Roy J. Tellason's Comments on Clueless BigCorps

In business? Then you should really go read this short book. And I'd be very much interested in hearing from any business that has a clue.

Apparently a great many large corporations don't, and show no signs of moving toward getting one any time soon.

One phrase that sticks in my mind from reading that book: "A market is a conversation." As opposed to what way too many big corporations act like, a person with a megaphone who is standing on a box and shouting at the top of their lungs. How many times have you gotten an email from some company where the "sender" had the left half of the address configured to be "noreply"?

They're saying, "Hear us, but we don't care to hear from you"!

How many corporate web pages have you seen that either have no "contact us" available or if they do have one it's next to useless? That's saying the same thing.

One BigCorp that obviously doesn't have much of a clue is Verizon. Yeah, that same outfit that I'm currently using for connectivity and the one that's hosting this web page. What are some of the indications? Let's see:

• In spite of the fact that the internet is implementing some of the most standardized software protocols on the planet (if they weren't they wouldn't interoperate so well), they only "support" mac and windoze machines. I run nothing but linux here, and was stonewalled in my attempts to get simple technical questions answered until I lucked out one time and got a guy who also happened to run linux. Too bad I'll never likely get a hold of him again.

• They seem to want to insist on dealing with things by way of "call tech support". Which I can understand, I guess, in some fashion -- after all, they are the phone company. But for me email is so much more efficient. Every single time I call there it's a long, drawn-out, time-consuming process that's almost always an exercise in frustration more than anything else. But that's how they're maximizing their resources in terms of the people they employ -- never mind my time, they obviously don't give a shit about that issue, and from their point of view it's worth nothing. Really shows how much they respect their customers all right...

• Then when you do call in, their stupid automated system insists that you talk to it. Well, guess what folks, I DON'T TALK TO MACHINES!. More time wasted trying to get past that, each and every single time I call in.

• There is no simple and easy way to get into direct contact with anyone there. I'd thought Yahoo! was bad? When you try their contact us link you get dumped on to a screen which allows you to enter a whopping seventy whole characters altogether. No more. And attempts to use this with things like "Please provide an email address for billing issues or Please provide an email address for tech support issues have gone completely ignored to date. But wait, it gets better...

• One of the things that I noticed in their advertising before I signed on with them was that you had a choice of either m$n or Yahoo! as an ISP. Or something to that effect. Now running mostly linux here I have absolutely no inclination to have anything whatsoever to do with linux-hostile m$, so that rules them out. And there are times when trying to deal with Yahoo! has also been an exercise in frustration, as in trying to ever get a hold of a person there ever. But overall they're not as bad as they might be. But in trying to access that facility from the Verizon side of things I ran into a stone wall, that shows up like this, which aside from their obligatory display of their stupid logo, consists entirely of content that says "To view this site properly you will need the Macromedia Flash Player Version 6" followed by a link where I'm presumably suppoed to get it. That's it. No help, no other links, no other way to get to the Yahoo! verizon stuff, just a stupid insistence that I need to have flash installed and that's that. Idiots. It apparently never occurs to them that maybe I don't want flash installed on my machine. Nor that it might make some kind of business sense for them to provide some alternate path to get there. No, that would require some thinking on their part. Not to mention how this insistence impacts those who are visually-impaired and are accessing the web using a text-only browser and a screen reader, something that I'm sure that their marketing department has somehow never considered and their legal department has somehow missed. But wait, it gets better yet...

• See, I tried that "contact us" option to ask them how I might access that "yahoo portal" (their term) without flash on my machine. Which was apparently a big mistake. Because what I got for a response was a rather long and indecipherable email that contained for most of its bulk a lot of HTML code. Now, I don't have anything against HTML in and of itself -- I'm using it to do my web pages with, after all. But I also feel that it has NO place in email. Contrary to m$, AOL, and bunches of other folks. I have nothing against, when appropriate, being able to attach things to email. But the primary function of it, from my point of view, is one simple function: Communication, between one person and another, or several others. And I don't see HTML as serving this end, not at all. So I wrote back to the "person" (if indeed it was a person and not some other aspect of an automated system, which I wouldn't put past them at all) saying that HTML email was unacceptable, and that they should re-send as plain text. And they sent again, same way, and I responded again, same way. And this happened a total of 14 TIMES! The last time around I'd finally decided that I was tired of playing this game and logged in to their system where I caught the last response before my POP connection picked it up and brought it to my system, and I moved it from my inbox to my "SpamDetector" folder. Maybe, if we're all real lucky, someone might just get a clue from this. But I'm not holding my breath. And in the meantime I still can't get to the verizon - yahoo portal which they tell me is included in the price of the service.

  And every single time I've tried to use that "contact us" form on their web site I get exactly the same response, a pile of mostly undecipherable HTML that seems to be referring me to various place on their web site where I'd already been and not found the answers to my questions.

• In addition to the above, it was a major PITA to find out simple things like "What's the IP address of this modem you've sent me so that I can try and talk to it?" That took about a half-dozen phone calls to resolve. And "Where do I find the server names so I can configure my POP client here?" (And NO, it's not outlook express!) And "What's the URL for my personal web space that comes with this account?" ALL of these issues are very simple questions, and all were much more difficult to resolve than they should have been. Why is that? The fact that they're prepared to for the most part deal with people who are technically clueless shouldn't prevent those of us who do have some understanding of tbis stuff from also functioning.

• I notice also in trying various things while logged on to their system that I get a stupid greeting. I feel the same way about this stupid greeting as I do about talking to machines. So in their configuration stuff I try to blank it out. Guess what? You can't. Why? If you try then it just puts the stupid greeting that it was using back in there. I tried replacing that with a single space character so I wouldn't have to see it, which also didn't work -- it was again put back to the stupid greeting again. I can at least at this point report that a single dash character works and is not too obtrusive on the page when it shows up where the stupid greeting used to be.

  What possible reason could there be for such a decision on their part?

So, might someone there actually get a clue? Only time will tell, I guess.

Hey Verizon? Can you hear me now?

And then there's yahoo...

Never mind that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to actually contact someone there. Eventually, if you're persistent, you can get a response from some "person" there. I put that word in quotes because sometimes I'm not sure if those are really people who are sending me those emails, or if it's some more clever (but not terribly clever) programming. One thing that's apparent is that they really really like form letters. Like this one:

Re: Fwd: (group name and subject line omitted by me) (KMM36568069V58095L0KM)

From: Yahoo! Mail 
To: "Roy J. Tellason" 
Date: 09/07/06 03:46 pm


Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.

Sending threatening or harassing emails using Yahoo! Mail is a violation
of our Terms of Service. We certainly take such reports seriously and do
suggest that you contact your local law enforcement agency if you feel 
as though your physical safety, or the safety of another person, may be 
in jeopardy. 

However, the message you forwarded to us is missing the full Internet 
headers. Without full headers, we will be unable to further investigate 
this matter. 
 
Email headers are used to deliver a message over the Internet and 
contain a record of the specific route that the message took. Full 
header information is included in every email that is sent, although 
email programs often display abbreviated headers. 

To learn how to display the full headers in a Yahoo! Mail account, 
please visit the Yahoo! Mail Help Desk at:

   http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/config/config-11.html

For non-Yahoo! Mail users, please refer to the URL below for information
on how to get the full headers for your particular email program: 

http://www.haltabuse.org/help/headers/index.shtml

By examining the full headers, we can verify if a message actually 
originated from the Yahoo! Mail system and take appropriate action.

Once you are able to get the full headers, please copy and paste it into
the message you send us. At this time, we will need you to send a copy 
of the full headers and message body, as opposed to sending it as an 
attachment. Due to security purposes, our custom messaging system is 
unable to access attachments.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Duke

Yahoo! Customer Care
http://www.yahoo.com/

25827414

Now there are a couple of problems with this...

First off, there are a few messages now and then that I forward to their mail-abuse email, and this was one of them. And then I delete them, immediately, since those have no place in the folder they ended up in, and I (should) have no further interest in them.

Secondly, the message should most times still be on their system, unless it's in one of their groups and the moderator of that group has also deleted it, though this doesn't happen too often or that quickly.

And I've responded to them before on exactly this point:

Please note that I have responded to yahoo on this particular point before.

Several times.

I quote from the most recent response here:

"> Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Mail.
">
"> Unfortunately, your message to us was missing the full Internet headers.
"> Without the full headers we will be unable to further investigate this
"> matter.
"
"I'm getting really tired of having to explain to you folks how to do your 
"job.  It's quite simple,  really -- LOOK IN THE YAHOO COPY OF THE 
"ABOVE-MENTIONED GROUP ON YOUR SYSTEM!
"
"It should be quite evident that this is where the information you seek is to
"be found.  And I've pointed this out to yahoo folks over and over again.
"
"If this form letter shows up in my inbox again,  the result in that case will
"be an invoice from me to yahoo for the sum of $50 for "staff training" --
"re-use of this form letter to me will consitute agreement to payment of that
"fee.

Since I have stipulated that a repeat use of this form letter would be billed 
as such,  please consider this email an invoice for "Staff Training" and 
remit to me the sum of $50.  You may either make that deposit to my paypal 
account or you may write back to me and tell me that you prefer another form 
of payment and I will notifiy you at that time where you can send it to me.

I'm still waiting to hear back from them on that one. :-)

Then there's the one they send me with the subject line telling me how they'd like to get my feedback for support case "such-and-such, groups" -- which consisted entirely of HTML, with no text part at all...

Hey Yahoo!? Get a clue!

Then we have Ingram Micro, TempForce, specifically this office and randstad...

Ingram has, like a lot of other companies, assorted items in their warehouse that are valuable. No surprise there. And some of these items are rather small, and easily concealable on one's person, if one were so inclined -- again, no surprise there, when we're talking about some hi-tech stuff. So they put a bit of emphasis on security.

I really didn't mind having to pass through metal detectors on my way in and out of the warehouse. Although them cranking up the sensitivity of the second one did get a bit irritating at times. I didn't mind being asked to remove my hat (a baseball cap), nor to carry my jacket (so they could pat it down), although at times that did get a mite irritating, particularly when I was headed for my half-hour lunch break.

What irritated me, more than anything else, was the fact that they put this security checkpoint stuff on the wrong side of the time clock! I mean, you go to work for somebody, they pay you, and you do what they want, right? The corollary of course is that once you've punched out, you're not on "their" time any more, you're on your time and they don't have a whole lot of say about it.

But not these folks! No, they put the security stuff after you'd punched out, and before you'd punched in (though of course coming in wasn't nearly as stringent as leaving was). Not a problem, mostly, though I did grumble about it. But then they varied their procedures depending on how their losses were stacking up. And when it got to where I was asked to remove my work boots, which had reacted to the metal detector each and every time I went through it, I was discinclined to do so, particularly since this was a cumbersome procedure, they weren't set up for it (no place to put my shoeless feet but that cold concrete floor), and I was only headed for my half-hour lunch break anyway and not planning to leave the building. Subsequent discussion with my TempForce supervisor resulted in a mutual agreement that we were "terminating my assignment there" at that point in time. Not a big deal, as this was a temp assignment and had about run its course anyway. Or so I thought.

Subsequent calls to TempForce looking for work always got me told that there wasn't any, a bit surprising for an office that had always seemed to be fairly busy. But I didn't think much about that. And then fairly recently, I talked to randstad, and was surprised to find when I went to do their "online computer application" that I was apparently already in their system. Apparently they and TempForce are "sister companies". Not a problem, I figured, until I was told that there was, because of "work history". Huh? I make it a point of pride to show up when I'm supposed to, never missed a day, didn't make it a habit to show up late, etc. So what was the problem? Well, I called TempForce and asked them -- and was told that this nonsense with security at Ingram, and my objecting to the way they did things, particularly my objecting to them wanting to do all this stuff on my time, was at the root of this. They called it "insubordination" of all things. Excuse me? I only subordinate when I'm getting paid to do so, and once I'm off the clock it's my time, not theirs.

Ingram? TempForce? Randstad? Please get a clue. You don't OWN your employees, and you don't have a right to their time when it isn't being paid for.

Uh-oh, apparently there are some newsgroups referring to me out there... Another "businessperson" who doesn't have a clue, and apparently thinks it's okay to just up and use someone's name without their knowledge or consent, over a period of several years. Perhaps one might give this careful consideration before ever doing business with one Chris Gunn t/a "Bizynet".

What is it with some web site designers? Why do they feel that it's perfectly okay to leave droppings on my computer? It'd be one thing if these went away when they were supposed to, but mostly they don't, even those that I've accepted "for the duration of the session", I end up having to go in there and clean up after them. I can understand that it's easier for some web site structures to keep track of where you are through the use of cookies. But when I attempt to load a page and before I see any content I get a request for a cookie? This makes no sense. And further, if I decline to accept the cookie, why keep trying? One site that I attempted to access earlier today tried twenty times to drop a cookie on my system before it gave up and finally displayed the content.

(And yes, I do have the option in my browser to check the little box that says I should use that choice (usually "Deny") for all cookies from a given site, but that costs too, it puts the site on a list that keeps on getting longer and longer, and I'd prefer to avoid extending it if at all possible.)

And those expiration dates? In the year 2038? Gimme a break! Nor is even ten years acceptable, you're lucky if you get ten minutes, for most sites. (You will get that and more if there's content that's of any interest -- that's a clue. :-)

Hey, webmasters? I don't need your site. Hey BigCorps? I don't need to do business with you -- I can always go deal with somebody else that won't hassle me. Get a clue, please?

Some years back I had made the acquaintance of a number of folks that worked at a local radio station (now gone, unfortunately). I spent some nontrivial time there, in on-air studios and also in production on occasion. That's when I found out about what one particular guy called his "hype voice". You've all heard commercials like that -- ones where a certain degree of stress is placed into the vocal track not too blatant when the announcer in question is professional about it. Unfortunately most of the ones that I hear on the air these days aren't that professional, so they just shout at you.

Thanks be for the mute button on the tv remote! Unfortunately none of my radios are so equipped, and I've gone from having a radio on pretty much all the time to hardly turning one on at all these days, largely in part because just about everything I can pick up any more is all working off the same "formula". They either get the specifics from it from some consultant who tells them that this is what they have to do to make money, or they're part of a big chain which all does things that way. So much for enjoying music much these days.

Hey radio stations? Can you respect the music enough to stop talking over the beginning of recordings? They start where they start, not where the vocals start, and if the artist didn't think that the instrumental part of the intro was all that important they would've left it out, y'know?

And hey businesses? If you're considering this sort of a radio ad, do you really think that, given a choice in the matter, I'm going to want to do business with anybody who continually is shouting at me? Not likely...

And do any of the lawyers out there really believe that the stuff mumbled in audio commercials or the screenful of text that's unreadable on even my 25 inch TV counts? Anybody know if such nonsense has actually held up in court?

May 12, 2009

Apparently there's a really stupid manager in place in the local mickey-D's these days...

I've eaten there occasionally, and so have assorted other family members.

And it's possible, I suppose, to figure out the occasional oops, when things don't go exactly as they should. Usually, in my experience at least, if there's a problem with a restaurant or other source of food, the folks that run such a place are all too willing to make it right, to the extent possible.

But not this time around.

A couple of family members recently purchased some chicken at the local McDonald's, a place that'd been demolished and a new restaurant built on the site that's not been open all that long. I don't know if that's involved new staff as well, or new management.

Unfortunately, those couple of family members got sick.

This sort of thing happens occasionally, even in the best of places, where a lot of food has been handled over the course of a day, the least bit of carelessness giving rise to a bit of bacterial growth. Usually in a case like that, the restaurant management is sorry about what happened, and indicates such by offering something to make up for what happened, and (one hopes!) staff is trained to avoid such stuff in the future.

But not this time.

I don't know what kind of idiot they have working there, but complaining phone calls have been met with a response that "It's not us, this must have been caused by something else" and similar nonsense.

This person is an idiot. Were we so inclined, the next step could be any of the local TV stations (who are always hot on "consumer issues", it seems), the state health department, an attorney, all sorts of ugly stuff like that.

The election at this time has been to pursue it a bit further up the corporate chain, and we'll see what happens.

May 12, 2009

Some "business" people sure seem to be into burning their bridges...

I don't know what they teach in business school. How folks that get into business and who try to play the game at the high levels of intensity that some folks seem to like to operate on set their priorities, etc.

I do know that some folks seem to choose to function in a way that fairly well screams that they could care less about those that they deal with. In some cases it's their cusomers, which is truly short-sighted, because those customers will find someone else to deal with, sooner or later.

And on the consumer side of things, how about all those companies that have decided that it's just too much trouble to have someone answering the phone the way companies used to do?

Used to be that companies would have a person, most often a "receptionist", who would handle both these duties and the greeting and other things relating to actually physically showing up there, another thing that's getting rarer than it used to be. That person would have a familiarity with the company's operations that would enable them, after not much phone conversation, to direct someone's phone call to whoever would best serve that customer or potential customer.

Not any more, unfortunately.

These days the function of such people has been replaced, typically by a voice-mail system. :-( I know of one local business, a garage run by two guys with several mechanics as employees, with a whopping four bays, that has such a system installed. Not that I can see where it ever did them any good...

The problem is, the designers of such systems all too often don't know how to do it properly. They don't understand how important it is to be able to handle callers properly, to direct calls to the proper person, or to someone that can handle the question or issue, and to generally make that person glad that they called that particular company. There's a lot of this sort of thinking going on when it comes to marketing and advertising, how to create that warm fuzzy feeling in people who are the targets of such efforts, but all too often this stuff doesn't carry over to what happens when you actually deal with the company in question.

All too often the caller is presented with a menu, and none of the options seem to apply to the situation. Or the caller finds themselves stuck in a sub-menu with no way out. Or dumped into somebody's voice-mail with no option not to leave one but to try for somebody else instead, wasting the call. Then there are those setups where there are all sorts of "tips" entered, things you can try, while you're waiting to talk to somebody. Too bad that in most cases none of them seem to apply to what I'm calling about. Worst out of the bunch seems to be those setups that expect you to talk to the machine on the other end, which more often than not seems to be too dumb to figure out what I'm trying to tell it. (See Verizon above, ferinstance. And all too often there's no apparent way to reach an actual human being in those setups.

Then there's the way some companies treat their suppliers, which is even worse. And while some may think of this in terms of suppliers of merchandise, this also goes for suppliers of services as well.

What makes this even more stupid is how easy it is to find out about these companies with the way the internet works these days. I have a file full of notes about a number of companies that I might consider dealing with, and what my experiences have been. I also have a whole lot of notes in there pertaining to other people's reactions to some of those companies, including things like bouncing checks, taking way too long to pay, making you jump through too many hoops, and all sorts of other similar nonsense. Now I know of a bunch of folks that I won't be working with anytime soon.

It's not just companies, either, it's also the people that run those companies. I can think of a number of instances where not just the company name (and other particulars) were under discussion, but also the individual or group of individuals who ran it were under discussion, most often when they'd closed up shop and tried to re-open with another company name, pulling the same BS on people. I guess they need to find out the hard way that this isn't really gonna work?