Never mind, just make it plain. And what do you want on it? Bacon? No. No bacon. Cheese? Sausage? You like sausage. Yes, you do like it. Just sausage and cheese. And I’m going to have a coffee, with half and half and two sugars. And what do you want to drink? I don’t know if they have that…” And 15 fucking minutes later, because they can’t take my order until they finish the order before me (FUUUUUUCCCK!), I order my two donuts.

Dunkin Donuts used to be a donut shop. There used to be a time, and it wasn’t really all that long ago, you could get in and get out. Now it’s a goddamn café. It doesn’t need to be one. In fact, McDonalds also has what they call McCafe. That’s the trap. McDonalds also used to be fast food. There’s nothing fast about it anymore. The same articles that talk about McDonalds adding new menu items to attract new business also say the restaurant owners hate it because it slows down their service times, which just backs everything up and irritates the customers, like me.

I say fairly often that I have pity for people growing up today because they have no idea that fast food used to be good and tasty and now it’s just processed bullshit. And now the service has gone to shit right along with the food quality. You know, Chipotle had something pretty good going for a while, until that whole poisoning thing happened. That’s another company that is probably going to get desperate and start introducing new items. You’ll know it when a new menu item has to be built off the conveyer line. And that will be the next nail in the coffin because it will reduce the efficiency of their service. Let’s see if they survive long enough to kick themselves in the teeth.

The Worst Developer

Posted by anachostic on February 12, 2018 No comments

I think it’s a universal truth that no matter where you work, you hate the software that you have to use. And it’s even more true when that software is written internally, meaning not store-bought or otherwise 3rd party. As someone who writes this type of software that everyone hates, I can understand the frustrations. But this story is about the software that I didn’t write, but was written by and for the company I was working for.

The particular software was primarily written by one person, who had been with the company since the start, which was decades. I was supposed to create the software that would replace it, but the company went under before that came to fruition. However, I did have enough of an opportunity to shed a ray of hope that better things were coming, at least software-wise.

The purpose of this maligned software was order entry and contact management. It was used by the sales force to create quotes, sales, credit memos, and also to track membership for the company’s special program. For as long as I could discern, there was friction between the sales team and management. Aside from mutual distrust, there was also resentment in that the company wanted to micromanage how things were done on the floor.

The company came up with a very precise, very specific way of selling from which no one was to deviate. And the software was written entirely to enforce that specific methodology. The people on the sales floor obviously didn’t subscribe to this methodology and simply felt that they were being treated as human robots, without any free will to conduct the sales transaction in the way they felt comfortable doing. The software developer constantly complained that the users were not using the software correctly and were always figuring out loopholes, which became bugs.

I have a lasting impression from my first few days working there when I was in training for that software. That impression was validated by another user near the end of my time at the company. After sitting through the training session, I felt like a complete idiot. I didn’t understand anything. Nothing made sense. And it was all because the software was written so terribly. And that feeling made me question my capabilities for working at that company. I tried to reassure myself that it was just because I was unfamiliar with the industry, but the user that confirmed my feelings was an industry pro and couldn’t understand the software either.

There were many issues that I took with the software. The first was the ridiculous color scheme and color choices throughout. It screamed “amateur”, and when I’ve been formally trained to write professional business software, this was not acceptable. Required fields were highlighted – in yellow. And not pastel yellow, the eye-bleeding danger yellow.

Taking that issue further, there were many dialogs that used “folksy” language. There was no “Cancel” button. Instead, you had a “Forget It” button. Unless it was a “Never Mind” button (which has a keyboard shortcut of Alt-V, because Alt-N to suggest “No” would be too much for a user to understand).

You had an option to “Undo Previous Whoops” on a dialog that asked specifically, “What Do You Want To Do?”

Here’s some messages the application could pop up:

Programmer Goof – Trying to use Add code for something else!
This Credit Memo will result in a net credit to the member of $x.xx. Is this what you intended?
Does Member desire a refund check from Corporate?
Is this Credit Memo being created to "Undo" this Sales Order as though it never existed?
Whoops — too many windows are open. Close some windows and try again.
You have tried to pick up more than was ordered. Please RTFS and re-enter valid amount in correct box. (The application’s name started with “F”, which was a convenient out if he was ever accused of telling the user to “read the fucking screen”.)

I mentioned that the software was written to enforce the sales procedure as defined by the company. This actually caused a big headache at one point because they changed policy one time which required a lot of code changes to support it. But anyway, when you would start a new sale or quote, you would be prompted with question after question about how the sales was to take place. These questions were supposed to be asked to the customer, which would prep the sales form with certain data. As you would suspect, the questions were all worded folksy and unprofessionally, and most were pointless, only nagging at the sales person to upsell this or that and don’t forget to ask about this. Some examples:

Don’t forget SUNDRIES!!!
We’re Pushin’ Cushion!!!
How ya gonna Cut it, Glue it and Dress it Up???
Whatcha gonna put it on? How you gonna seal it?
What’s gonna keep it down?
How you gonna keep it quiet?
How you gonna cut it, glue it and finish it off?
What’s gonna keep it from slidin’ around?

Because the entire process was so drawn out and pointless, the sales staff started memorizing the keystrokes that would let them fly through the popups and just get to a blank sales form. The developer, when he learned of this practice, was furious. They were skipping over all the hard work he put in to make them do their job correctly – the only way to do it correctly. So he took action. To keep them from skipping through the screens, he randomized the buttons on the popups.

Yes, it may sound absolutely incredible, but this developer literally made the application more difficult to use on purpose by changing the interface to require the user to read the screen. What was lost on him was that the user wasn’t reading the questions on the screen, they were only reading the buttons to find out what they had to click next. And if they misread anything, they got a sales form that wasn’t what they needed and had to start over.

And this developer was very proud of his work. He had defeated the users. And that really was his only goal. Not to make things better; only to win. And when he wins, everyone else loses.

Anachostic