connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by SOUTHEN)

My Mom has always worked the financial system to the best of her ability — from triple coupon shopping at ShopRite to becoming a landlord three states away as a retirement investment — so back in my freshman year at Syracuse, she co-signed an application for me to get an American Express Gold Card. She felt that by simply holding it, it would go a long way in establishing my credit rating.

It did.

Over the years, I’ve made large and small purchases alike, while making sure to be on-time with payments. As a result, my credit rating spiked and just recently, I was able to purchase a home at a decent rate — even though dotmatrix is in its first year as a business.

So, as much as I dislike paying $85 a year for a credit card, Amex has more than paid me back in return with customer service that has always been extremely helpful and courteous.

Until today, that is.

Can We Just Upsell You Instead?

In moving from freelance mode to building a design consultancy, I figured it was about time to completely separate my personal expenses from my business expenses. So a few weeks back I applied for an Amex Business Gold Card and tonight, with Christmas finally behind me, I called to activate my recently delivered card.

While activating, I asked the operator to transfer my points (close to 100,000 from 17 years of purchases) to the new card. Of course, that couldn’t be accomplished by the account opening specialist, so within a few minutes I was speaking to another CSR in the Membership Rewards department.

No problems there; the guy added the program to my new business card and proceeded to transfer my points over in one fell swoop.

Then I told him that I wanted to cancel my old Gold Card.

Wrong move.

Five minutes of hold time later, I was speaking to a guy in another department with a glossy title that, once decoded, equated with “card retainment specialist.”

I told the guy that I wanted to cancel my personal Gold Card, but before doing so, I needed to know that I would be receiving my End of Year Summary — essential documentation of my numerous business deductions over the past year.

The guy didn’t listen to one word I said.

Before I could say AOL nightmare, the guy began to upsell me about the benefits of the card. He said he could throw in a $40 credit due to my long-standing account status (for you non-math majors, that’s a benefit of $2.35 per year).

I repeated that I needed an answer to my question.

Instead of transferring me to customer service — who apparently held the knowledge as to when I was to receive my summary document — the specialist continued along the same line of reasoning.

Next, he tells me that it’s almost impossible to get an Amex Gold card and that I’d be missing out on a ton of great benefits. Getting a bit annoyed, I lost track of my request and challenged him to look at my account and tell me what exactly I’d be missing — especially now that just I opened a Business Gold Card.

Instead of doing what I asked, the guy took the opportunity to challenge me to name one of my Gold Card benefits — you know, ’cause I’m a dumb customer who doesn’t know what he needs.

Okay, now I’m starting to get pissed.

I returned to my original question about the summary and the guy just kept on going, telling me all about the great benefits of card membership, including more points with a second card. When I told him that I had that angle covered — for free with a non-Amex card — and that I didn’t need advice along those lines, he kept pushing, insisting that most people don’t know what they’re missing out on.

I tell him I’m an adult and don’t appreciate the continuous upsell.

He tells me that I’m not listening; everybody needs a Gold Card.

I hang up.

Next: Customer Service

So taking the only valuable info the retainment specialist gave me, I decided to call Customer Service to find out when I would receive my summary. The new guy must’ve checked his CRM tool (man, is this a call for VRM or what?!), as he was ready to deflect my question and continue to upsell Gold Card membership.

Only after I made it crystal clear to him that I just added another Gold Card to my account — keeping the beans coming in at a steady pace — did he stop his Lomanesque discourse long enough to put me on hold and find out for me exactly when I could cancel my card, yet still receive my summary.

After another five minutes, he comes back and tells me that I can’t cancel the account until March 9th — my anniversary date.

When I tell him that I receive my summary no later than early February, he pauses.

When I ask him on what date I was to be charged next year’s $85 fee, he meekly responds with “March 9th.”

Motherfuckers.

Learn Or Die

I ended up hanging up tonight, to wait until I receive my summary before I cancel prior to March 9th. I messed up: I never should have mentioned canceling the card before getting all the information I needed.

I guess I had too much faith that being a longtime card member should mean something — like not having to game my call to people who are supposed to be servicing me, the customer.

It blows me away that companies continue to develop CSR scripts along these lines, in an attempt to maximize profits. For 17 years, I considered Amex to be a great company — not based on the bills I received each month or the ridiculous $40 per year points program I’ve paid for since obtaining the card — but for their impeccable customer service.

Well, they’ve now joined the likes of Sprint as far as I’m concerned.

How much more money have they now lost through this piss poor brand experience? I don’t know, but I can tell you one thing for sure:

Momma didn’t raise no motherfucking plankton.

(originally uploaded by axb500)

My iPod battery died years ago; it now lives permanently attached to the cigarette lighter in my truck as if on life support.

Until DRM is dead, and I can use the music I’ve bought at the iTunes Music store on a player other than an iPod, screw ‘em both.

Dear Forward-Thinking Suits,

Thanks so much for pulling all of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips off of YouTube. You’ve now rendered a good number of my posts useless — posts that were marketing your shows for free. That’s right, you had thousands of fans, like me, pointing to and contextualizing clips from their blogs, generating millions of page views and legions of new viewers and you killed it because they weren’t your page views.

So dumb.

Let me ask you people a simple question: How much money do you pump into your marketing department annually? I mean, what’s your budget for marketing executives, their minions and external network marketing? Can’t you recognize that whatever percentage you had set aside for TDS and TCS brand awareness (not specific show promos, just awareness campaigns) was becoming a waste of money with the YouTube fans doing our thing? We were doing your jobs for free and doing it better than you ever could have done it yourself!

Come to think of it, maybe you did understand that angle before acting…

See, the way that I view this is that from an organizational standpoint, this type of viral marketing is a perfect opportunity to cut back on traditional marketing budgets and let the web do what the web does. But then again, organizations are made up of people and people need to provide value in order to get paid by the organization.

V.P. Johnson can’t keep that corner office if he has legions of fans doing his work for him at a price that puts him out on the street. So build that wall! Keep them out of our stuff! Send them back to Mexico… er… hm.

Congratulations, again, Comedy Central executives. You’ve proven yourself to be no more forward-thinking than this administration that your talent rails on each week. Someday, your network bosses will understand what this move did to your fan-base, but probably not until a competitor network — one that won’t collude with the rest of the big boys — embraces the web and the people that put food on your plates.

Colbert and Stewart are still my boys, but my passion for your product has dropped immeasurably.

And that’s The Word.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser (MediaShift) updated his open letter to Stephen Colbert with a report that lawyers from Comedy Central are cherry-picking the clips they want taken down from YouTube, possibly in a hardball negotiating move to tweak Google and their new acquisition.

So not all clips have come down. That’s good news. How Comedy Central decides to proceed from here, though, is key.

If they want to negotiate the creation of a channel on YouTube for CC distributed shows and all discrete segments of shows, that move will serve the desires of many CC fans, especially bloggers. The amount of ad revenue they’ll make on viral replays at this point in time pales in comparison to advertising revenue from the TV broadcast itself, but tacking on an ad to the end of a video (as Revver has done with zeFrank) works well for all parties involved.

This could work out for everyone if CC doesn’t get greedy and:

• attempt to add commercials within segments and shows, which are essentially already commercials (running across YouTube and the decentralized web) for their regularly scheduled programs on TV
• police people who upload their own segment edits, instead of chalking up the “lost revenue” as a marketing expenditure.

If Comedy Central can avoid those old media trappings, they just might come out of this as new media players.

I moved connecting*the*dots over to Sue Polinsky’s TechTriad servers a few months back because Dreamhost was chugging and crashing all over the place.

Not a bad decision, eh?

The NFL has gone soft.

I’m watching the Jets get theirs asses handed to them by the Jags… and the refs. Don’t get me twisted; the Jets are getting killed by the opposition, but two plays today have summed up the differences between the NFL circa 1975 and today.

1. Jonathan Vilma broke through the Jags o-line and crushed Byron Leftwich while he was releasing his pass for an incompletion. The result? A 15-yard roughing the passer call. Unbelievable.
2. Down 28 in the first half, Eric Barton sacked and leveled Byron Leftwich on the Jags 1-yard line. Too little too late, possibly, but at least we got a lick in. Wait, check that; 15-yard penalty, roughing the passer. I guess you can’t even sack THE DAMN QUARTERBACK ANYMORE!

Just as I prepared to swear off football for good (I’m still close), I sumbled across this gem of an article:

Brushback.com
New Rule To Protect Quarterbacks Prohibits Them From Taking Field

NEW YORK — In a further effort to protect quarterbacks from violent hits, the NFL has adopted a new rule prohibiting them from taking the field. The rule, which will be put into effect in week 3, is expected to dramatically decrease the number of injuries to starting quarterbacks, and also significantly alter game planning.

“This is a rule that we needed in order to protect our marquee players from season-ending injuries,� said commissioner Roger Goodell. “Guys like Carson Palmer, Steve McNair, and Daunte Culpepper are the faces of the league. We can’t have them battered around like tackling dummies. We can’t allow defenders to hit them high or low or in the middle or late or on-time or at all. They’re dainty, like little Russian nesting dolls, and we need to protect them from those scary, HGH-addled defenders.�

Goodell went on to describe the gridiron as a “scary, violent place that’s fraught with peril.�

“It’s just too dangerous out there,� he said. “Have you seen what goes on? Everybody’s running into each other at high speeds. Sticking a franchise QB out there is just asking for trouble. Personally I don’t even think they should be allowed to stand on the sidelines. You never know when somebody’s going to get shoved out of bounds and upend them. Oh, God I don’t even want to think about it. Can we just change the subject, please?�

The new rule change will force coaches to come up with game plans that don’t involve quarterbacks in any way. Generic running plays, as well as gadget plays like the double reverse and the halfback option, should become more common. In each case, a running back or wide receiver would take the snap from center.

[…]

It’b be hilarious if it weren’t so close to being reality.

If the NFL ever becomes a sport for men again — where business investments in quarterbacks return to the world of a roll of the dice — I might return to getting amped to spend 3 hours on Sundays to watch. Until then, well, consider my patronage a roll of the dice.

Over the years, I’ve spent a bit of my time writing about Amazon.com — ranging from posts critiquing their interaction model and interface design to propping their innovative, explorative iterations that have changed both online commerce and the web in general in extremely positive ways.

So someone, anyone, please explain to me what they’re thinking with this Unbox service model?

Cory Doctorow absolutely dissected their user agreement today, so I won’t spend any energy on that front. Read his article for the lowdown on their attempts of intrusion into your computer and your ownership rights.

After I read his post, I jumped over to Amazon to see for myself what all the bitching was about. Below is a sample Unbox product screen-shot:

(click for larger image)

The first thing I looked for was the user agreement that Cory tore to shreds, and in finding it next to the 1-Click button, something seemed odd.

1-Click isn’t enabled on my Amazon account.

Not jumping to conclusions, I figured that maybe I turned on 1-Click during one of my many visits to Amazon over the past few months, so I navigated over to my 1-Click settings.

Hm, turned off like I thought.

Thinking that there had to be some explanation about this default switch, I dove into their (well designed) help section and pulled up the 1-Click page. Guess what? Not a mention of Unbox anywhere.

So let me get this straight:

• Amazon unleashes Unbox, which installs what is essentially spyware on my computer in order to manage the DRM of the product
• Average users who are used to clicking on the Add to Shopping Cart button and backing out of the sales process if they’d like, are surprised with a no turnaround 1-Click setting
• Once the user buys media from Unbox, they are automatically stuck with abiding by the user agreement, which details how the spyware/DRM software is added to the host computer

Forget tricking people into making a purchase they don’t want — that’s easy to deal with — if I didn’t know any better, I’d venture to say that Amazon initiated the default 1-Click setting in order to get as many people as possible to engage in their crazy ass user agreement and initiate the installation of their software on our machines.

Tell us otherwise, Amazon, or I imagine that you’re about to feel the fury of a bunch of early adopters. And that goes much deeper in affecting your brand than a temporary drop of sales.

And his name is American Belly.

Belly bumping one corporate asshole at a time.

I’ve got one bullet left in the chamber, so this had better work.

This is a pissed-off customer rant. Proceed with caution.

To make a very long, frustrating story as short as possible, I lost every contact from my Treo 600 added over the past 5 months. There was some kind of a sync corruption that actually busted my phone — turning it off when receiving incoming calls from non-Sprint networks.

The same thing happened last December and the local Sprint store gave me a substitute 600, which worked fine until I tried to sync it this past week.

After it busted on Thursday while I tried to sync up my new contacts from last week’s Beyond Broadcast conference, I spent a good deal of time on Friday, Saturday and today in the local Sprint store, with the culmination of the first two days having me walk out of the store with a “reset” phone.

Today, I skipped the pleasantries. Within minutes I was vociferously arguing that they needed to make me happy or I was going to cut my contract. After 3 hours in the store this afternoon and speaking to what seemed to be the entire corporate ladder to approve a buyout of my contract termination fee, the store manager finally worked out a deal with me to receive a free 650 upgrade.

Fine.

But what a God awful, painful process to get there.

Even though it was obvious to everyone I spoke with that my phone kept busting/erasing data during the Palm sync process, they wanted nothing to do with my sync log sheet. Both their internal tech folk and the folk on the other end of the phone, kept recommending a reset of my phone, which had already been proved to be a useless approach. At one point, the manager started to lean towards it being a network issue or an issue with my computer… something they could do nothing about; you know, “time to go home Mr. Coon and search the web for answers”… Well, that’s when I lost it, diving into a tirade how:

• I’m locked into a two-year contract with Sprint (like the rest of the cellphone customers of the world!)
• They branded my Treo 600, so I can’t use it with another carrier (therefore I’m holding you responsible for *any* problems. Screw hunting down Treo or Palm or Mac tech support!)
• I’m standing in their brick and mortar customer touch point (and you can’t help me!? wtf!)

I couldn’t help it, I got Jersey on their asses. And that must’ve been the language they understood.

So yeah, the long-story short is that I now have a new Treo 650… and a new 2-year contract. Fuckers.

Prepare yourself for my soon-to-be-written email asking for your contact information… again.

/end rant

UPDATE: My new 650 is working like a charm. Next time Sprint folks, just give a seven year-long customer with an unfixable problem a free upgrade. It’s good business.

I could get really snarky with this post (yes, Tish, I do have it in me), but I’ll let the images below speak for themselves:

(via Miss Rogue and David King)

As I tried to explain to Anil, my move over to Wordpress was more of a philosophical move than a practical move. It’s absolutely true that I’m primarily a designer and writer (and not a programmer in the very least), and a simple interface for publishing my thoughts is a priority, but I’ve been feeling a bit too much like a Monday morning quarterback recently. I mean, honestly, how can I speak about the benefits of open source design/development, when I’m adverse to stepping out of my controlled TypePad experience to get my hands just a little bit dirty with Wordpress?

Anil, Ben/Mena Trott and crew over at Six Apart have a range of reputable services that meet the needs of a range of people and organizations; I just happen to be one person who has morphed out of their persona set. So to the fabulous ladies of TypePad support — Carla, Kymberlie, Colleen, Laura — thank you for everything, but I’m moving on to the Wordpress community. Speaking of community, a handful of people helped me get this WordPress blog up and running with relative ease:

• Christine, of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin fame, helped me pull my .php tweaks together from across the globe, in-between working her garden and prepping for a dinner party.
• Ianiv, of blogginghelp.com, pointed me in the right direction to get my permalinks synched up with my TypePad permalinks. His response time was practically immediate.
• The WordPress Codex community is full of helpful people and an immense library full of support threads.

So, I’m finally using the open source software I’ve been so geeked about. I gotta admit… it’s fun floating about, tweaking code and using a tool by the people, for the people.

UPDATE: Here’s a perfect example of why I’m finished with Typepad. I’m trying to download all of the images from my TypePad account (yeah, I know, I should’ve kept a local folder) and they don’t allow FTP access. This is the response I received from my help ticket to get FTP access:

“I apologize for the confusion. Currently, there isn’t a way to download all of your files at once, you’ll have to access each separately and download that way. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ll be looking at adding more options to the File Manager for a future release, so thank you for letting us know you’d find that helpful.”

Providing FTP access to my files is TypePad feature dependent? I’m sorry, but that’s bogus.