Fry’s Electronics is a Bay Area institution. Fry’s has notoriously poor customer service paired with excellent selection and an amazingly great no questions asked return policy.
How bad is the customer service?
When Best Buy set up shop here, they ran a sequence of ads asking local Bay Area residents what they thought of Fry’s customer service. Let’s be clear, they said that their pimply faced sales reps knew more about the products they were selling than the other guys sales reps. They were saying the other guy had set the bar so low, that they could vault over it …
Fry’s Sales Reps Mislead
Many years ago I learned that a Fry’s Electronics rep would mislead you. The sales rep in 1998 sold me a VCR that he said could skip over ads. Stupid Kostadis, what the sales rep meant was that there was a 30 second skip button on my VCR.
Two years ago, I relearned that lesson when I tried to buy a portable AC. The sales rep tried to sell me the product he was tasked with selling even though it was the wrong product for my needs.
Fry’s as a warehouse
The last two years I have used Fry’s as a warehouse. I show up with a piece of paper that describes the precise product I want. I avoid every single sales rep in the store, pick up the product, and then leave. If I have any questions I use my cell phone to look the information up. If a sales rep approaches me I growl at them: Go away. If they try and offer help: I say no, I don’t need it.
That approach mostly worked. Until today.
The all-time low
I wanted to buy some memory for my new 10” netbook. So I write down the specifications, and I march into Fry’s expecting to find the part and leave.
Unfortunately I could not just pick up the memory module from an aisle. A sales rep had to enter the specifications and then fetch me the part. I was ready to turn around and leave but figured that the simple task of entering some data into a computer and fetching the memory should preclude the usual set of Fry’s shenanigans.
But no.
The sales rep enters the information I carefully wrote down, tells me the price and I say okay. But before I sign and she gets her commission, she asks me a question. The question made it clear to both of us that she didn’t have the part I wanted. Instead of admitting that she could not fulfill my order, the Fry’s shenanigans began.
First she says that:
The memory module does not exist. That the memory module whose specifications I recorded from a memory module being sold on Amazon did not exist.
When I look at her with disbelief and say, no I want this specific part, she turns around and says that
To get the memory module I wanted, I had to buy 4 GB.
And when I refuse to do that, she starts mumbling stuff. Frustrated, and concerned that her inability to speak English was causing a misunderstanding, I ask if she could just get me the part so I could read the packaging for myself and determine if I wanted to buy it. Her response was:
No
Okay, so I can’t get the part I want, I can’t look at the part I before I buy it, but there is an excellent return policy.
Wait, I know of a website that lets me get the part I want, doesn’t let me touch the part before I buy it, and has an excellent return policy …
Hmm…
And so 15 years later my sordid affair with Fry’s is over. I will never buy anything from that store as long as there is the option to buy it from Best Buy or Amazon. And if it only exists at Fry’s, I will live without the product.
After almost a year long hiatus, I got my python program twitterblog to work again.
twitterblog lets me take a twitter time line and directly dump it into my typepad blog.
There were a couple of limitations of the original software, which are now fixed, and on top of which I added a couple of new features.
So the new features are the ability to specify the title from the command line with the –T option and the ability to specify an end time for a time line so you print out the tweets from 4 days ago, and only four days ago using the –e option.
I also fixed a bug related to how tweets that contained non-ascii characters were being treated. Normally twitter returns nothing but text, but if the text contains UTF-8, the rather simplistic parser I had would puke.
Now if I detect an error while parsing, I’ll do something semi-intelligent, but at least no longer crash.
Python continues to impress with it’s syntax and it’s wealth of libraries.
Okay so they are virtual and not quite real, but hot-doggedy-damn.
I saw 8 CPU’s in Windows 7 viewer and that was just cool. Almost 10 years ago I thought it was super cool that I had an Octane as a workstation with TWO processors, and here I am with my new shiny laptop and it has EIGHT.
So it’s really cool that we can use dynamic web technologies to have user interfaces that allow for maximum configurability…
BUT THAT’S NOT GOOD UI DESIGN.
Just because you mr. web designer decided that I need to be able to click and remove every UI element (so that I find myself trying to figure out how I lost the all important panel) doesn’t mean you should.
Building UI elements and forcing me, the VERY BAD UI DESIGNER to figure this out is an abrogation of your responsibility.
Over the last 30+ years, what has become apparent is that it’s all about the applications and not about the hardware.
In the 1980’s Apple pissed away it’s lead because it never knew how to court developers the way MSFT did.
And in the cell phone market, Apple has shown how to make a market for applications, and MSFT intends to demonstrate that they know how to make money for application developers and how to treat application developers.
The good news for Apple is that the reasons this backlash exists are completely meaningless to most normal people. That doesn’t make it right. But it should not affect peoples’ purchasing habits or their enjoyment of the iPhone’s standard features.
So it goes.
20 years ago the importance of applications was lost on Apple. More importantly the importance of a rich development community, and apparently 20 years later, the lesson is still lost.
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Here’s some food for thought: If you have nude photos of your wife on your cell phone, hang onto it.
Phillip Sherman of Arkansas learned that lesson after he left his phone behind at a McDonald’s restaurant and the photos ended up online. Now he and his wife, Tina, are suing the McDonald’s Corp., the franchise owner and the store manager.
The suit was filed Friday and seeks a jury trial and $3 million in damages for suffering, embarrassment and the cost of having to move to a new home.
The suit says that Phillip Sherman left the phone the Fayetteville store in July and that employees promised to secure it until he returned.
Manager Aaron Brummley declined to comment, and other company officials didn’t return messages.
D’oh.
With 8 GB of storage, a reasonably good camera, and a desire to photograph everything for posterity, this is going to be happening a lot more frequently than we would like.
I believe being able to remotely wipe a phone of all contents is going to be a key feature of cell phone’s going forward.
And sooner rather than later, folks are going to learn the value of encryption and strong passwords.
I wonder if we’ll see biometrics make it into phones?
I have been suffering with the my ATT Tilt, henceforth known as the, Piece-of-shit Cell Phone.
I had no idea how bad the experience was. Well maybe. My wife would sneer at my bumbling attempts to do anything with one hand, the absurdly short battery life, the large but mostly useless keyboard, but I faithful to the Microsoft cause stayed the course.
No more.
I am in love.
The E71 battery life is ungodly. No, I don’t do it justice. It’s Phelpsian.
The one-handed use of the phone is Boltian. Try to use an iphone or windows mobile with one hand. Go ahead, try it. Even better, try using an iphone with one hand while holding groceries at the farmer’s market. I defy you to try it.
Failed, didn’t we?
Still trying to figure out where the “slider to turn it on” is? Still trying to figure out where the number 5 is on the keypad, aren’t we?
And the keyboard. Oh that keyboard. I have these huge fingers, these ridiculous, stubby fingers that my genes bequeathed to me. And yet this keyboard works. Reviewers who tell you that the keyboard is too small are weak-willed, sniveling, cover-your-ass types who can’t admit that the keyboard works for people with big-hands because they feel they’ll sounding like Nokia fan-boys. This keyboard works for me, and I have hands that are ~12 inches from thumb to pinky, and approximately ~10 inches from the base of my palm to the top of my index finger. And I am not known for my dexterity.
And it’s even stylish. Yes, the Finns have made a stylish phone. Unbelievable perhaps, but true.
And of course, since it’s a Nokia phone, the audio quality is surreal, the device will only break if you throw it under an on-rushing train and frankly it just makes you good holding such a well engineered device.
Okay it’s not a perfect phone. The darned software doesn’t match the glorious experience of the phone.
For the corporate world, you really need Goodlink to be happy and unless you are willing to endure some entertaining phone hacking you’ll have to wait for Goodlink version 5.0. You do need to buy a whole bunch of software including an IM client.
And the S60 need a fair bit of customization until the UI experience is usable.
And yes, the iphone user-experience with two hands is superior.
I am currently running Vista on my new shiny tablet.
And for the most part this has been a wonderful experience. I find the user-interface to be significantly more elegant. The system as a whole seems to hang better together than XP.
However, I did run into a problem with my VPN. Now it turns out, for reasons that are a complete mystery to me, that Norton 360 and my Cisco VPN will not work together. After a lot of pain and frustration I decided to call Symantec today and ask for help.
First the helpful person on the phone told me to wait a sec while she logged on to my computer. To which I responded:
How do I disable that feature?
After a lot of time on the phone, the helpful person told me to:
Add a rule that allows any piece of software to use any port and any protocol to go in and out of my computer
Trust every interface.
I was in a rush, and just relieved I could use my VPN and have some kind of antivirus software, so I didn’t pay too much attention to what she told me to do.
But later on this evening I thought…
Hmmm…
Now I may not be a network expert but step 1 and step 2 are the moral equivalent of:
Turn off the firewall.
Symantec rather than tell me honestly:
Dude the product you spent 79$ doesn’t actually work with this other piece of software, so go to advanced options and turn off the firewall.
The helpful helpdesk person walked me through a convoluted process to disable the software without explicitly disabling it.
