Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

Good Customer Service at 7/11

To give credit where credit is due, 7/11 Corporate has pretty good customer service. About two weeks ago, I filled up my car at a 7/11 gas station and the place was horrible. There was gas all over the floor, and the hose did not detect that the tank was full, overflowing my tank. I filled out a complaint form on their website and did not really expect a call back. Much to my suprise, I got a phone call yesterday from someone at corporate level who actually went to visit the store (!) and found that the detector in the hose was not working properly. The problem has been fixed.

Now that’s customer service.

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Three 1/2 Tales of Horrible Customer Service: Part I - Quicken

I usually tend to buy very little software and try to use open source as much as possible. However, there are just some that I can’t get away - Windows (which comes with my machine), a specific program for my Treo and Microsoft Money. Every few years when my version of Money expires and can no longer be used to download data from credit card companies and banks I shell out $20 to $30 for an upgraded version. And every time I wonder whether alternatives such as Quicken are better (plus run on WINE). So this year I decided to test out Quicken and down the rabbit hole I went.

I downloaded the Deluxe version of Quicken straight of their website. However, when it came to importing 10 years of data, Quicken couldn’t do it out of the box. Quicken does provide a process to do it - it involves exporting Money data into XML and then using a standalone utility provide by Quicken to import the data. I tried that and it promptly failed with Windows Explorer terminating the converter.

I tried calling Quicken once and after getting through to an horribly accented foreigner, I was hung up on. I tried the Live help where a similarly named foreigner directed me to the FAQ entry referenced above. I tried calling again … and again. After Googling the problem and getting through to a semi-normal person, the answer is that the 2007 converter DOES NOT work and THEY KNOW ABOUT IT. Yet it is still on their website for some reason.

Their answer is to use the Quicken 2004 converter and a copy of 2004 Quicken Deluxe which they give you for free. People on the forums mentioned this as being something told by tech support and I was unfortunate to confirm it myself. Of course after trying to conver it that way and loading the new Quicken file - it was empty. Over 5,000 transactions but still empty. The last resort that was provided by Intuit Support was to export each account manually as QIF and import it into Quicken. With over 30 accounts, it wasn’t an option.

Needless to say I asked for a refund. To my suprise they refused since it takes several days to post into their system. I waited a few days and finally after trying several times (and getting kicked out of Live Chat) I got through. Now I get an email that tells me that the refund was issued but it might take upto a month to post.

What kind of business are these people running? A few things such as up-to-date FAQ entries, American tech support, and faster financial systems would have made a big difference.

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The WRONG Way to Sell a $600 Phone

Yesterday my company ordered several of the newly released Treo 700p smart phones for myself and two other people in the company. The list price for these is $649 per phone (before any discounts).

The Bottom Line is that if you are selling something that expensive, then you better make sure that you communicate well with your customers. In this case, Palm’s online order tracking system is absolutely useless, their representatives were rude and their processing of orders is atrocious. Of course, this is much better than two years ago when I ordered my Treo 600 from Handspring only to find a wide gaping hole in their ordering system which lets me look at other people’s orders (I called them and it was promptly fixed).

For the gory details, see below the fold.
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The Law of Unintended Consequences

Some time ago one of our customers asked us for a feature where a certain box on a certain printed document would be limited to a certain size. The feature was promptly put in place and used for the past few weeks. Yesterday, they suddenly realized that some of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the box because of the size is actually important and needed, so the feature had to be dropped. Go figure.

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Why Bad is Good in Spam

While perusing the news, I came across a rather interestingly titled article at CNET: “Zombie trick expected to send spam sky-high”. As many other spam-related stories, this one had an apocalyptic feel to it as well:

According to the SpamHaus Project–a U.K.-based antispam compiler of blacklists that block 8 billion messages a day–a new piece of malicious software has been created that takes over a PC. This “zombie” computer is then used to send spam via the mail server of that PC’s Internet service provider. This means the junk mail appears to come from the ISP, making it very hard for an antispam blacklist to block it. Previously, zombie PCs have been used as mail servers themselves, sending spam e-mails directly to recipients.

This will cause serious problems for the e-mail infrastructure, as it is impractical to block mail with domain names from large ISPs. Linford predicts that ISPs will see a growth in the volume of bulk mail they send and receive over the next two months, with spam levels rising from 75 percent of all e-mail to around 95 percent within a year.

“The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail,” Linford warned. “You’ll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It’s the beginning of the e-mail meltdown.”

Oh no, the email infrustructure “is beginning to fail”, its a “meldown”! Man the deck, close the hatches, the spammers are coming! Seriously, this is probably a thousand times this has been said and email is still standing. Quite the contrary, this development is not the beginning of a spam meltdown but rather the beginning of the end for the spam plague in general. Why do I think so? Lets sit down, analyze the fact and think for ourselves.
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Being a Consultant

Steve Friedl posted an excellent article (via SlashDot):

“So you want to be a consultant…? Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?”

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The Importance of Redundancy

The NY Post is reporting (via Drudge)that a fire knocked out an entire subway line in NYC for 5 years:

A fire in a subway control room has put the C line out of service for up to five years and caused serious problems on the A line that will make the commute miserable for hundreds of thousands of subway riders, officials said yesterday.

The unstaffed room containing 600 electrical devices called “relays” that are used to power signals and switches along a segment of the vital Eighth Avenue line were destroyed Sunday in the blaze.

And guess what, they didn’t have backups! This is why it is important to have redundancy:

The TA said there is no backup power system in place at that location. Without a signal system, Reuter said, “you could only get so many trains on a line. Chambers Street is the choke point in the signal system.”

Posted in Politics, Technology | 1 Comment »

Proper Bug Hunting

Joel has a great piece which mentions the right approach to bug fighting:

For example, if I assign a bug to a developer I expect them to:
1. reproduce the bug
2. if it’s not immediately reproducible, make a good faith effort to figure out why it’s happening to me instead of just assuming that I’m doped up on anti-allergy medication and hallucinating it
3. find the root cause
4. do some searches to see if the same errors were made elsewhere in the code
5. fix them all
6. test the fix
7. think about whether this bug might be causing serious implications for a customer who needs to be told about the fix etc.

That’s the Rosh Gadol behavior. Possible Rosh Katan behaviors would be
1. resolved-not-repro. You can always get away with this once without even trying to repro the bug, because later you can pretend you didn’t understand the bug report.
2. without even reproing the bug, make a change to the source code that seems like it would fix it and resolve it as fixed. If it wasn’t, I’ll catch it when I close the bug, right? And if it’s really still broken, surely another tester will find it.

Rosh Gadol of course is quite the opposite: taking initiative and doing what is desired, not what is requested.

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Wanna Work for Microsoft? Blog Your Resume

This is gotta be one of the stranger things used for recruitment, although not nearly as cool as Google’s weird math puzzles on billboards. If you link to this blog entry from Heather Leigh, a Microsoft recruiter, she promises to look at your resume (via Liudvikas Bukys):

Want me to find your blog resume without the trouble of having to send it to me?

Link from your blog resume to this post and I’ll check out your resume by reviewing my referrals. Pretty stealth, huh? Nobody needs to know except the 2 of us ; )

Not sure if she means plain HTTP referals or trackbacks.

Posted in Technology | 8 Comments »

Selling Public Domain Text Works

Today the 9/11 Commission published its final report. What is interesting is that over 500,000 copies of this report have been printed for sale at bookstores as well as for sale via the Government Printing Office. Except there is one catch - the text is public domain just like all other works produced by the US Government.

This just proves that selling free content and free software works.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

OSS against outsourcing?

All these stories about large companies (Sprint, JP Morgan, and others) outsourcing to India brings some thoughts.

A lof the jobs moving overseas are programming jobs. If a company uses open-source products, and most of the IT effort involved is not programming but rather integration or service, than it would follow that those jobs should stay in the US while the actual programming is done by the open source community (it is hard to imagine a company that does service and support on your operating system to have technicians fly in from India). Could switching to open source save the high-tech IT industry in the US?

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