Is it me?

I'm feeling misunderstood by customer service people. First, there was the compliment I gave buy.com, which apparently was new to them (see below). Now, there's is this exchange I had with Dell:

Me:
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Hi ... I am trying to add a second hard drive which is an old IDE drive. Can you send me a diagram of the motherboard layout?

Thanks,
Eric

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Them:
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Dear Ms. French,

Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Support. We look forward to working with you to resolve your technical issue.

Ms. French, I understand your concern. In order to resolve your issue, ...

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It is a pretty map, though

Suppose you want to find out where your local Time Warner Telecom office is. I really have no idea why you would want to do this, but let's pretend.

You know the web site, http://twtelecom.net. Right there on the homepage is a link that says "My local Sales Office". Seems easy enough.

I can almost imagine the meeting where they planned this one out.

Web Designer: And, if you click here, a page will pop up with a text listing of local sales offices.

TW Telecom Guy: I don't think our customers will be impressed by a "text listing". Maybe a ball should pop out of nowhere, and grow into our logo. Maybe then the perimeter of the logo can be surrounded by an odd glowing neon green color as we load a fairly large web application and then the logo, after just hovering there for a little bit, should disappear so that a rotating, slightly disconcerting, three dimensional map, from an overhead fly-by point of view can appear, that will, once it finally stops spinning in a counterclockwise direction, allow them to click on their state.

Web Designer: And then what happens?

TW Telecom Guy: Take them to a text listing. Whatever.

Maybe the roles would be reversed. Anyway, Give it a try.

Thanks ... uh, never mind.

I ordered this from buy.com. It's a speaker that goes where a CD drive would go on your computer. Adequate sound, no speakers on your desk. Good stuff, if you have space in the computer case.

Anyway, I placed the order Monday afternoon. It arrived via UPS Tuesday morning. (I chose standard shipping, which was free with a coupon I had.)

I'm always writing letters to complain about service. But receiving an order about 18 hours after it is placed seemed impressive enough that I should write to compliment them.

I sent this e-mail:
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So I ordered this yesterday afternoon ... and received it this morning.

Incredible service. Thanks!

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And received this response:

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Thank you for contacting Buy.com.

This is in reference to your email regarding the order #xxxxxxx.

According to our records, UPS tracking #1Zxxxxxxxxxxxx shows your package was delivered on Aug 9, 2005.

To receive a more detailed description of the tracking number provided, please log on to your My Account at:

http://www.buy.com/corp/support/login.asp

Once you have logged in, you will be sent to the My Account Profile page. From there, please click the Track button of the order number in question. You will then be sent to the Order Summary page where your tracking information will be displayed.

Thank you again for writing to Buy.com.

Sincerely,
Buy.com Customer Care Team

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Yeah. Never mind.

It's nice when someone finds my blog from a search engine. I'm not quite sure why I care that some random person did a search and my site happened to come up and they clicked on it and looked at it for 6 seconds, maybe did a search for the word they were looking for, promptly exclaimed "This isn't what I wanted! Stupid search engine!" hit the back button and moved on with their life. But I do care.

I don't think Google likes me (I'm sure it's nothing personal) but Yahoo seems to be friendly. I think I helped someone at a marketing firm find a list of name prefixes, and someone else found out what stinging nettle looks like. Or, as both they and I like to call it for no good reason, sting nettle.

Or maybe Yahoo doesn't like me. It's tough to see in the picture (click for a slightly larger version), but here is how Yahoo summarized my post below about poor Phil Sandlin:

"I like Phil. So you're a photographer. ... AP Photo/Phil Sandlin) Oh, and I used this image without permission ...


Sums it up perfectly, don't you think?




Oh, and the reason I keep saying Phil Sandlin instead of just Phil (or nothing at all) is that if you search for "Phil Sandlin" on Yahoo my blog doesn't seem to show up any more. I see that as a big disservice to anyone searching for information about Phil Sandlin. Let's see if this fixes that oversight.