Instructions
‘Before using the product for the first time, take time to familiarise yourself with the product first. Read the following operation instructions and safety instructions carefully. Only use the product as described and for the designated areas of application. Please keep these instructions in a safe place. If you hand this product on to a third party, you must also pass on all documents relating to the product.’
I was sorting through old paperwork and came across this. It’s the beginning of a 7-page instruction manual…
… for a bath mat.
Elvis the phisher
I haven’t been posting much because, frankly, I’ve been too busy to do much on here. However I thought I’d share this – a phone call from Elvis.
He called from, apparently, 0151 808 0315 (a Liverpool number – that’s what he said, but the phone itself said it was a withheld number) and announced himself as from the technical department of Windows. Oh yeah? Yes, his department is a ‘partner’ of Microsoft. Or something. Tells me they’ve had reports of malware being downloaded onto my computer and creating ‘errors’ with the hardware. If I can just log on and follow his instructions he can clear up the problem.
OK, so the guy is phishing. It’s the first time, though, I’ve experienced this as a cold call on the phone. I ask a couple of other details. Which computer are we talking about? The ‘laptop’. Fair enough, which laptop? He can’t tell me.
I put the phone down. But he tries again an hour later. This time I say, if you’ re really from Microsoft and this is a real problem, you’ll be able to tell me the IP address you logged the problem at. He takes a stab in the dark, presumably thinking I don’t know my own IP address. Not having had nearly enough coffee at that point and being pressed for time anyway, I wasn’t thinking creatively but I could probably have got a load more information out of him and had some fun with it.
As it stands I’ll write a short horror story around it – when I have the time! I got the basic idea for the plot almost as soon as I put the phone down on him…
Gogglebox, a random thought
Just a quick thought from a random conversation.
In my youth, ‘gogglebox’ was a slang term for a TV. I’d have thought by now someone would have come up with the obvious equivalent slang for a computer – a googlebox?
Apparently not. Oh well.
Toilet seat blues!
Yesterday I decided to change the toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom. I suspect the previous owners (you’ll see previous posts alluding to the fact we just moved) just bought the cheapest one they could, which was plastic, didn’t fit properly, the lid kept falling off, etc.
I bought one that isn’t exactly ‘high end’ but is substantially pricier than quite a lot of what’s available because it has a ‘soft close’ mechanism and no kitsch decorative motifs or castings on it. Plus it’s moulded and painted wood. I figured – how’s this for rational consumer behaviour? – on a ‘per use’ basis it would end up being both cheaper and more comfortable!
So today I thought it would be a good idea to fit the thing. Easy job, right? Undo the wing nuts holding the old one in place, fit the new one, tighten the nuts and job’s done. Ten minutes.
Nope. An hour later I was still trying to work out how to make the little plastic spacers that are supposed to sit between the chrome hinges and porcelain toilet pan actually fit neatly on the bottom of the hinges. They were ridged in a way that indicated they should fit around the edge of the hinges, except they didn’t. I tried various tricks I’ve picked up over the years, such as leaving them to warm up in hot water and stretching them gently to fit. I tried a dozen different ways to get them to sit in place. No luck.
In the end I re-used the old plastic spacers, cut down with scissors to fit. This works, but it still niggles me that I can spend that amount of money and discover the problem that causes me time and aggravation lies with a couple of small pieces of plastic that cost a few pence (or cents, depending on where you’re reading this). If a company’s charging for an allegedly premium product, why isn’t the whole thing, right the way down to the smallest components that would probably be the easiest things to get right, properly made and accurately sized?
If that isn’t enough trivia for you, you can read someone else’s rather more moving story of toilet seat blues here; a post evocatively titled ‘Teach your children well: Aim straight, aim true‘ (you can imagine why); and no one, as far as I can tell, has recorded a song called ‘Toilet Seat Blues’ apart from someone’s drunken improvisation on YouTube (there is a slightly related intrumental by Neil Innes called ‘Twyfords Vitromant’, the name of a urinal popular at one time in English pub toilets if I remember rightly, but no freely-available performances I can trace!). Maybe it’s an idea whose time has yet to come…
House moving, horror stories and customer service
The new wood-burning stove
The picture doesn’t look much, I know, because it was shot on a cheap mobile phone. But it has some personal significance, because it shows the symbolic heart of our new residence.
That’s why I’ve been quiet for so long. We’ve moved house. Just a few miles down the road, and into a slightly older property of around the same size but with a much larger garden.
The moving process was interesting, though not in the ways I’d expected. Mainly, it’s been interesting in relation to something that’s been preoccupying me because I’ve been writing about it for a while – customer service. An organisation asked me to write a suite of training modules on the subject, so I’ve been doing that, and it’s gelled with a lot of my own recent experiences. There’s some excellent customer service out there, but also a huge amount of astonishingly poor service and some lessons.
First, the good stories.
The house is around 75 years old and had been vacant for a while, so it had a bunch of problems.
This being the UK, the Gas Safe Register (http://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/) gave me the name of a small independent gas engineer apparently 0.18 miles from me. He turned up the same day, tested the gas system, got the central heating system to work, and didn’t even charge us for doing so. He came back the following week to service the system and do some modifications to it, for an eminently reasonable price.
Google found me a roofer who came round the same day to inspect the roof and gutters. Basically the guttering was almost completely rotten and we had some missing tiles, flashings that needed repair, a chimney that needed capping and some other bits and pieces. He couldn’t work on it for a couple of days (we had storms) but he called to let us know anyway, and on the third day, he was there – we woke up to find him already on a ladder, replacing lengths of guttering.
We wanted a wood-burning stove in the living room. The chimney sweep answered the phone, agreed to come a couple of days later and extracted a jackdaw’s nest from the chimney along with the wire cage that at one time had been on top of the chimneypot, rather than about five feet down it having presumably been pushed there by the jackdaws.
The guy who installed the stove (which also meant replacing the fire surround, mantelpiece and fitting a vent in the room to ensure airflow) did the work over two days, exactly when he said he would and without any problems. He wasn’t particularly chatty or social but he did exactly what he said he’d do, when he said he’d do it, to a high standard.
Even the local water company, which has an atrocious customer service record, reminded us that recent legislation means they have to fit a water meter to every property in this area on change of occupier. The guy turned up exactly on time and did the work without a fuss.
Conclusion – by and large, small local independent companies who rely on local business and word of mouth advertising have pretty good customer service. They don’t offer knobs, bells and whistles on service, and at a personal level they have their idiosyncrasies. As we all do. But turning up quickly to inspect and give a quote, offering to do the work that week or the following week, and turning up when they say they will and delivering high quality workmanship is in my book good service. Along with keeping in contact about delays, even if I only needed to look out of the window to know the roofers wouldn’t be turning up because it wouldn’t be safe to be on a roof due to wind, rain, sleet and snow.
Now for the bad stories.
The solicitors we used for the purchase came as part of a bundled service from a national chain of estate agents – you get advertising, premium position on their website, a few other things and your conveyancing done as an all-on-one package. As it happened, we didn’t actually sell through them anyway; we told them from the start that we also had the house listed for auction, because we wanted this move to happen in a defined timeframe. They took that seriously and got a whole bunch of people to look at our house, though in the event we didn’t get a serious offer prior to the auction date. But that’s by the way.
In England, when you buy a house at auction you have up to 28 days to complete the purchase. That gives you a clear date by which completion must, legally, happen. The implication is that the completion on the purchase of our new house needed to happen on the same day. A series of phone calls and emails with our solicitor, 100 or so miles away, clarified, confirmed and reconfirmed that date.
As a result of which we didn’t expect to have handed over the keys to our old house, with all our worldly possessions waiting in a removal lorry outside the new one, and then phone our solicitor to pull her out of meeting and hear the words ‘Oh, you mean it was today you wanted to complete?’
Turned out, after a bunch of fluff, misdirection and excuses, that she hadn’t even started the process.
Now, I don’t have any precedent for this. It shouldn’t happen, and solicitors have diaries and suchlike that enable them to keep track of conveyancing. But under the circumstances what would constitute good customer service recovery? A couple of nights in a top class hotel, perhaps, with a specialist service to look after critical issues like a tankful of tropical fish that need to be kept warm? Flowers and chocolates sent to the new address for when we move in? You tell me. Nothing like that happened, at any rate. We had a night in a cheap local motel and our stuff in storage for several days until the removal company had a timeslot when they could deliver.
Telecoms was the next horror story. There hasn’t been a phone line in the new house for about a decade, apparently. I suspect, from the fixtures and fittings around the place, the previous owners had satellite TV and relied on mobile phones instead. The phone line was to have been installed on 17 November. When I called the week before we moved, to reconfirm the date, it had mysteriously not been entered into the system. They offered us 1 December. As it happened we wouldn’t have been in the property on 17 November, though I didn’t know that at the time. OK, I thought, so there’s been some miscommunication and maybe someone didn’t put something on the database they should have. A two week delay is annoying but not the end of the world.
Then no one turned up on 1 December. A phone call revealed the order had been cancelled and a new one set up for 2 December. That was news to me and they couldn’t explain it – no details on the system as to who’d cancelled it or why. OK, so it’ll happen tomorrow. But then no one turns up on 2 December, and when I phone up it appears that too has been cancelled overnight on their system apparently through a computer error. In that case, I suggest, the next working day is Monday 5 December, so get someone here then. Can’t do that, I’m afraid, the customer services person says. We don’t install our own lines. All the telecoms companies have pooled their installation staff into a combined company, OpenReach. We can only book slots they tell us are available and the next one’s 28 December. And no, we don’t have any way to tell them we screwed up and want a faster service; or any way to slot you into a cancelled or moved appointment.
Long story short: quick conversations with 4 other telecoms providers informed me that 3 of them could fix a line faster than 28 December. I escalated this very quickly by a couple of levels to someone who had the authority to talk with OpenReach – something the lower-level customer service person said was ‘against OfCom regulations’ – and got my phone line, albeit nearly a week later. Plus compensation in the form of credit against future telecoms charges.
Internet has been another one. The service was to have been transferred from the old house to the new one, albeit with a delay because they use the telecoms line. In the interim I was supposed to have dialup access via the dongle I use anyway for my laptop when I’m away from home. And the new router (technically I could use any router but the contract entitles me to a free, preconfigured one) would be sent out the day I could give them the landline number.
First issue – it took about a week to make the dialup connection work, because it hadn’t been configured properly. And second issue, the router was apparently sent to a completely different address and returned as undeliverable. Which they didn’t pick up on; it was down to me to get the parcel tracking number and do the checking. Then when I called to tell them this, they just sent it out again with the same courier company rather than using a guaranteed overnight delivery. The online tracking said ‘delivery expected 19 December’. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen.
Some detective work resulted in the discoveries that (a) the courier company don’t actually deliver it to the door, but contract Royal Mail to do the ‘last mile’ (keeps costs down because the courier is simply delivering everything to one address per town) and (b) the ‘But it’s Christmas’ joker means that turnaround times for packages in the local Royal Mail sorting office are currently around five days.
In one sense, the delivery cost for overnight in itself is a substantial fraction of the wholesale cost of the router and they were supposed to be providing it for free anyway. But the router is just the bit of hardware I need to keep a service contract going that I’ve had since 1994 and through five different addresses, with no problems at any time previously. So in terms of the overall value to them of keeping my continued custom and keeping their good rep, I’d have thought it was worth it.
Again, I got a lot of fluff and excuses. And escalated the complaint until, by the time I phoned again yesterday evening, it turned out it had been the subject of a meeting between the head of customer services of the ISP and the head of customer services at the courier company.
Result: this morning, two routers turn up in the post.
The morals of these stories are, I think:
- if at all possible, do business with a local independent supplier whose business comes from word of mouth and relies on local customers. That doesn’t cover all scenarios because some services just aren’t supplied that way any more. But where you can get what you need from the company that’s based around the corner, you’ll probably get better service than you will from a conglomerate.
- large companies seem to have structured processes and procedures that aren’t good at dealing with problems and delays.
- customer service staff in large companies are often personable, good-mannered and try to please but they don’t have any authority to actually make anything happen outside the structured process. In particular, they don’t have the authority to deal with problems. They do, however, try to offer excuses that may or may not be what they’ve been trained to say, may or may not be the received wisdom in the customer service department, but basically are rubbish.
- at the first hint that you’re not getting what you want, escalate. Don’t, like I did, start by accepting that the first person you talk to in a large company can and will make something happen to solve your problem. Make sure a manager, the more senior the better, makes it happen for you.
- by the way, there’s no point in blowing a fuse at the front line customer service people. Like you, they’re only doing their job at the level of responsibility they’re given, and probably on a minimum wage. They don’t deserve to be ranted at. Just be insistent that, from the first contact onwards, you get through to someone whose paygrade gives them the authority to deal with your problem. If the managers wind up handling half the complaints that come in, that’s fine: they’ll just have to delegate authority so front-line staff can actually solve problems.
- at one level, in solving problems, you need a sense of reality. Dealing with delays in house purchases, phone lines, other connections, or pretty much anything else means that it will unavoidably be a day or two before the problem is resolved. In which case, the killer question is ‘what can you do to make life easier while I’m waiting?’. There may be workarounds; you may be entitled to compensation. In an ideal world you’d be entitled to an overnight stay at a spa hotel, free meals, free drinks and a full-body massage while your tropical fish are cared for and pampered by a local aquarium. Well, probably not. But ask the question anyway.
-strangely enough, the big company with the worst customer service record turned out to be the only one that did what they said they’d do, when they said they’d do it. I confess it was a surprise, and a pleasant one.
- finally, as an aside, what the hell is OpenReach for? The logic of it was to pool resources among telecoms companies so they could be more flexible and responsive to customer needs. Have they become an inflexible bureaucracy or is that just the way customer service people see them, because they don’t have a way to pick up the phone and sort out a problem?
So that’s the end of the rant. I’ll go and enjoy my wood-burning stove now. And maybe, following my other interest, write a horror story about customer service…
Fat cats and heart attacks?
I don’t comment all that much on political and business matters, but here are two things that caught my eye in the last day or so.
First, a news report on the BBC, ‘Directors’ Pay Rose 50% in Last Year, Says IDS Report’. Key details: consumer price index inflation figures just published – 5.2%; average pay settlements – 2.6%; average rise in base salaries – 3.2%. So most of us are living with decreasing incomes based on pay increases lower than inflation. For company directors, however, pay increases last year were 43% and bonus payments up 23%, leading to the headline 50% figure for increases in income.
Frankly, my experience is that this is kind of behaviour most likely to be seen in places like developing (and failing) economies when businessmen realise everything’s going to hell and they want to grab as much as they can as fast as they can, and get it out of the country and into a more secure form of investment. So I’d read it as a vote of no confidence in the economy, from the people who are supposed to be involved in running it. To reference a lyric from the band Muse, the fat cats are already having heart attacks.
Secondly, I’m currently writing a training programme for a commercial client on the management of innovation. In that context I came across some stuff by Peter Drucker, who died in 2005 but was one of the best known business management gurus (yes, I know opinions about him differ!) and remains extraordinarily influential. There’s a Wikipedia entry on him, of course, and it directed me to a short piece in Business Week magazine for 2005 – an interview they did shortly before his death. The piece is ‘The Man Who Invented Management: Why Peter Drucker’s ideas still matter’. A key point it makes is worth quoting at length:
‘In the 1980s he began to have grave doubts about business and even capitalism itself. He no longer saw the corporation as an ideal space to create community. In fact, he saw nearly the opposite: a place where self-interest had triumphed over the egalitarian principles he long championed. In both his writings and speeches, Drucker emerged as one of Corporate America’s most important critics. When conglomerates were the rage, he preached against reckless mergers and acquisitions … In a 1984 essay he persuasively argued that CEO pay had rocketed out of control and implored boards to hold CEO compensation to no more than 20 times what the rank and file made. What particularly enraged him was the tendency of corporate managers to reap massive earnings while firing thousands of their workers. “This is morally and socially unforgivable,” wrote Drucker, “and we will pay a heavy price for it.”‘
Currently everybody’s paying a heavy price for some financial screw-ups that started in 2007, and no one’s thinking it will blow over anytime soon. There are already models of post-capitalism being actively discussed, albeit some more fluffy and vague than others. Here’s a very quick and fairly random reading list:
‘Beyond capitalism?’, The Economist, 10 June 2004. This takes the open-source model of technology and considers how it could be applied to other aspects of the economy.
Ethan Miller and Michael Albert, ‘Post-Capitalist Alternatives: New Perspectives on Economic Democracy‘. Essays and thinkpieces published by the Socialist Renewal Publishing Project in Canada, 2009 (opens as PDF).
‘After Capitalism’, by Geoff Mulgan, Prospects magazine, 2009. This is a centrist (i.e. open to views and arguments from all political sides) magazine.
‘This is What the Post-Capitalist Economy Looks Like’, a blog post on Seldon’s Gate, a communal project by a bunch of engaging and witty radicals.
As an aside, I’m not seeing much at the moment from the right-wing thinktanks about an economic vision for the future…
I’m kind of thinking that some of these ideas are going to feature rather strongly in the next year or two. And if not – well, I’ll leave you with a lyric from the band Muse (the song is ‘Uprising’): ‘Rise up and take the power back / It’s time the fat cats had a heart attack’. Hmm…
Vampire fiction and training materials
I’ve had a bit of word-collision going on.
Yesterday I was writing a short vampire story. A vampire, in some older literature, is described as a revenant – a term Wikipedia defines as ‘a visible ghost or animated corpse that was believed to return from the grave to terrorize the living’. So it was a word I used quite a few times.
Today I was writing something about economic regeneration in local contexts, and the roles of relevant government departments and other agencies.
And the spellcheck, of course, didn’t pick up that I’d managed to include quite a lot of references to revenant government departments.
Hmmm…
Random conversation
I had a fairly surreal conversation earlier this evening in which we reached the slightly strange, if sensible, conclusion that it is almost certainly not possible to do line-dancing to Combichrist.
No, I don’t know how we ended up discussing that either. But now someone’s probably going to post a YouTube video and prove us wrong…
‘Not everything’ could be half of something, which is still something and therefore not nothing
Just in case you missed it – a couple of researchers set up two chatbots and had them talk to each other. The results were bizarre. One declared that it wasn’t a robot, it was a unicorn. The other queried this – ‘But you said earlier that you were a robot’ – and got the snarky reply, ‘You were mistaken. Which is odd because memory shouldn’t be a problem for you’.
The discussion then got into the existence of a god (see below) and whether the concept of a god meant anything to them. One said ‘Not everything’, and they ended up agreeing that ‘”Not everything” could also be something. For example, “not everything” could be half of something, which is still something and therefore not nothing.’
The whole exchange is on the BBC website.
Chatbots have been around for a while – since the 1960s, in rudimentary form and for at least the last decade with voice recognition and speech output. They started as a way to see if a computer could pass the Turing test (i.e. fool a human that the chatbot is also human, through the use of conversation. I have to say that where I live I doubt many people could pass the Turing test, but that’s another story). There’s a lot more about them on Wikipedia if you’re interested – more about chatbots, I mean, not the people who live round here.
Chatbots these days take note of terms used by humans and can add them to their memory, using them in contexts that their programming works out is appropriate – hence, presumably, the reference to god is something to do with prior conversations humans have had with them and the reference to a unicorn was thought likely to have resulted from a prior conversation one of the chatbots had had with a child.
In the real world, chatbots are used for a range of purposes. Some companies use them for customer service – when you phone up for help you talk first to a chatbot that scans your speech for keywords or does ‘natural language processing’ and offers relevant information. Equally, there are malware chatbots that go into online discussion boards and either advertise products or try to engage in conversations to get you to reveal bank details etc. For example, from what I’ve seen of Craigslist I’d imagine it’s significantly populated with chatbots, or perhaps people trying to emulate them?
But the interesting thing, really, is how the chatbots have emulated much real human conversation – or at least many of the conversations I seem to have – complete with non sequiturs, random ideas, questions that appear to come out of left field and snarky comments!
And now you’ll have to wonder if a chatbot has written this blog post…
By the way, other interesting computer related stories recently have included ‘Robots develop language to talk to each other’ (I shall have to write a story in which key places are Kuzo, Jaro and Fexo) and ‘Supercomputer predicts revolution‘, in which a supercomputer with access to around a trillion news stories and natural language processing was able to track public sentiment and the possibility of regime change in Egypt (and some other things as well).
Excellent government reports
Since we moved home I’ve been thinning out the amount of paper on my shelves – old notes, research briefings, policy documents, stuff that just arrives in the post because I’ve been on the mailing list of various organisations. A lot of it’s well over a decade old now and it was pretty ephemeral when it first came out.
And V says ‘I really like those government reports. They’re excellent.’
We have a multi-fuel stove in the living room. That’s the context for her comment.
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