Magic Spot Flowing

The final item in the Comcast saga is that I overpaid them by $5.42 and they issued me a check for it, which of course they directed to my old address so it took a while to arrive. But at least dealing with them is over for now. Thank you, neighbor with open wireless.

Yesterday I took the check to the bank, along with another one, to deposit them. Usually I make deposits in my credit union account, but these were low-denomination checks so I decided to deposit them through Bank of America. This is the first time I’ve used one of their new ATMs that can scan your checks, determine their amount, and issue you a receipt with the check image on it. It’s pretty cool. You don’t need a deposit slip or envelope and you don’t even have to enter the amount if the check can be OCRed properly. One of my checks was, but the Comcast one wasn’t. It showed an image (zoomable!) anyway so I was easily able to enter the amount based on the image, even though the check was no longer in my hand. The receipt printed both checks with small but recognizable images (this is optional if you don’t want it, but I thought it was cool).

Big businesses can be annoying to work with, and Bank of America demonstrated this recently when I wanted to change my address. They offer the ability to do that online — sensibly enough, since you can do pretty much everything else with your account online — so after I moved, I did. However, for some reason that I still don’t understand, they refused to complete the online address change, claiming that I had changed my address too recently. That’s utter nonsense, since I lived in the same place for three years and only updated my address once to correct the spelling (yes, I spelled my own address wrong — the street name has two variants that are both common and I chose the wrong one).

It took quite a bit of back-and-forth to correct this, including a visit to the branch where they informed me that since it’s a California account, they can’t change it on the Oregon computer system (WTF? Really?) and it only ended when I described my address change history (or rather, lack thereof) in detail and threatened to move on if they continued to be clueless. Finally I got someone responding to my emails that seemed to realize there was no actual problem, so she changed it for me.

But they do have cool tech.

I’ve written before about my struggles with Comcast — they lose payments, they bill incorrectly, and until recently, calling their general customer service from my cell phone was an exercise in frustration because they would redirect me to New Mexico Comcast based on my area code.

When closing my account with them, I had another struggle: they told me they would send me a final bill, but they didn’t issue the bill before the due date on my previous bill or before the account was closed. When I talked to them, they seemed not to be aware that I had ever been promised such a thing, and maybe not even aware that I had called to cancel my account (even though my account should have shown that I had canceled as well as returning my modem — another poor experience, since it took 30+ minutes while everyone in the place moved at molasses-speed).

Eventually I had to sit on hold on their online chat for a while and request that they tell me the final balance. One representative claimed I should just pay the full amount due and they would refund the balance, but I’ve heard that song and dance before and I didn’t fall for it. To quote myself from March 2008, “Like hell. At this point, they don’t get my money until they prove that they’re supposed to.”

Even after he agreed, he claimed all they could give me was an estimate because they couldn’t calculate the taxes. (Really? How do you do it every month then?)

Today I got a notice in my email that my bill was ready online, so I guess they finally prepared it. I tried to log in to look at it (because the email doesn’t give the amount) and — surprise! — I can’t log in because the account number associated with my login profile has been canceled and is invalid. No, really.

Let’s hope I estimated an amount close to the correct amount when I paid them online. Otherwise I’ll have to wait for my mail to be forwarded to sort this out. (…and I only even get paper statements because they can’t be trusted to send out an email every month.)

” ‘With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get it running on the Tera.’
‘The Terror?’
‘Tera. As in Teraflops.’
‘That does me no good at all. When you say “as in” you are supposed to give me something more familiar to relate it to.’ “

I got a Portland Water Bureau Drinking Water Quality Report in my mailbox today. There’s a section where they list contaminants, including Radium, which is measured in picocuries per liter. There’s also a “Definitions” section which defines picocuries per liter, among other things. The definition is:
“Picocurie is a measurement of radioactivity. One picocurie is a trillion times smaller than one curie.”

Note to the PWB: please see the above Cryptonomicon excerpt for my reaction to this definition.

I was at home today when the postal carrier came by, which turned out to be a good thing, not because he had a package for me, but because he apparently thought I had already moved.

I don’t understand, because I filed a change-of-address that had a start date of 6/27/09 (the day I’m moving). I did get a notice that said that it went through, which is great, but it doesn’t actually confirm the start date, so now I don’t know if the start date is correct but my postal carrier is clueless, or they didn’t add the start date. Either way, fail.

The postal carrier kept trying to convince me that I should leave him a note on the day that I moved so they could start forwarding my mail. I thought that’s what a change of address form was for! I shouldn’t need to leave a note in my mailbox for my postal carrier to get an official change of address put into effect properly. Should I?

A while back I bought an LG Dare. Mostly I like it fairly well, but it has a couple of problems — even leaving aside the fact that it’s now restarted spontaneously four times since I bought it.

One is that it’s hard for it to distinguish between scrolling and selecting. Oddly, the browser and the other functions seem to have different prejudices. The browser tends to scroll when I’m trying to select, and the phonebook and menus tend to select when I’m trying to scroll. You get better at it, but it’s still not perfect.

The other is that it hates commas. And apostrophes, in some cases.

I use a lot of commas when I write email, and even when I write texts or notes. I like commas. Unfortunately, the comma is not on the main QWERTY soft keyboard, nor is it the second option on the T9 punctuation softkey like it used to be. Instead, they prefer @. I understand that @ is used in email addresses, but I honestly do not type email addresses very often unless I’m in an address field (which is less common than being in a text field) and I don’t think I’m very unusual in this regard. Certainly not in text messages, and rarely in the browser. And while I like having the .com key occasionally, I’d really rather have a comma.

The extra keys available on the regular QWERTY change depending on context, but the one I really want, the [, '] option, is never available. In the text messager, it’s [@'] (so I have to shift for ‘) and [.?] (logical). In the browser, it’s [.com], [.] and [/], so neither , nor ‘ is available in QWERTY and I have to switch into symbols for either and press shift to get to the ‘. Argh. I don’t often need to type a URL when I’m in an input field in the browser, only if I’m in the address bar, which is a totally different thing. Why give me those keys? I need my complex clauses and contractions! With apostrophes. No “its cold outside” for this linguist.

The issue of accessing the symbols keyboard brings me to my second major keyboard complaint. Like the iPhone, the QWERTY soft keyboard on the Dare has a switcher-key that turns it to numbers and symbols. However, unlike the iPhone, it has two keys: one for QWERTY and one for symbols. This is less than ideal. The iPhone guys thought this through and realized: if you’re in symbols already, you don’t need the symbol key. Ditto QWERTY. So they gave just one key, which toggles back and forth.

Unfortunately, LG was not that clever, so there are two keys. The ‘reason’, I think is, that in the browser the QWERTY key can also be used to access accented letters, but there’s gotta be a more clever way of doing that than always taking up precious screen real-estate (the Dare has a smaller screen than the iPhone, although a larger keyboard because the QWERTY goes across the long side) with two keys.

All this makes typing on the Dare a much longer and more complex process than it should be, diminishing the practical usefulness of being able to type faster on the QWERTY.

Give me punctuation or give me a red pen!

Say what you like about the original bailout bill, it did not get better with the addition of tax cuts (yes, tax cuts at a time the government is proposing to give away $700B it doesn’t have anyway) and unrelated items. Write or call and urge your rep to vote against it. Strangely, those of you with Republican reps might have better luck for once. The Democrats so far have been annoyingly eager to save Wall Street from itself in the guise of saving us from them.

I just sent Amazon a feedback comment asking if they have either of two features:
1) Notification when an item on your wishlist becomes unavailable, and/or
2) The ability to easily switch from an unavailable edition of something to an available one.

I had quite a few items on my wishlist that had become unavailable. Some of them are really no longer available, but a lot have just changed editions. I want to 1) find out the items are not there without having to go look all the time, and 2) have an easy way to switch.

Do these features actually already exist, and would anyone else use them, if they don’t?

I just navigated a long and stupid phone menu (which had no proper way of failing if you can’t give a phone number that matches your address except to wait for a long time and finally transfer you to customer service) and several customer service representatives who transferred me to yet another representative, with the accompanying hold times, only to try talking to an extremely rude customer service representative who would not explain why my “attempted delivery” notice did not say that I would have to be at home in person to sign for and receive the item I ordered (the 2WG bag, which is coming from Canada).

The delivery notice was placed April 8th. It was placed, first of all, in my mailbox instead of on my door, which is both unusual and frankly kind of silly, because packages aren’t delivered to my mailbox so I don’t expect to find anything about them there. UPS puts them on the door. On the other hand it’s my own fault I don’t check my mail every day.

Second, it didn’t bear any marking showing that a signature was required at the time of delivery. I carefully followed the directions to request redelivery, including signing where designated only to get the notice stuck back in the mailbox (again) with a notation that I had to sign and fill out the address in a place that the instructions definitely did NOT say I had to sign and fill out.

I did, and the notice was picked up Monday. No indication that anything was wrong. But when I called them, I got (beyond the usual “Your package has notice left status.” “Yes. I know. I’m calling because I want to know what happened to it after I returned the notice.” “Oh, well then I have to transfer you to [other department]. Please hold.”) this woman who was extremely rude to me, as if I was the stupidest person in the world not to know that I had to be present for delivery, and who when I asked her why this was not made clear on the notice, left a short silence and then said very curtly “Do you want to schedule a redelivery on this package?”

A: “First I want to know why the notice didn’t tell me I would have to be home to receive it.”
USPS: “Please tell me if you want to schedule a redelivery on this package.”
A: “I would like to know why the notice didn’t tell me –
USPS: “Please tell me if you want to schedule a redelivery on this package.”
A: “I do, but I also want to know why–
USPS: “Well then please hold.”

She did schedule a redelivery, eventually, at which point I just wanted to get the thing done. Throughout the entire thing she was extremely curt.

I called back to register a complaint about her rudeness, and even though I wasn’t able to get her name or ID number, they were able to find out who it was by looking at who scheduled the delivery. So, a complaint will be registered. Which makes me feel a bit better, at least. The rest of the people I talked to were fine, it was just this one.

The postal service screwed this one up by not being clear. Just admit it, apologize, and offer, politely, to fix it. There really is nothing wrong with just saying “I don’t know exactly why this happened, but maybe the postal delivery employee did not realize that this package could not be left at the door or forgot to indicate that on the slip. I/we apologize for any inconvenience. Let’s schedule a redelivery so you can get your package at the best time for you. When would you like it to be redelivered?”

Update: Even better — I got home and said package was waiting for me on the doorstep!

It’s probably churlish to file a further complaint about this, but seriously — that woman was completely wrong, and furthermore, doesn’t the post office know when trackable packages go out for delivery, so shouldn’t they have told me that it was on its way? Instead of making me go through this entire rigmarole?

My previous experiences with Comcast customer service haven’t been too bad, but I had an annoying one this weekend.

First, I got an online chat representative who wouldn’t really tell me anything useful about my bill changing, and referred me to my local service center. He admitted the bill did not make sense to him and that I had been on a promotion, but would not do anything to tell me whether I was still on the promotion or not, or whether I could get on a new one if not.

When I called the local service center the next day, during their listed business hours, I navigated fully through the phone menu, only to find out they were closed during their listed hours.

I wrote an email to Comcast complaining about this. I received three “responses” from them before I received one that was vaguely helpful. The first two said useless things like, here are more service centers near you (where by near they mean, you could drive to them), and yes, their hours are what you said and they haven’t changed. The last one proffered the lame suggestion that maybe (maybe? why don’t you just call them and find out?) they were having a meeting.

Maybe they were, but their message should be changed to say “We are temporarily closed, please call back in X hours.”

I ended up getting another live chat representative who was a bit more helpful, but the whole experience has lowered them in my eyes from “pretty good customer service” to “on the whole rather annoying to deal with”.

I got my second order from Bike Nashbar today and most of it looks fine, but I must say I’m extremely disappointed with the capri-length bike pants I ordered and will definitely be returning them. They’re Nashbar brand and were cheaper than I’m used to (my experience is that good tights run $70-90 unless on sale so I guess capri-length should be a bit cheaper), so I was tempted into ordering them. Never again. As soon as I touched them, I could tell they were thin and scratchy. They have seams right up the inner thighs that scratch when you put them on, and the padded seat is made of poor-quality foam and badly stitched.

Crafted from a blended nylon/Spandex/polyester fabric with a soft, textured interior to create a lightweight, yet warm knicker that wicks moisture away from the body to keep you dry and comfortable. The padded chamois prevents chafing and hot spots for increased comfort.

Yeah. Not so much. Soft and textured equals scratchy, and I don’t think that the foam in the seat meets anything but the vaguest of specifications of “padded chamois”.

I haven’t had the greatest of experiences with Nashbar so far, but most of the stuff they’ve sent has been of acceptable quality, if poorly advertised (not explaining that the rack I ordered was not vertical storage even when I asked and inconsistent offering of weight details on locks) but this just irritates me, both literally and figuratively. I’d rather give my business to local bike shops if Nashbar doesn’t have their act together; at least I don’t have to deal with shipping and return shipping.

Update: I wrote a snarky email to Nashbar Customer Service (including the phrases “this description is poetic but totally inaccurate” and “such poor quality as to border on being defective”) and they’ve offered to pay for the return shipping by allowing me to label the item defective, as I requested. I appreciate their willingness to own their error.