Sean's T-Mobile Hell

Sean O'Driscoll unravels a long chain mishandled and unfortunate situations within the bowels of T-Mobile customer service. Sean's experience is sadly not unique, but his perspective is. He manages the community support services team at Microsoft and is tightly focused on the future of customer support. It appears that T-Mobile has provided him a great worst case scenario - he left the service because of it.

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Popcorn With Your Sewer Scope?

This morning Sachi had a fun job - participating in a "sewer scoping" with someone from a company called Hydro Physics. It's like a colonoscopy for a sewer line. They feed a camera down into a house's sewer pipes to look for problems.

The whole process is video taped and before Sachi left she received a video tape (yes, VHS) of the inside of the sewer line. But the tape was not the only take home - she also received two packs of microwave popcorn for our viewing pleasure. The sewer scope guy is giving out popcorn with his sewer movies. So you know what we're doing tonight!

 

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Eating Their Dog Food

That phrase always makes me laugh, but I think it's accurate. If you're not familiar, it means that a company that produces a product should use the product themselves.

In the online community world, I've been suspicious of companies that purport to understand all things "community" but don't have a community that supports their customers using their platform. It's one of the things I do like about Web Crossing, they have WebXHarbor.

I haven't seen a more productive example of eating their dogfood than how the Robot Co-op is using with their new site at ideas.43things.com.

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Finally a Positive Experience with an ISP

I awoke this morning to find my Internet service was down. Historically this has been a complete pain, as it was never easy enough to find out if it was a system wide problem or something local about my service or set-up.

Eventually I called Comcast, entered my phone number within 2-3 button pushes. The next message was- "We are experiencing service outages in your area, if you would like to receive a phone call when service is restored, please press 1".

So, I accepted the offer for the call-back, my service came back a few minutes later and I received a call from Comcast saying my service had been restored.

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