7deeds » rants

Stupid juice machine

Petros — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:00:01 +0000

I have this juice machine, which unfortunately is stupid. When I try to produce one glass of orange juice, I then have to clean up the mess for half an hour. Talking about stupid design.

FAIL!

Competing by enhancing customer experience

Petros — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:51:55 +0000

Recently I had a very bad experience with a VPS hosting provider. Although, I am so angry I could setup a domain with rants about that hosting provider and a universal poll with one button that would say “Press me if you thing X hosting provider sucks”, and then pay for that site until that hosting provider went bankrupt, I decided not to go that way.

Instead, I thought I should try to invert all these negative feelings by trying to provide some value through this blog post.

Sometimes a company may screw up. When a company screws up and as a result a customer is unhappy, most think game is over. This is not true though. A company can win that customer back immediately.

All it has to do is:

Explain to the customer all the details about the incident.
Tell the customer what steps you are going to take so this incident cannot happen again.
Sincerely apologize to the customer.
Be generous and give the customer something to compensate for their loss.
Try to help the customer get over the incident
Try to have one person supporting the customer until the whole thing is resolved, or if you can’t at least have a system that keeps every support technician up to date with the incident. That way, the customer will not have to explain what happened to each and every different person that contacts him.

If instead of all the above, you do exactly the oposite, there will come a day you are going out of business.

Hide and seek emails

Petros — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:48:45 +0000

Mail, most of the times is nice, but there are two forms of mail that I really hate:

Hide and seek emails
Hide and seek emails

Hide and seek emails are coming from people that think it is cool to add 4 paragraphs of disclaimers, 10 lines of personal info and one line of content somewhere buried inside the message body.

You, the recipient, have to spend time to locate the content and then be anxious because you need to also make sure the rest of the text is not of importance.

It becomes even worst, when the sender forwards you a message but leaves 40 lines of AV shitty messages saying that the email was checked for viruses. I don’t know why these AV applications have to insert a message in the email. Nowadays, everyone has one form of email protection or another. If an email hasn’t already been checked, my own AV will… what’s the big deal.

Anyway:

Please, please, please STOP doing this. Just write what you actually want to communicate and stop including shitty text that nobody reads.

Windows Vista profiles are carved in stone

Petros — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:12:06 +0000

I recently bought a laptop and the technical department decided to name my profile as “User”. When I took the laptop, I renamed the account from User to Petros. I thought the matter ended there, and I started installing all the software I need for everyday operations. Recently I had to look something in my profile and to my astonishment I saw that my profile’s name was still “User”!!

Lesson One: When you rename a user account, the associated profile is not renamed.

Ok, I said. I am used to Windows unfriendliness. All I need to do is rename the profile. After searching for an official way for about half an hour, I gave up and turned to our best friend Google. I searched and searched… and I realized there is no way to rename the folder without fearing you are going to break some application. Moreover, renaming the folder is not a supported operation in Vista. One has to also tweak the registry.

Lesson Two: Don’t think something obvious is as you expect it to be if you are a Windows user.