A World without Gray: Why Customer Support Sucks

I called RCN a year ago shortly after they installed my brand new cable modem account. “Look,” I said to the customer service rep, “I know your support stops where your wire stops, but I just spent 5 hours trying to get my Linksys-based home network running again and I’m wondering if you can tell me if it can be done.”
“Sure,” said the rep, cheerily. “I have one at home.”
“Great! Is there some trick to getting it to work?”
“Um, yes, but I can’t talk with you about it.”
“But there’s some one thing I have to do?”
“Yup.”
“Can’t you just blurt it out?”
“These calls may be monitored.”
“Ok, I understand that, and, for the record, you’ve been great and have followed the guidelines. Is there a Web page that talks about how to do it?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Can you email me the trick?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to help you with this.”
Obviously, this rep was going out on a limb just by saying that RCN cable can be home-networked via Linksys. It was RCN, Inc.’s fault that the call went wrong. Their message that “This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes” should say “We may listen in to make sure our reps aren’t using their own judgment. Remember, here at RCN Customer Support, customer support comes second and protecting ourselves comes first.”
The problem isn’t just that companies are afraid of the legal implications of going beyond the smallest range of responses. It’s that the legal system has scared the gray out of the system. Had the rep said, “Look, we don’t officially support home networking and there’s nothing in the RCN playbook about this, but I have one at home, and here’s something you might try…” I would have understood — from the words and their context — that this wasn’t an officially sanctioned RCN procedure for which I could hold them responsible. Our language accommodates conditionals and qualifiers. Our legal system doesn’t.
Even better, I wish RCN had set up a customer-to-customer support board. I’d be happy to share the PPPoE tip. And I bet the support guy would have already logged on from home with step-by-step instructions on how to get a home network going.
Two followups:
1. After another day of trying, I randomly discovered that you have to unclick the PPPoE box on the Linksys prefs page.
2. RCN Support now answers questions about home networking with the Linksys box.

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Cho Cho Cho, Merry Christmas!

Binyamin Jolkovsky, editor of the Jewish World Review, is passing around an article by Michelle Malkin that says that Ron Sims, county executive in Seattle, deserved the pummeling he took for suggesting that public employees avoid the phrase “Merry Christmas” or any other greeting specific to a particular faith. Malkin says that Sims was wrong to try to exclude religion from the public sphere.
Humbug! It’s not a big deal – not big enough to get all snippy and self-righteous when someone wishes you a cheery “Merry Christmas!” – but it is rude and thoughtless to assume that everyone is of your faith. It’s more troublesome if the person is representing our government. Sims was, in my opinion, 100% correct.
No, it’s really not a big deal. It’s worth a memo or an email reminder, but not worth a reprimand. Personally, if I’m feeling feisty, I respond with a festive “And a happy Chanukah to you!”
And, while we’re on the subject, if you’re Christian, I hope you have a warm and restorative Christmas.

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Meta-Ads

We went to see Jimmy Neutron last night at a National Amusements brand theatre (tagline: “Applying Real-World Stickiness to the Bottom of Your Shoes”). The children in the audience (including ours) enjoyed it. I myself was nationally amused by a screen that came on before the lights went down: “This pre-feature entertainment is brought to you by SomeCo.” [Unfortunately, I was so dazzled by the concept that I forget who the actual sponsor was … not a hearty endorsement of this form of sponsorship.] There then followed three commercials, followed by a number of movie trailers.
Yes, the commercials now are being sponsored. Can’t we please take this up one more meta level and sell sponsorships of sponsorships? “This pre-entertainment sponsorship is being sponsored by Bayview Ford where we deliver on the idea of the idea of customer service!”

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The Red Pill

Gary Stock points us to an academic article by Nick Bostrom of Yale’s Dept. of Philosophy, the title of which poses a question with relative succinctness: “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Dr. Nick summarizes:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

If I understand this – and there’s no reason to think that I do given that my eyes glazed over rather early on – the professor is saying that if our descendents managed to evolve into something post-human and care enough about the past to build a simulation of it, then, yes, we probably are living in a simulation.
Note to my puppet masters: Would it hurt to give me the Brad Pitt skin?

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Have Yourself a Very Jewish Christmas

Ah, Christmas, that most wonderful time of the year. For Jews anyway. None of the stress. All of the time off. You can work without the phone ringing. You can not work without having to pay for it by packing the kids into the car and driving to see relatives constrained to be jolly. So long as you don’t mind those damn Christmas carols blaring everywhere, and can put up with the casual assumption by every town and store clerk in America that you too must be Christian, why it’s the most glorious time of the year!

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Developers x 3

Vergil Iliescu points us to an MP3 (found by his 13-year-old son) that sets to music the footage of Steve Ballmer chanting “Developers developers developers.” You can download the footage at tdcrc.com There’s also a music video that failed to play on my machine.
This continues the Ballmer self-bashing that began with the release of the infamous Monkeyboy video showing Ballmer doing an unfortunately simian dance of enthusiasm at some morale-building internal MSFT event. (I wrote a half-assed defense of Monkeyboy that says that making an ass of yourself in public may be a good thing, especially if you’re an Important Guy like Ballmer.)

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Neology

World Wide Words, a weekly ‘zine, reports that the BBC is gathering its list of 2001’s important additions to the language. Among the entries:
box-cutter
asymmetric warfare
wi-fi
weblog
It’s followed by a list of suggestions from We the People, including:
Potterphobia
e-sackings (being fired by email)
Euronating (media hype over the introduction of the Euro)
Leader envy (people in the US who wish Tony Blair was their President)
Any other suggestions?

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e-pals

Bethann replies to my passing conundrum: What do we call people we know through email and the Web?

I call my Web acquaintances e-pals. You know, like pen pals.

Of course!

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Blogful Statistics

A few people have written in with suggestions for where I might find the statistics I’ve been looking for.
Meg Hourihan writes:

I don’t know if there is any one place that has the kind of blogging stats you’re looking for, but I’d like to see them too. When we were raising funding at Pyra (spring ’00) we crunched some numbers and came up with one interesting stat: Blogger users averaged 2.5 updates *a day* their pages. That was total users, we didn’t do any filter to remove inactive users when we got that number, so I imagine a more realistic number might be higher.

Michel Benevento suggests we take a look at some Yaysoft stats:

you’ll see that you can view a couple of thousand different blogs by latest entry, total entries, average entry per day of, and so on. It uses data from weblogs.com.

Of course, then there’s my own special scientifical journalistical approach to stats: Skip over them when other people cite them and make them up when I need them. It really works. Why, a recent study shows that this approach brings a 68.7% increase in the quality of information. Really.

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Have yourself a Vomitious Flash Xmas

A correspondent who wishes to be identified only as Donald sends us to a Flash-animated Christmas greeting that is tedious, pretentious, empty and boring. But surely it is only a 5 on the scale of tedious, pretentious, empty and boring holiday-themed Flash animations. Do worse! Let me know and I’ll compile the list. I’ll even check it twice. (Note: I’m looking for corporate entries, not personal tedious, pretentious, empty and boring holiday-themed Flash animations. I’m not that mean.)

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