August 2010 Archives
(Note: This is a rant. Rants ain't short. If you don't want to read a rant, or a longish rant, stop here.)
ROUND ONE, MOVING ON UP (FROM A "DUMBPHONE")
So I've been using a "dumbphone" for a bazillion years, happily enough. A few years ago, I moved up to a slightly newer model which had Bluetooth, so I could use a Bluetooth headset, which I like a lot. (It also had a camera, which I never got the hang of.)
But over the last few months, it was clear that it was past time for me to try something newer.
One reason, to relate to what the mainstream is using.
Two, to have something that will let me try sundry smartphone apps and accessories, e.g., to be able to review them or simply try the things otherwise writing about. I've been writing about smartphones, mobile apps, and accessories (see http://www.dern.com/artic.shtml#SmartPhones ); maybe having one will let me get additional assignments, and/or write more knowledgeably.
Three, who know, maybe having mobile access to my email and the web will be useful?
And four, for mobile broadband access a notebook, via "tethering," especially since I'm often trying a press loaner.
I'd been debating between a smartphone -- iPhone, BlackBerry, or something that would run Google Android -- and an iPod Touch, which would give me the "apps" experience, albeit without the "phone" part.
Anyway: I've been an AT&T Wireless customer since before whenever it was that AT&T spun off and sold its wireless division to Cingular, which in turn upnamed themselves back to AT&T Wireless, something like that, for probably well over a decade. I.e., I'm a known customer. And by now -- ten-plus years -- I've spent what's got to be well over ten thousand dollars in service with AT&T Wireless, with the likelihood I'll stay with them, barring some reason to change.
In terms of my actual phone, I've been provisioned, or doing a lot of my window-shopping, at a specific local store. They don't know me (I think), since I'm in there maybe a few times a year.
So back around April or May, when I decided it was time to try a smartphone, I was torn between getting an iPod Touch, so I could try apps without committing to more per-month costs. But I decided that the iPhone 4, then announced but not yet out, would have some of the features I want (multitasking) or think I want/want the option of (tethering to a notebook). Good timing on my part.
I'd read, of course, about the see-the-newest-Star Wars-movie-class lines and strategies, and had not interest in trying that hard. My local store, when I poked my head in a week or so before the first shipments were due, said i could simply sign up, on a list, and they would order me one.
So I signed up, putting my name and phone number on the list on the clipboard.
ROUND TWO: RECORD-KEEPING, NINETEENTH-CENTURY STYLE
A few days after whenever it was that the iPhone 4 was supposed to arrive, I stopped by. The sign outside said, "Come back Tuesday."
Wednesday, I called to see if my iPhone was in stock. "Do you remember your salesperson's name?" they asked me.
Surely you jest, I thought. "Sorry, no," I replied politely enough.
"Was it a man or a woman?"
"I don't remember."
"Did they have glasses?"
"Why do you need to know?"
Apparently the received reserved machines are filed by salesperson, I guess, and even though I've got a name, there's no app for easily searching and finding on this basis. Anyway, somebody went to the back room and looked. "Can you call back every few days?" they asked.
"I supposed."
And yet, then, oddly: "We'll call you when your phone arrives."
I hung up confused. Which is it -- do they need me to call, or will they call me?
ROUND THREE: HUH?
Weeks pass. Clearly I'm not panting for an iPhone. I'm doing an errand nearby, so I poke my head in again. "Is my iPhone in yet?
"Did you order one?"
"I left my name and phone number on the clipboard, after talking with a sales rep for about fifteen minutes about my current plan, and what the various options were with the iPhone."
"Did we get your credit card and run an order?"
"No."
So apparently , much to my surprise, I HADN'T actually yet ordered an iPhone.
Obviously -- as I remarked to the mildly apologetic sales person -- if I'd been more concerned or eager, I would have called or checked in sooner, and this error would have been uncovered sooner.
Apple of course hasn't suffered sales-wise from not being able to sell me an iPhone yet; the store had none in stock, my phone will hopefully be available in a week or so.
And I did raise my eyebrows at the end of the order process, after getting my credit card back along with my receipt, and suggest that perhaps AT&T Wireless would, when the phone arrived, like to do something to make it up to me, a loyal customer for a decade, for the confusion. (Not to mention the nuisance and delay.)
But the question is, why didn't the salesperson actually take my order? That's like say, yeah, we've got burgers, but skipping "May I take your order?"
ROUND FOUR: DON'T CALL US, WE'LL CALL YOU
OK, so I'm clearly not in a great hurry.
AT&T said they'd call when my iPhone arrived.
I normally don't check email between Friday evening and Monday morning. A week after I'd done the paperwork that AT&T Wireless store folks had forgotten to have me do a month sooner, I check my email around 4:30PM on Sunday, for some reason... and see email from AT&T Wireless, from that Friday afternoon, letting me know my iPhone has arrived.
It's 4:30PM. The store closes at 5PM on Sundays.
So much for calling. This really is a store that doesn't do what they say they will, or know what they mean when they say something.
ROUND FIVE: SORRY, WE'RE INCOMPREHENSIBLY SLOW
I'm not able to get to the AT&T Wireless store until the weekend.
The store is not crowded.
So I get there, early afternoon. There are at least four people in the store, all helping somebody.
There are maybe six people ahead of me, maybe four.
It takes them OVER 45 MINUTES to get to me. Even the Post Office or local drug store where I live is faster, which often isn't saying much.
And that's just for the store manager semi-triaging, to find out why I was there, and fetch my machine from the back, open it, and get it ready so a sales person could help me when my turn came.
There was one person waiting to buy one simple, inexpensive item they couldn't get elsewhere... and they, too, were forced to cool their heels for 30 to 45 minutes, there's nobody working a sales-only register for the simple requests.
I'm nearly ready to give up, but it would take more time to leave and try another time.
What's really annoying is that this particular AT&T Wireless location shares a parking lot with a large, established, well-known independent bookstore. We could be browsing nearby... and be a lot less irked. Even if this store (whose location I'm not identifying) isn't savvy enough to provision waiting customers with those wireless vibrating reservation thingies that lots of restaurants offer, if I were the bookstore managers (and knew about this problem), I'd offer to provide them.
So, finally, my turn comes. The sales person says, "Wait while I go in back and get your phone." "It's right behind you," I say. "Somebody else already got it out."
They go in the back, and come out without my phone, of course, but after a minute or two figure things out.
So I finally get my iPhone.
In a frosty, irked, annoyed, irritated, unhappy, but calm and polite tone of voice, I summarize the tragedy of errors on this store's part that have caused me to wait roughly a month longer than I should have. "Perhaps," I suggest quasi-archly, "you might be able to do something to reduce my unhappiness." (Or something like that.)
They apologize, but, with iPhone accessories, iTunes/App store gift cards and whatnot all around them, nobody offers to staunch my unhappiness, beyond a vague promise to do so later on. No twenty bucks of iTunes card, no offer to reduce some part of my cost, nothing.
They do, to their credit, port my phone contact information from my old dumbphone's SIM card to the iPhone. Easy, they've got a machine for that.
There's also no effort to sell me a case, a Bluetooth headset (just as well, as it turns out, ignoring the fact that I've got one). I ask about the "free case" I'd heard about, to address the antenna problem. "You order that through Apple, they'll get it to you in two weeks." Nobody points out that that's just a "bumper," more or less a small band-aid, and won't actually protect this shiny, expensive new object I've just bought from them.
Again, this isn't about the iPhone. It's about customer service. This is how stores from a franchise, and businesses as a whole, lose customers.
HEY AT&T, MAYBE SELLING IPHONES ISN"T YOUR CORE COMPETANCY...
When I started this fulmination, I thought my point was about how Apple needs to be more discriminating about its business partners, as they reflect poorly on Apple, and in turn, are likely to reduce what I spend with Apple.
But then I realized, that's the wrong view. This is the first Apple product I've bought, and I might easily not spend more than I spent on the iPhone proper in follow-up AppleCare, accessories or apps from Apple. Apple's already gotten most of what they're going to get from me. Maybe Apple's accessory and app partners care. And it's not like there aren't bazillions of people buying iPhones, what I do or say, or to whom, as a consumer customer, isn't likely to make a big diff.
But AT&T Wireless needs to care. All they need to do to keep getting that monthly payment from me is NOT PISS ME OFF. And we passed that milestone a while back.
And all they had to do to not piss me off was run their store non-ineptly... and act (or be) more concerned when they didn't.
This is the same reason I do fly Southwest Airlines as my first choice, and JetBlue as my second; pretty much all the other airlines have, over time, been annoyingly unhelpful, incompetent, apathetic, or otherwise useless when something went wrong that created problems for us passengers, leaving us to flounder unless we knew what to do, who to complain to, or could YELL REAL LOUD.
So, Apple, partner with whoever you want, your business clearly isn't suffering. Maybe you don't want too many more iPhone customers until there's more bandwidth available, anyway.
But AT&T, you've got competition. You're not the only company selling iPhones. And there's enough non-iPhone phones and carriers around... many of us don't need our smartphone to be an iPhone badly enough to keep giving money to somebody who doesn't seem to care.
I've got a month to decide whether I like the iPhone... and also how annoyed I still am with AT&T Wireless.
Anyway, enough about AT&T Wireless (mostly). Now that I've got my iPhone -- my first "smartphone" -- it's time to figure out how to use it, what it can (and can't do), and, well, enjoy it.
Which is, not surprisingly, another story.
ROUND ONE, MOVING ON UP (FROM A "DUMBPHONE")
So I've been using a "dumbphone" for a bazillion years, happily enough. A few years ago, I moved up to a slightly newer model which had Bluetooth, so I could use a Bluetooth headset, which I like a lot. (It also had a camera, which I never got the hang of.)
But over the last few months, it was clear that it was past time for me to try something newer.
One reason, to relate to what the mainstream is using.
Two, to have something that will let me try sundry smartphone apps and accessories, e.g., to be able to review them or simply try the things otherwise writing about. I've been writing about smartphones, mobile apps, and accessories (see http://www.dern.com/artic.shtml#SmartPhones ); maybe having one will let me get additional assignments, and/or write more knowledgeably.
Three, who know, maybe having mobile access to my email and the web will be useful?
And four, for mobile broadband access a notebook, via "tethering," especially since I'm often trying a press loaner.
I'd been debating between a smartphone -- iPhone, BlackBerry, or something that would run Google Android -- and an iPod Touch, which would give me the "apps" experience, albeit without the "phone" part.
Anyway: I've been an AT&T Wireless customer since before whenever it was that AT&T spun off and sold its wireless division to Cingular, which in turn upnamed themselves back to AT&T Wireless, something like that, for probably well over a decade. I.e., I'm a known customer. And by now -- ten-plus years -- I've spent what's got to be well over ten thousand dollars in service with AT&T Wireless, with the likelihood I'll stay with them, barring some reason to change.
In terms of my actual phone, I've been provisioned, or doing a lot of my window-shopping, at a specific local store. They don't know me (I think), since I'm in there maybe a few times a year.
So back around April or May, when I decided it was time to try a smartphone, I was torn between getting an iPod Touch, so I could try apps without committing to more per-month costs. But I decided that the iPhone 4, then announced but not yet out, would have some of the features I want (multitasking) or think I want/want the option of (tethering to a notebook). Good timing on my part.
I'd read, of course, about the see-the-newest-Star Wars-movie-class lines and strategies, and had not interest in trying that hard. My local store, when I poked my head in a week or so before the first shipments were due, said i could simply sign up, on a list, and they would order me one.
So I signed up, putting my name and phone number on the list on the clipboard.
ROUND TWO: RECORD-KEEPING, NINETEENTH-CENTURY STYLE
A few days after whenever it was that the iPhone 4 was supposed to arrive, I stopped by. The sign outside said, "Come back Tuesday."
Wednesday, I called to see if my iPhone was in stock. "Do you remember your salesperson's name?" they asked me.
Surely you jest, I thought. "Sorry, no," I replied politely enough.
"Was it a man or a woman?"
"I don't remember."
"Did they have glasses?"
"Why do you need to know?"
Apparently the received reserved machines are filed by salesperson, I guess, and even though I've got a name, there's no app for easily searching and finding on this basis. Anyway, somebody went to the back room and looked. "Can you call back every few days?" they asked.
"I supposed."
And yet, then, oddly: "We'll call you when your phone arrives."
I hung up confused. Which is it -- do they need me to call, or will they call me?
ROUND THREE: HUH?
Weeks pass. Clearly I'm not panting for an iPhone. I'm doing an errand nearby, so I poke my head in again. "Is my iPhone in yet?
"Did you order one?"
"I left my name and phone number on the clipboard, after talking with a sales rep for about fifteen minutes about my current plan, and what the various options were with the iPhone."
"Did we get your credit card and run an order?"
"No."
So apparently , much to my surprise, I HADN'T actually yet ordered an iPhone.
Obviously -- as I remarked to the mildly apologetic sales person -- if I'd been more concerned or eager, I would have called or checked in sooner, and this error would have been uncovered sooner.
Apple of course hasn't suffered sales-wise from not being able to sell me an iPhone yet; the store had none in stock, my phone will hopefully be available in a week or so.
And I did raise my eyebrows at the end of the order process, after getting my credit card back along with my receipt, and suggest that perhaps AT&T Wireless would, when the phone arrived, like to do something to make it up to me, a loyal customer for a decade, for the confusion. (Not to mention the nuisance and delay.)
But the question is, why didn't the salesperson actually take my order? That's like say, yeah, we've got burgers, but skipping "May I take your order?"
ROUND FOUR: DON'T CALL US, WE'LL CALL YOU
OK, so I'm clearly not in a great hurry.
AT&T said they'd call when my iPhone arrived.
I normally don't check email between Friday evening and Monday morning. A week after I'd done the paperwork that AT&T Wireless store folks had forgotten to have me do a month sooner, I check my email around 4:30PM on Sunday, for some reason... and see email from AT&T Wireless, from that Friday afternoon, letting me know my iPhone has arrived.
It's 4:30PM. The store closes at 5PM on Sundays.
So much for calling. This really is a store that doesn't do what they say they will, or know what they mean when they say something.
ROUND FIVE: SORRY, WE'RE INCOMPREHENSIBLY SLOW
I'm not able to get to the AT&T Wireless store until the weekend.
The store is not crowded.
So I get there, early afternoon. There are at least four people in the store, all helping somebody.
There are maybe six people ahead of me, maybe four.
It takes them OVER 45 MINUTES to get to me. Even the Post Office or local drug store where I live is faster, which often isn't saying much.
And that's just for the store manager semi-triaging, to find out why I was there, and fetch my machine from the back, open it, and get it ready so a sales person could help me when my turn came.
There was one person waiting to buy one simple, inexpensive item they couldn't get elsewhere... and they, too, were forced to cool their heels for 30 to 45 minutes, there's nobody working a sales-only register for the simple requests.
I'm nearly ready to give up, but it would take more time to leave and try another time.
What's really annoying is that this particular AT&T Wireless location shares a parking lot with a large, established, well-known independent bookstore. We could be browsing nearby... and be a lot less irked. Even if this store (whose location I'm not identifying) isn't savvy enough to provision waiting customers with those wireless vibrating reservation thingies that lots of restaurants offer, if I were the bookstore managers (and knew about this problem), I'd offer to provide them.
So, finally, my turn comes. The sales person says, "Wait while I go in back and get your phone." "It's right behind you," I say. "Somebody else already got it out."
They go in the back, and come out without my phone, of course, but after a minute or two figure things out.
So I finally get my iPhone.
In a frosty, irked, annoyed, irritated, unhappy, but calm and polite tone of voice, I summarize the tragedy of errors on this store's part that have caused me to wait roughly a month longer than I should have. "Perhaps," I suggest quasi-archly, "you might be able to do something to reduce my unhappiness." (Or something like that.)
They apologize, but, with iPhone accessories, iTunes/App store gift cards and whatnot all around them, nobody offers to staunch my unhappiness, beyond a vague promise to do so later on. No twenty bucks of iTunes card, no offer to reduce some part of my cost, nothing.
They do, to their credit, port my phone contact information from my old dumbphone's SIM card to the iPhone. Easy, they've got a machine for that.
There's also no effort to sell me a case, a Bluetooth headset (just as well, as it turns out, ignoring the fact that I've got one). I ask about the "free case" I'd heard about, to address the antenna problem. "You order that through Apple, they'll get it to you in two weeks." Nobody points out that that's just a "bumper," more or less a small band-aid, and won't actually protect this shiny, expensive new object I've just bought from them.
Again, this isn't about the iPhone. It's about customer service. This is how stores from a franchise, and businesses as a whole, lose customers.
HEY AT&T, MAYBE SELLING IPHONES ISN"T YOUR CORE COMPETANCY...
When I started this fulmination, I thought my point was about how Apple needs to be more discriminating about its business partners, as they reflect poorly on Apple, and in turn, are likely to reduce what I spend with Apple.
But then I realized, that's the wrong view. This is the first Apple product I've bought, and I might easily not spend more than I spent on the iPhone proper in follow-up AppleCare, accessories or apps from Apple. Apple's already gotten most of what they're going to get from me. Maybe Apple's accessory and app partners care. And it's not like there aren't bazillions of people buying iPhones, what I do or say, or to whom, as a consumer customer, isn't likely to make a big diff.
But AT&T Wireless needs to care. All they need to do to keep getting that monthly payment from me is NOT PISS ME OFF. And we passed that milestone a while back.
And all they had to do to not piss me off was run their store non-ineptly... and act (or be) more concerned when they didn't.
This is the same reason I do fly Southwest Airlines as my first choice, and JetBlue as my second; pretty much all the other airlines have, over time, been annoyingly unhelpful, incompetent, apathetic, or otherwise useless when something went wrong that created problems for us passengers, leaving us to flounder unless we knew what to do, who to complain to, or could YELL REAL LOUD.
So, Apple, partner with whoever you want, your business clearly isn't suffering. Maybe you don't want too many more iPhone customers until there's more bandwidth available, anyway.
But AT&T, you've got competition. You're not the only company selling iPhones. And there's enough non-iPhone phones and carriers around... many of us don't need our smartphone to be an iPhone badly enough to keep giving money to somebody who doesn't seem to care.
I've got a month to decide whether I like the iPhone... and also how annoyed I still am with AT&T Wireless.
Anyway, enough about AT&T Wireless (mostly). Now that I've got my iPhone -- my first "smartphone" -- it's time to figure out how to use it, what it can (and can't do), and, well, enjoy it.
Which is, not surprisingly, another story.
To get to my email and do some of the file management for my web site, I still use a shell account (if you've just said "Huh? Whazzat?" you're free to stop here and go to the next entry) (it's a Command Line User Interface (CLUI) access to a *Nix account) (think of it like Windows CMD command box) (still with me?) , and, because of the way I work, files accumulate.
I'm not a Unix maven by any means. I'm an end user. I've been using Unix as a command-line user since 1983, included a "Enough Unix to Survive" chapter in my 1993 Internet book, The Internet Guide For New Users, but there's a lot I never learned or don't remember.
In particular, ways to look for files, and disk usage by size. There's du and some other command I don't remember at the moment, but sorting by size, and then sub-shelling to use rm (which, of course, I've aliased to include the dash-i option, to avoid accidentally blowing away way too much stuff).
But pruning out older, unneeded files via the command line is time-consuming.
On my Windows machines, it's easy; Windows Explorer lets me click-sort files by size.
Fortunately, I've found a way to do this on my shell account, without even adding a new tool. I've been using the free FileZilla as my Windows FTP client, which displays filename, date, and size for the shell account as well as on my Windows box. And, it turns out, FileZilla has Explorer-like abilities at both ends to rename and even delete files.
So now all I have to do is click on the FileZilla date or size column, select what should go, and press Delete. Another problem solved!
Most of the articles I write get submitted electronically, which beats
the heck out of what I had to do decades ago, namely, snail mail or
overnight, or faxing. After making a copy to keep... or, in the really
old days, having made a carbon copy, using carbon paper. For some of my
music reviews for the Boston Globe, I got in my car and drove over to
Morrissey Boulevard, and handed my hardcopy to somebody. In the early
days of the online personal computing world, I sometimes got to submit
electronically, by dialing up using phone and modem, and pushing the
article into their system as directed.
These days, not so hard: it's either email, or directly to the content management system.
But for larger files, like multi-megabyte fotos, or video, that's a bit much for email. I can create passworded directories in my web site, but that takes a few minutes... and adds more megabytes to keep track of and delete, if I don't want to go overquota and pay more.
I've got a paid FlickR account, which means space isn't a concern, but FlickR sizes down the fotos, and I've found it a PITA (ache in the posterior) to organize, plus I haven't yet figured out how to set up specific access shares. Ditto YouTube and some other media-posting sites I've got accounts with.
Fortunately, there are bunches of services offering free/fee online space, which can be shared. (Spacewise, I could simply email via Gmail, but that doesn't solve the problem of overwhelming the recipient's mailbox.)
I've just started trying DropBox.com, I set up an account a week or three ago, just logged in, created a sharable folder and "invited" the intended recipient.
Eric Grevstad, my sharee du jour (who reports, "I always wanted to be a sharee. Now I've got ''My Sharee Amour' running through my head") says it works fine... he declined to download the DropBox program, but (as I presumed it would), browser access worked fine.
Another day, another small success!
These days, not so hard: it's either email, or directly to the content management system.
But for larger files, like multi-megabyte fotos, or video, that's a bit much for email. I can create passworded directories in my web site, but that takes a few minutes... and adds more megabytes to keep track of and delete, if I don't want to go overquota and pay more.
I've got a paid FlickR account, which means space isn't a concern, but FlickR sizes down the fotos, and I've found it a PITA (ache in the posterior) to organize, plus I haven't yet figured out how to set up specific access shares. Ditto YouTube and some other media-posting sites I've got accounts with.
Fortunately, there are bunches of services offering free/fee online space, which can be shared. (Spacewise, I could simply email via Gmail, but that doesn't solve the problem of overwhelming the recipient's mailbox.)
I've just started trying DropBox.com, I set up an account a week or three ago, just logged in, created a sharable folder and "invited" the intended recipient.
Eric Grevstad, my sharee du jour (who reports, "I always wanted to be a sharee. Now I've got ''My Sharee Amour' running through my head") says it works fine... he declined to download the DropBox program, but (as I presumed it would), browser access worked fine.
Another day, another small success!
