If a bricks-and-mortar shop were run like a web-deploy

"Hello, emergency response unit, what is your emergency please?"

"Yes, hello, I'm glad I *finally* got you... you have to do something immediately, it's an emergency"

"Yes sir, please tell me what is the nature of your emergency"

"Welll you see, I was in the middle of taking a customer's order, and they were trying to pay me the money, but then the till drawer got stuck and..."

"I'm sorry, sir, did you say the *till* got stuck?"

"Yes, that's right! The drawer got stuck and wouldn't open, and of course, you know, that means I can't take orders... so I called you and you have to fix it."

"I'm sorry sir, we don't really deal with this level of problem - perhaps if you called your building manager during normal work hours..."

"You fix things that are broken, yes? so fix it!"

"Yes, but you've called the emergency support line, not the..."

"What? I pay for this support service, I know you can fix it... just get it working, it's losing me business!"

" have you tried ringing up the sale first?"

...silence...

*taptaptap* *kerCHING!*

"Oh"

*click*

...later that day... after the building manager arrives

"No, no, I'm sorry but you're just going to have to destroy the entire store and start over.."

"I really don't think that's necessary, it's just a few design issues that we need to sort out..."

"Just a few design issues! This is a total branding failure. The display at the far right of the store isn't showing the products we asked for, this will completely ruin our business!"

"But... you're the ones that are supposed to set those products - we just filled it with some cardboard-cutouts so you'd get the idea of how to use it"

"I don't care - it's not what I expected! I expected it to work properly and it doesn't... I swear, I've been looking at sales, and they aren't as high as they should be and so it *must* be this display putting them off. There's nothing else that will do, you just have to destroy the new store and rebuild the old store for us!"

"What? We can't do that at this stage! Do you know how much work it'd be to tear down this new building and rebuild the old again? Are you going to pay for it?"

"Why should *I* pay for it? You messed up the display!"

Another day...

"That's it, close the doors, no customers are allowed in!"

"What's going on? why are you closing up?"

"It's a disaster! You see this picture here? it should be over there! and it's hanging askew!"

"Askew? I don't see it."

"Look at the other two pictures here... they line up with the edges of the cashier's desks exactly... but this one? Do you see why it's so wrong?"

*looks*

*looks some more... *

"I'm... really sorry, but I just don't se..."

"I don't believe it. See, does this help?"

*holding up a ruler*... "the third picture is *1cm* over the edge of the desk"

"Oh, I see it now. Yes - we should straighten that up for the next store-refit"

"Next refit!" *shocked look* "It's a disaster! We can't wait until the next refit! It's terribly unprofessional!"

"...but it's scheduled for tomorrow night, and it's not like it's impacting your cashflow..."

"not impacting... !!! ... It's *ruining* our brand-position! How could you have let something like this go out the door! Can't you get *anything* right? the entire design is ruined!!!"

*stunned look*

"OMG! *that's* we we aren't taking any orders, it's all your fault! we're losing business because of this! fix it now!"

...

The perils of pagerank

Now that RubyGlasses has gained a bit of PageRank, I've noticed a marked increase in the amount of people emailing me requesting "Link swapping".

I've generally been deleting these along with most of the spam... google doesn't like linkswapping, and I won't do it. (all hail oh mighty google!)

However, I've also received one or two offers of advertising... and, to me, that's different. I'm happy for an advertiser to pay me to put ads on my site that are relevant to my audience.

However, after a recent email-conversation, I now have to make it clear to potential advertisers that these ads are going to be obviously ads.

I will freely confess that I don't get very many offers of advertising. I've had two so far... one that I've accepted (see if you can spot them) and one that I have most definitely not.

The first did want me to *not* use certain ad-like keywords in proximity to their ads... no doubt they're after a bit of my pagerank "link juice" as well as the actual click-throughs that are likely to accrue (yes, I actually asked them about this). That was ok to me, as long as it was obvious to my readers that what was going on was actually an ad... ie paid-for content inviting people to purchase something.

The reason I turned down the second offer, however... was different. In fact, I didn't even need to turn them down - just stated what I was and was not going to do.

The second exchange began with an offer to "have cooperation in marketing". I'll admit that maybe I didn't completely read the email in question because it also explained that they expected me to "add our product information with links to < thecompany > on your blog"... I read this and thought "advertising"... but in the following exchange (I asked if that's what she meant), discovered that she expected to write articles about her products... and put them on this blog.

After explaining that I write my own articles she responded with (and I paraphrase) "Oh ok, so *you'll* write articles about our products on your site, and put links to our products"

I had to then explain that I write articles about Ruby-on-Rails or web-development or freelancing... if her products were relevant to that then I might write an article on them... but I would *not* promise to be favourable.

She then responded with a "suggestion":

I have read your email, I have one suggestion, how about we write articles suitable for your site, and you put it on your site. We can also pay for you on adding them, but how much per article will you charge?

I mean, what does it take to get through to these people? My final email to her reminded her that I write my own articles, and that I will happily post paid advertising at the bottom of my articles - and that she could even dictate the text of the advertising... but that I would not post fake articles written by somebody else about her products.

She said she'd stay in touch...

I'm not a militant feminist

I assume non-gender bias at the start; I don't care what pronouns you use, and most of those "war of the sexes" ads are just plain funny.

Which is why I was totally surprised by an ad I saw today which suddenly made my "feminism" detector spike off the charts.

I can't find a pic of it online, so I'll have to describe it.

It's for some kind of smartphone.

A smug-looking geek-boy is standing there, with a gorgeous-looking girl with her arm wrapped around him.

The caption: "It's about how smart you are".

...

In case I need to state the obvious - clearly, being totally smart means that if you're a smart guy you get the hot-looking bird... but what makes him look smug is just as clearly *not* about how smart she is.

---

Disclaimer...

I like geek-boys, and for me it *is* more about how smart they are... but I'd hope that for the geek-boys it'd be about how smart *I* am too!

---

On further reflection, I think I'd be almost as scandalised if the ad showed a smug geek-girl with an Adonis draped over her.

What mostly annoys me is that it implies that the main benefit of being smart is to be able to entice the beautiful people to hang with you despite how plain-looking you are. In other words - even though it says it's about how smart you are... it's still about how pretty you are... :P

mobile broadband roaming

The directors of MoneySpyder have been reading "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss and are all fired up about the idea of us working from home (amongst other things). Basically, they're hoping to kick the expense of an office - which is fair enough.

So I casually asked "so, does this mean I can take my laptop on the road?"

I was kinda surprised when they answered yes.

w00t!

So, I finally have the option to live my original dream - spend a month in France, a month in germany, a month in spain...

BUT...

(you knew that was coming)...

I've just checked what it costs to get international roaming on mobile broadband, and it doesn't look pretty.

Actually, that's an understatement... it looks downright atrocious.

I'm currently on three mobile - and I pay around £15 a month for 5G of internet usage. As yet I've never busted that limit - I think I use around 1.5-2G. I used to have a 1G account (with O2) but that wasn't enough for me - eg when I needed to do a full ubuntu upgrade.

However - when I checked into the mobile broadband roaming rates I discovered that they don't bundle your monthly allowance - it costs per mg... and not at the usual overlimit pricing rate of around 10p per meg - it costs you £1.25 per meg!

This would mean my normal monthly usage would come to cost of £2000-£2500 PER MONTH!

Yes, that's over two thousand pounds per month!

Now - I can understand that it costs a fair bit more to use overseas carriers, than to use their own.... but even if *they* bought the data at retail prices, and then charged *us* retail on top of that - this would come to only *twice* our normal per-meg rate...

Not 166 TIMES my normal monthly amount.

There is something seriously wrong there!

Now - the pages all say "well, just don't use as much internet when on the road"... but unfortunately, I have no choice. I am a Web developer - that requires me to do a bit more than just checking email or checking the local weather online. I need to download the latest codebase, get copies of db dumps, upload and deploy sites, go to the online site and test it thoroughly... etc etc. Even if I cut out all recreational internet use (and where's the fun in that) I'd still be using about a Gig a month.

I've noticed that a very few enlightened companies have begun to offer something a *little* better (eg orange travel bundles), but even so - they're still not even approaching regular internet usage. The orange bundle offers 50M at £40 - which would make my monthly spend "only" £1200 - so, half the rate of the Three option... but still in the ridiculous zone.

Now, I've wandered about online in search of a better solution, but I have only a couple of viable options.

Firstly - I could spend my life in a Maccas or Starbucks (or equivalent) for the purposes of the free WiFi connections... rather than actually enjoying the variety of local establishments. Of course - they do expect you to actually purchase some of their wares - and I refuse to eat the former, and the latter is definitely not my cup of coffee-flavoured-milk.

Also - it's quite difficult to actually do real work in a busy cafe. It's ok for a few hours - but it's tough to be there all day. I'd also have to shut down, pack up and potentially lose my table every time I needed to dash to the loo. :P

The second alternative would be to just buy a new dongle from the country I'm visiting... for each country I visit. This feels expensive and wasteful... but if you compare it to the roaming rates - it actually works out cheaper... *far* cheaper.

With Three's quoted roaming rates, it would cost me an average of £85 per day.
Even if a new dongle cost me £100 (for the PAYG version) - I could buy one every two days - and still be paying less.

Ridiculous as this seems, it seems to be my best real option.

If anybody knows of a better solution, let me know!

Dongle-sharing?

But then I got to wondering: perhaps there's others out there wanting to do the same thing. If we each buy a dongle for a different country and then swap with each other - this would be far less expensive. Just buy our own PAYG sims. Or perhaps there are others of you out there already in a different country (that I want to visit) who'd be willing to rent me your own dongle for a month... I'd even pay a refundable deposit!

Any takers?

How *NOT* to do customer service

1. Start by telling your customer the work is not good enough. That the resolution will make it pixellated and that will look terrible.
2. Then say that the image has "keylines" that have to be removed and "crop lines" added "outside the trim area" - without explaining what they are
3. When your customer naiively asks what these mean, instead of explaining it - tell her that you haven't yet received the artwork because the only files they received don't have these things
4. When the customer says she sent files through and asks what is needed to change them into files that will meet their requirements (giving a detailed guess at what that might be), tell her again that you need these things - without explaining exactly what is needed or confirming that what she suggested is actually what you needed - even if she's later proved correct. Tell her that she is running out of time to get this done...
5. When your customer calls, make sure your receptionist (or colleague) answers, and that she tells your customer that you are with some other important client... and get *her* to also tell your customer that the artwork isn't good enough and go on at length about how it's such low resolution that it'll look all pixellated and low quality that it'll look terrible. Make sure she promises that you'll call her back before close of business.
6. When your customer has received no calls or emails and it's near close of business... and calls you. Answer immediately and...
   1. Begin by telling her off again at the low quality of the images (due to the resolution).
   2. When she mentions she thought you'd be calling her back, tell her you have *so* many other clients and you're very busy, you know...
   3. When she asks if you'll please just explain what she needs to do to add the crop lines - don't explain, tell her that you were expecting to speak with a designer who should already know these things.
   4. When she suggests that not all clients know the industry jargon of printing businesses and again asks for you to explain what to do, tell her to go and look up "crop lines" in the dictionary
   5. When she says that sometimes in your industry you have to deal with people that aren't specialists (she gives an example that if you'd asked her to set up a website, she wouldn't expect you to know what Rails, MySQL or AJAX were)... then tell her that you simply don't have time to explain to your customers how to add crop lines to an image, and that you only deal with designers that already know what crop lines are...

background...

We're launching our new startup this weekend (ie tomorrow) and needed new business cards ASAP. So my colleague called around the local while-u-wait business card dealers and found one that was willing to print and ship in time for tomorrow.

I'd quickly thrown together some business card images that were the exact size/shape required. They aren't brilliant, but they'll do for the weekend after which we can get some better ones done up.

I have a day-job... so while I'd love to go out and find out all about crop lines and trim-borders and whatever... I need to actually spend the day making money for my employer...

When I got off the final phone call and calmed down for a few minutes, I managed to find some time to go look it up. Apparently, all I need to do is exactly what I suggested in the reply to the second email - ie, expand the image size and add borders a little larger than where the old image-shape used to be... this would have taken him all of one minute to explain - just as it did me just now.

I recommend that you *don't* purchase from Kall Kwik 781 in Eton Street, Richmond

Some day, my visa will come...

So in case you happen not to have actually spoken to me any time in the past two months, I'm in the process of moving to the UK. Of which, the major step is to get myself a UK work visa.

I'm (frankly) too old for a holiday working visa (and I don't want to go for that short a time anyway), so what I need is the Tier 1 general migrant visa. This will let me work in the UK for any company for up to 3 years before having to reapply, so it's pretty good.

However... apart from some very strict requirements the current wait for a visa of this kind is a bit on the long side.

The website tells us that there is a wait of 25 working days for any kind of visa[1], but this is simply not the case. The wait is currently averaging 45 working days. The following thread is an ongoing conversation by a large number of people frustrated about the current Tier 1 visa waiting times. It's been running constantly since October (when the Tier 1 was first introduced) and now runs at 47 pages of comments... this should give an indication of the current level of feeling surrounding the handling of this class of visa.

One of the chief grumbles is that the official website flat-out lies about the length of time it takes. The visa-office staff are aware of how long the wait times are currently averaging (I called and asked).

Moving internationally is a really large, life-changing event. It takes a lot of planning. It requires packing up your house and quitting your job, and long, tearful farewell parties... If we are told that it takes 25 working days, and then it takes another month... it means there are a lot of people left twiddling their thumbs and watching their bank balance go down - at an alarming rate if we're unlucky enough to have quit our job or are forced to stay in a motel after giving notice or selling the house.

Don't get me wrong - I don't mind that it takes 45 working days, but if I had known this from the start, I wouldn't have planned my life around 25 working days... and things would be going much smoother. As it is, I've been interviewing with several companies in the UK and having to tell them "looks like my visa *still* hasn't come through yet... can you hold off another 2 weeks"... which is a situation that *nobody* likes to be in.

It's not my fault that the visa simply hasn't come through, and that I have no idea of if or when it ever will... but I can't shake the feeling that I'm coming across as being flaky... which is a feeling that I really dislike.

The problem is compounded by the fact that there is literally no way in which one can find out the progress of a visa application[2]. There is no website, there is nobody I can call. I just have to wait and hope... and wait and hope some more... while every friend, relative and innocent bystander is going crazy alongside me and asking me when it's going to come... and I don't have any answer to give them!

Being my mother's daughter, I called anyway and asked - they said there was no way, but they confirmed it was taking 45 working days, so they know that the website is incorrect, and yet have done nothing about it.

That made me mad. Are they deliberately misleading people or are they simply too negligent to bother? We're not talking about the kiddies on their gap year holiday doing a bit of waitressing on the side (incidentally, those visa come through in a jiffy). These are the most highly skilled people in the country who are moving their lives around to get over there, and the official website gives an estimate that is 80% inaccurate... and they *know* it is! :(

The real kicker for me is that, because we can't see our progress, they have no obligation to get anything done at all! Now, I know the system has just changed and they probably have a stack of applications a mile high on their desk - so they're probably *not* just being lazy... but the lack of transparency certainly leaves the system open to abuse.

One final niggling point is that they recently published some world-wide stats for visa processing times... and it looks like countries such as the US have an average turnaround time of only 6 working days. I can imagine a time difference of maybe ten or even twenty days, but this is ludicrous. What could cause a discrepancy of over 600%!

If there's a shortage of staff... hire more?

[1] Apart from a permanent settlement visa, or an annoyingly vague description of a "non straight forward" visa - which apparently means a visa application that is incomplete... by which assumption the Tier one should be straight forward as long as you provide everything they ask for.
[2] at least until after 45 working days have past in which case you can pay $10 to get an SMS "progress report" sent to you (of which the aforementioned thread has several stories of it never arriving) and which, when it arrives, tends to say something vague along the lines of "In progress", and with no indication of how long it will take from there.

That doesn't help me, it helps you

I just got off the phone with Australia Post and I'm not happy. Even though they were very polite to me, they failed to provide a good customer service experience. This issue requires a bit of backstory.

While in Melbourne last weekend, I'd bought two half-cases of wine and paid for them to be delivered. I have no car, so I left explicit instructions for the parcels to be left on the back doorstep if I was not at home.

I got one of the little blue cards in the post yesterday, telling me that they tried to deliver one of the parcels to me in the 1 hour when I was out of the house getting some lunch. I figured that the winery must have forgotten to put the "in case not at home" message on the parcel, so today I decided to just fetch it from the post office.

I damaged my knees fencing, a couple of years ago, so walking eight blocks while carrying a heavy box is painful for me. My arms and knees both ache, now, but I got the parcel home... only to find a second little blue card in the mailbox.

The parcel from yesterday clearly has the "in case not at home" instructions printed on the outside, so I figured I'd call up Australia Post and see if they could actually do what I paid them to - which is to deliver my second parcel to my house.

I called them up and waded through their long telephone menu-system to get to a real human being. The man at the other end seemed kind enough, but the only option available to him was to allow me to lodge a complaint against the contractor who failed to follow the given instructions.

I don't really want to lodge a complaint - I just wanted my parcel delivered - which is what I paid for.

I asked the man if he could find anyone that would be able to help me get what I wanted. He went back to his supervisor, leaving me on hold, and returned to tell me that the only way I could get it redelivered was to call up the people that I originally bought it from (some winery out in the Yarra valley - I don't know which one as the parcel is still sitting in the aussie post office), and to get *them* to call aussie post and figure out if their contract supports "redelivery-on-failure"...

Good grief! From my POV it's pretty simple:

1. I paid for delivery to my home
2. Aussie Post stuffed it up
3. Aussie Post should find a way to get it right

Instead of finding a way to get my parcel to me, they kept insisting that they were helping me by starting up a complaints process and making sure it "never happens again". If you want to reprimand your contractor, that's your business. It will help you improve your own processes over time, and no doubt his non-instruction-following is the weak link that broke in this particular chain of events...

But doing this isn't going to help me. Getting my parcel to me helps me - that's all I want, and Aussie Post wasn't willing ot help in that regard. I was a customer on the line right then and there with a problem that Australia Post caused - and wasn't able to get any resolution that actually solved that problem.

I was left with the feeling that Australia Post wasn't willing take responsibility for this mistake and do something about it. Instead they wanted to shift the blame to the contractor, and then claim that responsibility was out of their hands.

This reeks of bad customer service.

If you want to leave a good impression with your customers, follow one of the basic rules of human conduct: if you stuff up, take responsibility and try to fix it. Whatever you do, don't just give a reassurance that it won't happen again... we won't believe you. After all, you've just proven that you can't be trusted. At least if you try to find a way to give me what you promised in the first place - it'll go a long way towards reassuring me that you can act in good faith.