thursday, january 4
If Nordstrom's online service sucks, this one takes the cake.
Ok, sorry for the long delay. But we're back.
So I had another run-in with stupid customer service.
J.Crew.
Wouldn't have ever believe it, eh? That scion of best customer service, right? Well, listen up. Here's a fun story. And it's short, too.
One fine Tuesday, (this being four weeks before Christmas) I decide to do a little Christmas shopping. This, of course, was motivated by the fact that not only one year earlier I had made the rather egregious mistake of waiting until December 23rd to do all my shopping.
No, this year, I would get it done quite in advance. And on that list was a pair of nice, pink-outside, baby-blue-inside, shearling fluffy, down-filled, ultra-high-thread-count cotton-covered booties. From J.Crew.
And of course, being the online sort of fellow that I am, I ordered them online. Big mistake number one.
Background: I currently live in California, but I just moved from New Jersey (hence the big gap in postings.) I haven't switched over my billing address for my credit cards yet. I have them go to my parents house in Jersey, because it's an easy central location (and I pay them online). So I place the online order with my credit card, with the billing address in New Jersey, but my shipping address in California. Remember this. It's important. There will be a quiz.
The next day, I call up and check the status of the order. Order being processed. Ok, not bad. (I didn't exactly want to create an account to buy one item.)
Thursday, I call up. The item's been shipped. Great! Via USPS ground? Ok. So it should take a few days.
Five days later, Wednesday, no package in sight. I call up again. How's the status of that package? Well, sir... Here comes the hemming and hawing.
Hemming and hawing my ass! Here's how the conversation went:
Can I check the status of my order? That's order number xxxxxxxx.
... Sorry, sir. We don't have any stock on that item.
No stock? I told it shipped five or six days ago.
The records say that when you placed the order, we had them in stock, and the order went to the warehouse, but the warehouse didn't have any left.
So why wasn't I notified? I have a phone number, and an email address listed.
Yes, you do, but instead we sent a letter to your address.
I never received any mail. Where did you send it?
We sent the letter to your billing address.
Ok, that's just too many mistakes. Here's the complete list of mistakes J.Crew made, in nice, tabulated order.
- Mark an item as available that isn't.
- Mark an item as shipped before it's even packaged.
- Notify the customer that the item is not in stock by snail mail.
- Send the snail mail to the BILLING address, instead of the SHIPPING address, without asking the customer.
- Do all the above two weeks before Christmas, when it would be impossible to go to a local store.
J.Crew sucks. I'm never buying anything from them online again. My girlfriend tells me that she's had bad experiences from them too, but only when ordering online. She suspects that the online fulfilment is done by a different company than the phone side, mostly because orders by telephone always arrive with a printed catalog, and orders placed online never do.
j law | 7:31 PM
thursday, october 19
eCompany Now: Dotcom Inferno: Money to Burn
Imagine, if you will, a manufacturer of airplanes sending its representative to talk with the contractor who will be building its engines.
"We'd like it to make the plane go really fast," the rep says.
"Uh-huh," the contractor replies. "Well, what are your fuel requirements? What size is the plane this will go in? Do you have specs you'd like the engines to meet?"
The rep blinks once. Twice.
"We'd like it to make the plane go really fast," he says.
eCompany Now talks about both sides of the story: how iXL fsck'd a client and still has the balls to sue him for $320,000 --and how you can make enough sense to avoid this from happing to you too. I have had this problem with Goldman Sachs. Not only did they not know what they wanted to do, they didn't know how soon they needed it. Worse yet, when asked who their target audience was, they replied, "Everyone."
This for a wealth-management site whose requirement for membership is not only $10 million in assets, but also an additional $5 million in investible, liquid funds.
Check it out: Dotcom Inferno: Money to Burn
j law | 1:23 PM
wednesday, september 27
Windows NT 4, Groupthink Edition
Oddly enough, when you choose "command prompt" from the Start menu in NT 4.0, it gives you something called "cmd.exe". This is all fine and dandy. When you start to apply principles from what you learned in Windows 9x (95/98), things start getting odd.
I just tried doing Start->Run->"command". You get something that looks a lot like the command prompt, but oddly enough, doesn't know how to talk to long file names. It displays them just fine (unlike Windows 95/98's prompt) -- it just does this when you try to change directories to something that has long file names:
C:\BURN> dir
09/27/00 11:54a <DIR> .
09/27/00 11:54a <DIR> ..
09/27/00 11:54a <DIR> gswdemo0922
C:\BURN> cd gswdemo0922
Invalid directory
What??!! That does indeed look like the same name to me... Very odd. Now, if you change it to 8.3 notation (i.e. less than 8 characters for the folder name), it shows it just fine:
C:\BURN> rename gswdemo0922 gsw
C:\BURN> dir
09/27/00 11:54a <DIR> .
09/27/00 11:54a <DIR> ..
09/27/00 11:54a <DIR> gsw
C:\BURN> cd gsw
C:\BURN\GSW>
Mind you, this is when you use something called "command.exe" instead of "cmd.exe", even though "command.exe" seems to do the job just fine on Windows 9x, and it looks exactly like the regular "cmd.exe". It shows the long file names, but you can't get at them, and the error message is misleading. This is the problem I have -- if your system is so broken as to not really have long file names, at least make it obvious when you have legacy programs lying around. (i.e., Thisis~1.doc for 'This Is A Long Filename.doc". In this case, it's obvious it doesn't know how to talk long file names, and you aren't sitting there with a disconnect between what you see, and what you can do.
Interfaces should be damn clear about what you can do, and how you act on it. How should I know that your OS is broken?
I do miss my fucking Mac. And goddamnit, this is what we have to look forward to in OS X. They should at least make the backend completely hidden... and put out a true multitasking, UNIX-based OS for the power users, and a completely hidden, GUI OS for the consumers. This kind of nonsense only happens in hybrid, bastardized, conglomerate, middle-of-the-road, appease-them-all, average, groupthink, lowest-common-denominator shit.
Rant off.
j law | 12:01 PM
tuesday, september 26
Daddy Mencken says:
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats."
— H.L. Mencken
Oh, my. That's eloquent.
j law | 3:34 PM
Oh, boy...
A few interesting lines from What the Bible Really Says
Or Why Disobedient Children Should be Killed, an article discussing why political agendas should espouse enforcing "what the Bible says":
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother... They shall say to the elders of his city, "This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst." - Deuteronomy 21: 18-21
"A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God." - Deuteronomy 22: 5
An excellent analysis. I'm sure there are many defenses against this argument (the one regarding Catholicism and its interdiction against birth control as a means of spreading religion-as-virus is one) but the critical line holds: where do you draw the line about politicking and enforcing biblical ethical practices?
j law | 11:58 AM
Shamless album review... Tsunami (Various Artists)
It's all about the psy-trance. Derivative (or similar to) goa, psychadelic trance is great shit.
It's nothing like Ibiza trance, which is much more poppy and anthemy (think Chicane and "featuring Bryan A or Mel C"). Not that I have anything against that kind of trance (yes, I own a few house/trance albums) but it's just not the same on a rainy, thunderstormy day.
Most psychadelic trance is hard, dark, and wurbly in the fashion of good goa, but Tsunami goes one step further -- it's "second gen" psy-trance, making it harder, darker, faster, wurblier, thumpier, and just plain better than the old stuff.
Tsunami, from cdnow.com
j law | 10:53 AM
Dogs... ye gods, what an image...
I apologise for not having a link, but Stereophile magazine doesn't seem to have a section online for the editor's commentary column, "As We See It". If there were, I'd link it -- but until then, you'll have to be satisfied with this great quote from the October 2000 issue by Jon Iverson:
And don't get me started about watermarking DVD-Audio releases to prevent piracy... It's as if the record labels and equipment manufacturers got together to build the world's most wonderful swimming pool. They filled it with ultra-pure mountain spring water and installed a state-of-the-art filtration system, and then, every day, mark their beautiful new territory by peeing in it like dogs.
I couldn't have said it better.
j law | 10:44 AM
friday, september 22
The Commisar Vanishes, 2000
This is hysterical:
Picture of minority student digitally inserted into shot on application booklet
What, haven't we larned ANYTHING from those darned Ruskies? You'd think by now, people should be especially leery of editing photographs. No one likes being fooled.
Even when Fox Broadcasting edited hockey games by putting a purple sparkle trail on the puck (which was "moving so fast the public couldn't see it") to make it more exciting (why not just chromakey ("bluescreen") in some ravaging bears, a 100mph cop chase, or a killer goldfish, given the reputation of the studio?) letters and calls poured in, decrying even that amount of Final Cut Pro (or was it Media 100?) slight-of-handery was just simply unacceptable? (and that was actually pretty, too...)
At least do a better job, if you're going to do that... get a release, airbrush out the glare...Ahem.
j law | 11:19 AM
Speaking of pigs...
What's up with the stupid NYC subway doors? They don't auto-re-open if something's stuck in them.
Now, either this is:
A) a fault of the hardware, or
B) a tremendously bad decision to implement
A woman's bag got caught in the closing doors this morning. A normal system would auto-reopen the doors, and let the woman through. Now, in the case of the NYC subway system, it could be really old hardware. (I saw three "Rebuilt in Canada" badges on one train, with three different years...)
Old hardware needs to be replaced. This is dangerous. Someone could get pretty badly hurt in those doors if the train staff didn't notice and manually re-open the doors.
The other option is that the administration decided that it would be more of a threat so people wouldn't keep rushing for the closing doors. This would ostensibly keep traffic and squeezing down.
C'mon, idiots. People are going to rush for the doors, whether they know it's not going to automatically re-open. They want to get places. It doesn't help that your trains are perennially late and/or broken.
Better to make it safe than be sorry. And yes, this is also my view on drugs.
j law | 10:07 AM
The three little... pigs.
One day the first grade teacher was reading the story of the Three Little Pigs to her class. She came to the part of the story where the first pig was trying to accumulate the building materials for his home. She
read,
"...And so the pig went up to the man with the wheelbarrow full of straw
and said, "Pardon me sire, but may I have some of that straw to build my
house?"
The teacher paused then asked the class, "And what do you think that man said?"
One little boy raised his hand and said, "I think he said: 'Holy Shit! A talking pig!"
j law | 10:02 AM
monday, september 18
$29.95 to beta test your software? You're kidding me...
Apple, please tell me you're kidding.
You're going to charge ME to beta-test YOUR crappy software? The idea of a "beta-test" is that many people across the world get to use your software, and tell how you to fix it.
You ought to be paying US. That's how the rest of the industry works...except for Microsoft...
Uh oh.
j law | 11:51 AM
I'm sure this doesn't interest most of you, but...
Dr. Bott's gHEAD fixes the stupid Powermac G4/ATI card + Sony monitor limited resolution issue. In essence, with the standard G4's ATI Rage 128 Pro AGP card and an older (i.e. 1997) Sony monitor, not all resolutions and refresh rates show up.
If you can make all your refresh rates come back by switching the monitor on after the machine has booted up, check out this little dongle.
j law | 11:21 AM
thursday, august 31
Jon's Guide to Eternal Corporate Love
It is truly ridiculous when the people in a company are so irresponsible as to start meetings anywhere from 10-30
minutes late, regularly, every single day, every single meeting.
Then these same people demand that we show up to their meetings on time -- when they aren't even there!
Who gives a shit about you and your fucked-up agenda? Utterly useless.
Get a clue, people. Start your meetings on time, end them 10 minutes early, and everyone will love you.
j law | 3:05 PM
Is it just me, or does Brandeis' robot project sound a little like Deep Blue?
j law | 11:49 AM
Overcharging for Microsoft Windows?
California files suit against Microsoft for overcharging up to $40 per copy of windows.
Hello, it's called capitalism for a reason, people. Microsoft should be able to charge anything they damn well please -- if it's too high, people will start looking for alternatives (other OS's, writing their own, or horror of horrors, pirating). The dangerous part of being a monopoly is that they squelch competition, not that they charge exorbitant fees. It's not like they're using their monopoly power to charge $859. Hell, it's only $179, and for consumers, it's usually bundled with the computer.
I'm a rabid hater of Microsoft's tactics as any next Mac/Un*x-head, but largely because they put out really buggy software (63,000 known issues!?) that has the usability of a mildewy, four-day old snail track and that they like to force their competition in various new markets to give up.
j law | 11:06 AM
Got an issue? Mail me: hologon@excite.com
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