ryan l.

Why is it that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on shipping, you still can never count on these fools to do their jobs?

How does it work?

Hmm, put it in a box, put some padding around it, put on truck, pay attention the big, black, bold letter all over the box that say FRAGILE THIS SIDE UP (!!!!), deliver, keep paying attention to the instructions: FRAGILE.THIS.SIDE.UP - or just stand the damn thing up since we know glass is more easily broken when laying down.

I guess that was too difficult to understand. After nearly $300 for shipping alone of our bed set, which included this mirror, we received the damn thing broken with nice big holes in the top of the box with little brown packing tape put over them. Really subtle, guys. Unbelieveable.

But, this isn’t just a short story about irresponsible people, it’s one about great customer service.

After opening the box to find this mess, I called JCPenny customer service and talked to this sweet, older sounding, woman presumably from the South given her thick drawl. She apologized up and down. She checked what they had in stock and promptly ordered us a new one, this time electing to send it with EXTRA PACKAGING (which she noted on the order) and via FedEx … hopefully they’re more careful.

Here’s the last communication I received from them. We may still be waiting for our new mirror to come, but it doesn’t get too much better than this when you have a problem. Customer service actually understands and values its job at JC Penny, or at least this particular lady did. Thank God.

If there’s one thing Bryn does well it’s sleep. The woman can crash whenever she wants to, which consistently makes me jealous and, ultimately, motivates me to find stuff like this …

There’s not a whole lot I feel like I do well, but one thing that I’ve done a lot is pack and move. It’s a pain in the ass that most of us have to endure at least a handful of times in our lives, but for me and Bryn, well, it seems like an annual activity. That time came about two weeks ago and today we finally finished unpacking and setting up. For us, the end product is quite pleasing and mostly a relief.

That’s just the living room, one that is almost as big as our last apartment, or at least it feels that way. This place is much more spacious than our last and a major step up. Of course, big steps up also bring my bank account to tears once a month, but that’s ok because it’s certainly worth it to have such a nice place to come home to every day, even if it’s in sweltering Dublin.

We’ve had the apartment in pretty good shape now for more than a week, but we were missing one thing: our new bed set. Apparently, the shipping company thought it would be funny to hold our merchandise for well over two weeks without so much as a call to schedule the delivery. It took my pushiness to finally open the lines of communications and even then it still took them about four days to get our stuff to us. Naturally, everything came on a day we had plans in the evening, so we felt a little rushed to set up things. But, we got it together in time to get out of here on time … except we had one problem - the mirror was broken. Awesome. After nice lengthy calls to both the shipping company and JC Penny, our new mirror was ordered, but who knows when it will arrive. Oh well, we wait.

Tonight we have Bryn’s mom, dad, and brother coming over for Father’s Day dinner. Should be fun provided some things happen and others don’t. I’ll just leave it at that.

This is what happens when you combine a lack of sleep with an unending desire to not have to reach deep inside of a bag to get some more pretzels. Ay dios …

What an awesome video. I can’t claim the “D” as my affiliate, but this is damn good.

via Laughing Squid

So much is in motion these days that I haven’t given the blog a second thought after the long days and busy weekends. I hope to change that in the near-term, but I think I’ll be abandoning the “professional” blog approach. Like others out there, I feel like there are just too many voices online who are far smarter than I, and contributing/driving the comms/PR/new media conversations forward for me to spend too much time feeling guilty about not writing anything. I hope to make my mark on my industry with the work I do rather than anything I could possibly write on a site like this.

Moving forward, I’m planning to transform this space into a person one. No, not a diary, just a log of things I and my family care about. Now that me and “the boss” (aka my wife, Bryn) are out on our own for the first time since we were married last June, this is as good a time as any to change direction.

Just an additional thought on Google Reader … maybe more of a request. As Reader gains more marketshare, it would be great if the team could create a way to aggregate the most shared items. Much like Digg or Techmeme does for hot stories. Now that is a feed I’d subscribe to or a page I would visit constantly. Instead of subscribing to individual feeds of shared pages, why not figure out a way to consolidate all of the stuff that people find interesting or compelling? Maybe I’m rehashing an idea someone else has already thought of, but if that’s the case, then it can be looked at as a request.

It would be a more interesting and insightful Techmeme (imho) since it would pass through the filters, surely, of many smart people.

Blockbuster is struggling. We all know this. Companies like Netflix are putting an end to a business, and business model, that has proven successful for the last 23 years, but has failed to evolve appropriately with the changing marketplace. The company is now desperate.

We all read, viewed, and experienced the “no late fees” campaign, which actually ended up being misleading. The company made some changes, tried to communicate more clearly that “no late fees” didn’t actually mean “none.” Awesome.

Well, Bryn and I rented a couple of movies a week or so ago. Like most people, we got lazy and didn’t return them for maybe three or four days past the return date. We thought everything was cool.

Today, I checked my account balance following the payment of some bills and noticed a $23 charge from Blockbuster. How amusing. The charges were for … wait for it … late fees.

The company is clearly desperate; clinging to any and all opportunities to steal from its customer base.

Now Blockbuster, is that any way to turn it around? I think not. Now I just need some recommendations for which package is most appropriate from Netflix because I’ll never go back to Blockbuster. The company can go bankrupt for all I care.

Good luck.

I love Google Reader. It’s simple, effective, and has very few issues. But this post isn’t about Reader, but rather it’s sharing feature, which so many love, myself included.

I do a lot of reading, both blogs and traditional stuff, and love to share the posts/articles I find interesting, even if no one reads them. It’s just a nice way to catalog things I either want to read again in the future or just keep track of if I need to cite a source. The problem comes when I’m not subscribed to the feed of an outlet that produces one of these posts I want to share. For instance, this one. I want to share it, or bookmark it if you will, but since I don’t subscribe to that particular RSS feature, my options are limited. I don’t want to subscribe just to share, it’s not that important, but it’s something I’d like the ability to do.

I wish the Google Reader team would create a bookmarklet, or something similar, that would enable to me to share posts that I don’t subscribe to. It would totally increase the utility of the product, at least for me.

But maybe I’m missing something that already exists (?).

You know, it’s funny, usually when you’re in the process of making a buying decision you seek out the most expert advice you can possibly find in an effort to narrow down the choices. You go with knowledge, experience … expertise. At the same time, you usually don’t rely solely on one person’s opinion. You also ask around - friends, colleagues, other people you know own and use the product for an additional perspective. This is usually where the power of word of mouth really comes to the fore and becomes an impactful thing.

I experienced this first-hand recently. I was in the process of making the leap from a standard point-and-shoot camera to a DSLR. A big jump if you even have the slightest clue about the differences between them. So, of course, this wasn’t a decision I took lightly - we’re talking a $900+ decision, after all. What did I do? I first went to the person I knew would have a strong opinion and solid facts (and experience) to back it up - my father-in-law, a veteran photographer with 25+ years in the biz. Surely he would provide me with the “most expert advice I could find,” right? Of course the man came through with some solid recommendations. So, off I went to the next step: to find the users. This didn’t mean  I found my father-in-law’s advice useless, it simply meant that I knew his opinion had to be slightly biased (he said himself he made a manufacturer decision back in the day and has become a loyalist) and I wanted to hear from the people using an alternative to, say, a Canon 30D or bettter.

I looked for the Nikon users because that, in my view, was the next best (if not better) manufacturer after Canon. Luckily I work with a few Nikon users and was able to get some great information out of them.

It was with all of this information and opinions in tow that I then moved to my next box to check: quality. My father-in-law had mentioned that the difference for an amateur between Nikon and Canon was negligible and that I’d be safe with either manufacturer, but that he also favored Canon due to his many years using cameras made by the company. Fair enough. I took to flickr in search of some comparisons - both price and image quality - and he was right. I couldn’t tell much of a difference between images taken with each camera and actually came to realize that it’s more the lens and the photographer that make the photo, not necessarily the camera.

This left me with one last hurdle: price. Since the differences for me were negligible, where could I find the best deal and what could that deal get me (I really didn’t care) became the next question. Turns out that B&H had a great deal on a Nikon D80 that came with two lenses. This price and package bested any other I found (and I wouldn’t have to pay sales tax). Based on all of the information I had gathered, expert and amateur, I made my buying decision. The Nikon D80, in all of its too-much-camera-for-me-to-handle glory, now sits on my coffee table just begging to be used.

In my case, the deciding factors for this purchase in order of weight and importance were as follows: recommendations based on use and experience, quality, price and package.

Despite, not in spite of, my father-in-law’s vague advice (he mostly outlined my options with a slight leaning to Canon) I went with Nikon not only because the price and package were right, but mostly because I talked to (and read reviews from) more than five people who wholeheartedly endorsed the product as solid, trustworthy, and of high quality.

How could I ignore that? It’s not to say that Canons are no good, it’s simply that the power of recommendation is … well … powerful. Plus I have access to more lenses this way.

In this case, a word of mouth concept motivated a buying decision. Could it be that Nikon’s efforts at jumpstarting its blogger relations reviews program for the D80 had influence or sway over the recommendations I was given? Possibly. Point is, if you’re a company trying to sell a solid product, you shouldn’t have to do more than empower your users and sit back and watch them evangelize for you. This situation is optimum, and hard to achieve, but when the product speaks for itself, even the so-called expert’s can sometimes (most times) find themselves unable to sway opinion.

Bonus: I’m an elitist asshole (it’s what I do best, right?) Apparently when you don’t follow “expert” advice, you anger the person that gave it and instantly become an elitist in their eyes because you chose what they view to be an “elitist camera”. Huh? An elitist camera? Why is it that in calling me out, the expert sounds like the elitist?

WOM trumps expertise every time, son.