Ooma's atrocious customer service

My Ooma box broke. Because my cell phone doesn't work at home, I had to live chat with them to try to sort it out.  They were useless.  A friend walked me through every possible test we could do, and then I went to work and called Ooma.  I told them I wasn't with the box but that I could tell them the results of any test they would want me to do.  He ran through a standard list of questions, and I answered them all.  I'm wondering if the question that stumped me was on the list or was his own creativity: He asked, "Have you taken it to someone else's house to see if it works there?"

When the replacement box arrived (which I had to pay for, as the original warranty ended a month ago), I needed my account transferred. So I went on live chat to ask them to do it. Here was the response ("Liza" is them, not me; I am "You").

Liza: In order for your account to be transferred to the new Ooma device, I can open a ticket for you now so that our Higher Level of Support will be able to do the transfer for you. They will be sending you email feedback within 24-48 hours once the transfer is done. Would that be okay?
You: It's not great. Is that my only option?
Liza: Yes.

I like that Higher Level of Support is capitalized. Because it's like they are going to ask God. Also, email within 24-48 hours just means email within 48 hours.

Ah, poor woman. She asked me for feedback.

Liza: Are you satisfied with the way I handled your chat session?
You: No, I am not.  You were unable to resolve my issue.  You were perfectly polite and did everything you could, but I am not satisfied with the service I have received.You: I know it's not unique to you.  I have never had a satisfying experience with Ooma customer service. You: You are clearly not trained or empowered to help customers.  Even the Higher Level of Support people have not been helpful in the past.

(Heheheh, I referred to Higher Level of Support.) She got a supervisor, and they transferred my account within minutes.

Liza: There's still supervisor available. I am going to request now to do the transfer. 
You: Thank you.
Liza: One moment please.Liza: Done. Your account has been transferred to the new Ooma device.Liza: You may now connect your Ooma device to your router.
You: Thank you, Liza.  I appreciate that you escalated this. 
Liza: Are you satisfied with the way I handled your chat session?
You: I am satisfied with the resolution.  I wish we had started with your finding someone to help.  I wish Ooma's standard process was as helpful as the exception you made for me.
Liza: I am glad I was able to help you answer your questions through Chat Support.  Thank you for choosing Ooma, we appreciate your business!

Liza has disconnected.

Put me in an ad.

A colleague told me that I was a perfect advertisement for the iPhone 4S. While sitting next to him at the Twins vs. Cubs at Target Field in Minneapolis, I:

Checked in at Target Field on Facebook. Checked the weather so I could report that it was 88 degrees.  Took a photo of the field and uploaded it, too. 
Texted the photo of the field to my brother. 
Used google to find out that the white 1965 flag represented when the Twins won the AL but lost to the Dodgers in the World Series. 
Looked up th capacity of Target Field (39,504) and the new Yankee Stadium (50,291)
Received a call from my dad, who called to tell me he'd run into the younger brother of my high school boyfriend. 
Emailed several times. 
Looked up the most common male names in the U.S. (James)
Updated one of my contacts. 
Found out that the Twins are last in the AL central, 8.5 games back (before they won the game today)
Texted with a friend about the morning's bar mitzvah. 
Took pictures of my group (using the reverse camera) and posted them on Facebook. 
Received a call from my cousin regarding dinner plans. 
Used Shazam to identify the song being played. 
Said "ice cream" to Siri so she could tell me where I could find nearby places to get some. 
Used the mapping feature to get directions back to the hotel. 

Yeah, it was a dull game.

A Kindle for ???

Happy Chanukah. Merry Christmas.

After a vacation with the family in Mexico, where I debated bringing a big, heavy hardback book (Clash of Kings) and instead brought a medium sized hardback library book (Someone to Run With), and everyone else brought Kindles, I decided I must have a Kindle. Sure, I have my iPad, which it becomes harder and harder to separate myself from, but an iPad screen is pretty bad for reading books.

Feeling under the weather, which made me want retail therapy as well as to climb into bed with a good Kindle, I braved Best Buy this afternoon. I was focused, asked for what I wanted, got what I needed, and got in line. While in line, I examined the impulse buys: a pink Hello Kitty iPhone case (I was tempted); a Star Wars license plate in a pack of gum (like baseball cards); various cases for things. Then I saw it: a gift bag. The perfect size for my Kindle, not Christmasy, white with purple and blue designs. I bought my impulse bag.

In line, I also second-guessed myself. Buy the Kindle on Amazon and pay no sales tax? Buy it at Target and save 5% with my Red Card? I forced myself to stay in line, calculating the value of my time and my need for instant gratification.

I went home, wrapped the Kindle in white tissue paper and put it in the bag, and thought it was the prettiest present ever.

Now what?

When you give yourself a gift and you know what it is, when do you open it?

When you are on Day 5 of a holiday that lasts eight days, on which day do you open it?

When it's Christmas eve, and it's fun to open presents on Christmas day, what do you do?

Most of all, when you're a grown-up and can eat Pop-Tarts for dinner if you so desire, what rules do you even need to follow?

Since it was so pretty, I decided to wait until after lighting the Chanukah candles tonight. I was going out to dinner at 6:00; the sun set at 4:something. Do I light the candles and open the Kindle before dinner? My nap until 5:00 answered that question.

I went out to a traditional dinner at a Chinese restaurant with friends; more friends walked in at the end, and I hung out with them; they invited me to their house, and I thought, "Cool, I'm really waiting to open that Kindle sitting at home." (Also that I loved all the friendly spontaneity of the evening.) I didn't end up going to their house, and I came home, lit Chanukah candles ... and opened my pretty gift bag to find my pretty little Kindle!

It's a little weird to have in my hands a portable device that has buttons and not a touch screen (I keep touching the screen), one that is not made by Apple, one where it's actually functional when it's disconnected from the internet. This will take some practice. Luckily, Clash of Kings, The Magicians, and Pirkei Avot are already loaded on it from my iPad adventures, so I can begin practicing right away.

The slow life?

I came home, ran the water in the sink for a few minutes (literally: minutes) to get it to be hot.  Went to the living room, hit the TV power, and while it was powering up I turned on my lamp, which has a CFL bulb and so takes a while to light fully.

Waiting for the water, the TV, the lamp.  No instant gratification here.

The iPad arrives

Once it hit Oakland, it moved quickly.

Interestingly, the return address on the box is Elk Grove, CA.  Looking at the labels on it, there is very little evidence of its travels.  However, on the FedEx mailing label, it has text that says "bill third party" (I assume the Shenzhen shipper was a FedEx affiliate), and, above the Elk Grove address, it  says, "ORIG ID: SZOA" and a series of numbers.  I googled this, and it stands for Shenzhen Optometric Association, a major glass manufacturer. 

I haven't even opened the box yet.  I'm way too interested in the packing labels!

iPad genius

The iPad is far more revolutionary than it gets credit for.

Because it is wireless and has no disk drive, you can only get things like software, music, movies into it via the air.  As a result, as an anti-piracy tool it is spectacular.  No more handing someone else a CD and allowing them to make a copy.  Piracy moves from the privacy of one's home, which is hard to police, to the ether, which, while still hard to police, is a far more public place.

Microsoft gets screwed.  Or perhaps it is screwing itself.  There are no Microsoft products available on the iPad.  Suddenly, Pages and Keynote become not just the fabulous-but-I-use-Office-anyway apps, but become something we have to learn.  And we will learn to love them.  Until Microsoft builds its apps for an iPad, Apple has a head start in persuading its customers that there are alternatives.

Before putting this thought toward iPads, in a recent presentation (done with PowerPoint, although I'd also done a small presentation in Prezi), I talked about things I think will go away in five years.  Mice, I said, because they were created to help us point at screens, and now we can touch our screens.  Cables connecting things, definitely.  Keyboards, potentially, although I just purchased an iPad keyboard (and I don't even have my iPad yet).

And, as reinforced by the iPad, local storage.  Cloud computing and things like Dropbox (which I just signed up for, to serve my future iPad) means that we won't need a lot of disk space any more.

I like the idea of not using local storage.  I am OK with learning the iWork suite.  I sadly wave goodbye to friendly piracy.

Fraud police strike again

(Is it jet lag if I am awake in the middle of the night at exactly the same time I'd be up in my own time zone?)

Looking at my email, as I do, and should not do, in the middle of the night, I see that Zappos is thanking me for my order.  However, I did not place an order for $398 worth of random fragrances.  (Tommy Bahama, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, Missoni, Carolina Herrera.  Not my style, although they aren't disastrous fragrances.)

Continuing to look at my email, I see all these fragrances weren't charged to me.  They were charged to an address in Kansas ... and shipped to "me" c/o someone else in Washington state.  I called Zappos, and they are canceling the order and taking it off my account.

Then, through the creepiness of the internet, I reverse looked up the billing address in Kansas to find who might have been defrauded to let them know of it.  I found a name and a phone number but no email address.  The name belongs to someone who is 97.

I just gave her a call, as it's afternoon in Kansas at the moment.  As would be someone of any age, she was very confused by my call.  She had never heard of Zappos and is not expecting to receive her credit card information in the mail for another 10 days.  I suggested she call her credit card company right away.  I feel bad -- I gave her my home number, and I explained that I am traveling ... but I won't be home for a week if she tries to reach me because she doesn't understand what I meant.  Maybe I will call her back tomorrow.

Is Mercury retrograde?

Today I struggled with technology.

• I changed the message of the day on our intranet. After I did, the front page changed entirely -- to a warped version of the page I last saw three years ago in beta and that we never implemented.

• I tried to get on a Google group. I was told I was part of it. I couldn't find it and got lost within that part of the Google universe.

• I was directed by a colleague in very specific terms to a particular website about our travel policy. I just could not find it.
  

• When I got to the gym, there was only one elliptical machine open. I was at this point absolutely certain it was broken. It wasn't ... yet.

• While working out, I went to play a podcast on my iPod, and it crashed. Big time. Normally I can reset my iPod when this happens, but no luck. I worked out to the nearby spin class' music and hoped the iPod would wake up. Fifteen minutes later, I managed to reset it.

• After my workout, I waited for the "workout summary" data to show up on the little display on the elliptical. I find it satisfying to see how ... uh, little or much ... work I've done. Instead of showing me the details, it just said, "workout summary ... workout summary ... workout summary...." No data.

The account saga continues ...

Only in a recommendation: if someone buys iTunes gift certificates on your credit card, just redeem them back to yourself!

Apple support suggested I open a new iTunes store account, said that I could keep it from being associated with a credit card by buying myself a gift certificate.

And then I thought: what a shame: to buy another gift certificate after punkyusa bought five on my credit card. In fact, I had already built a spreadsheet with the recipients' names and email addresses. Which I got off iTunes when I examined the electronic copies of the gift certificates. Duh!

I changed the recipient email address on the five gift certificates to my own and resent them to myself. (Although the automatically-generated email says that they were from Albert McNutt.) Thanks, Apple for the "resend" feature! Three of punkyusa's friends had not redeemed theirs yet (and now they never will, bwah-hahahahaha). Punkyusa and deathemperor had. I have called my bank (which already refunded my money) to tell them I got $200 back on my own.

I figure I can spend the $200 on gift certificates for people I know, since I don't think I'll ever spend it all on myself.

Mr. McNutt, check your credit card!

A few days ago, I checked my iTunes account again. I found that my account payment source had been changed to that of Mr. Albert L. McNutt in Columbus, TX, and that $23 more had been spent. The last four digits of the credit card listed were not mine, and my bank account showed no payments, so Albert McNutt was being defrauded this time.

I removed his credit card information from my account.

Then I looked up Albert McNutt in Columbus, TX, on whitepages.com and called him. I left a message explaining that he should check his credit card statement for a $23 charge. I also suggested to Apple that they contact him, but they said they didn't know how to.

Phished or cracked?

The scary part is that I just received a personal email from the person who took over my accounts last night and from whom I finally retrieved them just now.

Very Good, Lisa! You have try to get your protection, but that's useless. Anyway, this account is your property then I don't wanna have it. I just make a astonished and will make up a loss to you.

Ominous. Hannibal Lecter, anyone?

Last night I received a note from iTunes thanking me for my purchase. But I hadn't made one. So I went to the iTunes store and discovered that there had been $546 worth of purchases from my iTunes account in the past week. The first $500 was in the form of some very hefty gift certificates. I checked my bank account, and indeed there had been purchases, so I called my bank and reported it. And I reported it to Apple and changed my password.

I made a spreadsheet of the people who received the gift certificates, since I had their names and email addresses from my iTunes account record. One went by Deathemperor. Punkyusa was the one who received the biggest gift certificate, $200.

Somehow, I thought I should check my Yahoo account. Things became a blur here because they happened so quickly and confusingly. It was an unreal experience. I figured out that punkyusa was actually online and in my accounts, since I was receiving email notifications of my own account settings changing even as I logged into them myself. I found that punkyusa had made him/herself an alternate email address for my Yahoo account -- and that, for some reason, I couldn't delete that. It meant that punkyusa would receive notifications of my own password and account changes. I suspected that I hadn't received a note from iTunes for the first $500 in purchases because punkyusa was going into my account and deleting those emails.

And suddenly my Google account was no longer available to me. That was the freakiest part (well, until tonight's note). One minute I was reading an email from an ex-boyfriend, and the next I was trying to log in and couldn't get in. Punkyusa had changed my password. I imagine it was in retaliation for my, just prior to that, changing the Yahoo password and locking him/her out. It would have been a very dramatic movie with a soundtrack and quick cutting between me and punky.

My brother was on the phone, also using my logins to see how far we could get -- dividing and conquering. You'd think this whole experience would have taken like five minutes, but when you don't know what is happening it takes longer. ("Is my caps lock on? Do I know my password?") I spent a lot of time interrupting myself trying to figure out what was happening (like putting together a spreadsheet) rather than how to stop it. My natural inclination: gather more information. I googled Deathemperor and found some 2005 discussion groups where he's looking for discarded website domains on the cheap. I was up for hours.

Punkyusa has laid down his/her arms. Well, except for offering me a link to a free laptop "just for me." So not really laying down arms. But I'm not done. I know these email addresses are probably quickly used and discarded, and no one is really going to want to hunt these people down, but I am still going to report them to their domain hosts and to my bank. Punkyusa is "domain keys verified" on gmail and has sent me an actual email. Shouldn't that be enough of a trail?

Resistance is futile.

I've been handsfree on my phones for a jillion years. It just hasn't made sense to me that our ability to type or wash dishes or clean our offices should be impaired by a silly phone handset. But for most of that time I was landline handsfree. Cellular phone handsfree is an different animal: you're out there in public. I remember the first time I saw someone walking in San Francisco on a handfree hookup to his cellphone. On Market Street, passing the homeless people, I saw a well-dressed man talking to himself. The convergence of mental illnesses.

I'm so into handsfree that I can't wait until they implant something in our heads that allows us to connect with people. I believe this will happen in my lifetime.

I'm somewhat suspicious of California's handsfree cellphone law. The state is trying to be business-friendly, and, instead of doing it by changing the business tax structure or something, it's just forcing everyone to buy handsfree kits. Bluetooth headsets abound.

I arrived at a dreaded meeting called by someone who is rather arrogant and certainly interpersonally tone-deaf. He arrived with a Jawbone on his ear. A Jawbone is the one of the flashiest and most expensive of the bluetooth headsets. And he doesn't have much hair, so it wasn't at all subtle.

How do you react to that kind of thing? Was he expecting to receive a phone call in the middle of our meeting? -- How disrespectful! Was he just wearing it to show it off?

As the initial chitchat progressed, I said, "Hey, are you expecting a phone call?" He said no, he wasn't, and kept going. Didn't even take it off. So at this point it's just so he can feel important. To himself, because I've expressed through my question that it's not impressing me.

Yesterday my own bluetooth headset arrived from Amazon ($30 cheaper than Best Buy). I decided that, while I'm happy with my corded handsfree, a wireless headset would get me closer to the brain implant solution. It's tiny, a Motorola M680. (Motorola even makes a women's version of this with pretty vine squiggles!) It's so small that it's not really visible in my hair. (It is also the perfect cat toy: small and shiny with a sproingy plastic curved piece reaching out to goad.) My goal is never to be like this guy in the meeting, wearing a headset because I'm about to talk to someone more important than you.

Goodbye, old friend

Today at work, where I have a PC, I lost a friend.  I was upgraded to Office 2007.  I launched Outlook, and my dog was gone.

I am probably one of the few people who liked the office assistant.  Most people take one look at the leering paperclip and want to kill it.  I turned it into a dog and have had it as my desktop companion for eight years.

I'm used to seeing the dog put its feet on my desk while I'm typing; using a flame thrower on paper when I delete something; and tossing a sheet of paper when I print.  It would bark at me if I made an error or if it needed my attention.  It has often stood annoyingly in front of exactly the button or menu I needed.  It was always happy, patient, and fun.
When I would open an Office application, the dog would come through an arch, and when I would exit it would create that arch and exit through it.  It's made its final exit, and I didn't get to say goodbye.

Going online to find a picture of my dog, I discovered it had a name, Rocky.  I found a few pictures, but I'm still looking for one with the flame thrower and one with the arch.  If you happen to find those pictures, please send them my way.

My hope (am I in the denial phase?) is that someone will resurrect the dog in a non-servile app that will allow it to run free on our desktops.  Please resurrect him into Mac land!