In the past I’ve written about my esteem for Cook’s Illustrated. They make it easy to be a great cook.
Tonight, however, Cook’s has lowered their reputation with me considerably, by trying to scam me out of my money.
May 17
While visiting New Jersey this weekend, I stopped at the Williams-Sonoma store in the Short Hills Mall. Williams-Sonoma is an upscale kitchen-accessories store. The Short Hills Mall is an “ultra-premium” mall, the sort of place where the anchor stores are Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s instead of JCPenney and Target. What should’ve been a premium shopping experience turned into a frustrating trip that makes me unlikely to visit that store again.
May 06
I read today that the font foundry Monotype is now offering a service providing over 2,000 fonts for use on Web sites. This sounded like great news—one of the things I hate about trying to make a decent web site is the horrid state of web typography.
Of course, it’s too good to be true.
Apr 03
If you’ve read my article “The Art of Turboing,” you know that I’ve had run-ins with UPS before. Years ago, they didn’t offer package tracking for ground shipments.
Although UPS has fixed that, the tracking service they offer… Lies.
It lies often.
What’s the point in having package tracking if it’s so unreliable that you can’t trust it?
I know that Apple requested extra security for the iPad rollout. I can understand not wanting to advertise where a shipping depot might have a large number of prerelease iPads. But surely there was a way to do it that wouldn’t cause anxiety for thousands of expectant customers? This reflected badly not just on UPS, but on Apple as well. It seems odd that Steve Jobs, notorious perfectionist, would accept this kind of inattention to detail from a vendor.
My iPad was shipped from China on the 29th of March. UPS quickly showed it making its way to Alaska, and then to Louisville, Kentucky. It then sat there for days. OK, so far nothing too strange.
Of course, that’s the story now. If you had been watching the package’s progress, you would have seen a number of entries related to clearing Customs. They disappeared from the record a few hours after they appeared.
There was one cryptic entry entitled “UPS Internal Activity” that appeared for a brief while before disappearing. The most interesting part about that entry was that it had a timestamp 10 hours in the future.
At least that entry had a local location stamp. That was the only time that the tracked package appeared to move until it was actually delivered to me. As far as I could see, the package was stuck in Kentucky until being magically teleported into my hands.
At least UPS had two employees watching Twitter to reassure all the confused Apple customers.
FedEx gets this right. I don’t understand what’s so hard for UPS that they can’t master package tracking after all these years.
Certainly, if I have a package to send and I want to be able to track it, I’m not going to choose UPS after this experience!
The iPad did arrive safe and sound, eventually. I used it to compose this post.
Jun 09
I wanted to give Pilot Pens some feedback about their G2 pen line. I like the pens—unlike recent UniBall gel pens, the Pilot G2 doesn’t suddenly stop writing for no apparent reason despite having plenty of ink—except for one small flaw. The rubber finger-grip area has two small nubs from the molding process, and they’re usually just prominent enough to be annoying. Nothing that can’t be fixed with a knife in short order, but if Pilot could improve that part of their manufacturing process, it’d be an even better pen.
Good: They have a customer feedback form on their website. It even lets you fill in all the blanks with the keyboard, instead of being forced to pick up the mouse to select your state.
Bad: Sending in a message via the form gets this reply…
From: MAILER-DAEMON@as.pilotpen.us To: (omitted) Subject: failure notice Hi. This is the qmail-send program at as.pilotpen.us. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out. <pilotpenservice@yahoo.com>: 66.196.97.250 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 554 delivery error: dd Sorry your message to pilotpenservice@yahoo.com cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued [#102]. - mta219.mail.re3.yahoo.com
Worse: Immediately following up that message with
To: (omitted) Subject: PilotPen.us Customer Submission From: Pilot Pen <website@as.pilotpen.us> X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.73] Your email has been received and will be responded to shortly Please note our new contact information: Pilot Consumer Service 3855 Regent Blvd. Jacksonville, FL 32224 Tel. (904) 645 - 9999 Fax (904) 966 - 2974 Sincerely, Your Friends at Pilot Pen
I’m not sure what the worst part of this interaction is:
- Using Yahoo! Mail for your customer service account after going to the trouble to buy a domain name, especially when you’re an international manufacturing company;
- Sending an automated message from a third domain (pilotpen.us) that sounds more like spam than legitimate mail from a commercial interest;
- Telling someone who e-mailed you at the contact link you set up that they should write, call, or FAX you instead;
- Not testing your customer feedback mechanism occasionally to discover it’s massively broken.
The experience sure made me feel less warm and fuzzy about Pilot Pens.
Jan 27
Terry Goodkind wrote a pretty good fantasy story some years ago, Wizard’s First Rule. This turned into a book series, The Sword of Truth. Although the books weren’t all as good as the first—after the fourth one, there were some missteps—the series still told a good, thoughtful tale. They also told a decidedly mature-audiences tale.
When I first heard that Disney/ABC was developing Wizard’s First Rule into a syndicated TV series, “The Legend of the Seeker,” I wondered how they would possibly handle some of the more, ah, exotic content of the book.
It turns out they handled it the way I had feared: by totally bastardizing the book.
Jan 16
In the most recent issue of RISKS Digest, Gene Spafford writes about his experiences with Samsung Blu-ray players. (A more detailed version is on his blog.)
It seems that Samsung published faulty firmware images for the BD-P1500 Blu-ray players on their servers. When these BD-Live equipped players contacted Samsung and retrieved the update, the player was rendered unusable.
Gene says that Samsung is not offering a fix, and that Samsung is offering no restitution for bricking the out-of-warranty model. In fact, if the fix—once Samsung develops or admits to one, if ever—requires the out-of-warranty unit to be sent to the factory for service, it would be at the customer’s expense.
Another, newer Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-ray player that Gene owns became non-responsive after a short period of ownership. He sent it in for warranty repair, and it has been “waiting for parts” for weeks.
I guess I won’t be buying any Samsung products.
Want to drive away customers? An excellent method is to make a mistake that destroys a product they’ve already paid for, refuse to fix it expeditiously, and then charge them for the repair when you do get around to fixing your mistake.
I think Samsung should have immediately sent Gene a new BD-P2500 to replace his dead BD-P2500, and they should have given him a rebuilt BD-P1500 or BD-P2500 to replace the bricked BD-P1500. That would be acknowledging that it was their mistake.
Instead, someone will wind up mentioning it to a particular kind of lawyer, they’ll become the figurehead for a class-action lawsuit, people like Gene will get a coupon good for $20 off their next Samsung Blu-ray player (if purchased in the next 6 months), and the lawyers will make millions.
Jan 12
For a decade now, I’ve been a Saab owner. When I got my first Saab, a leased 1999 9-5 sedan, GM had a large stake in Saab, but the Swedes were still calling the shots. My 9-5 had a lot of GM parts, but it was still a Saab.
I fell in love with that car.
When I next had the opportunity to choose a car, I bought a used 2000 9-5 wagon. The 2000 model year was produced before GM finished buying out Saab, but by the time I bought this car in 2004, the buyout was complete.
Although I still love many things about my Saab, it hasn’t exactly been reliable. Continue reading »
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