Moo! The Musings of a Plaid Cow

VitaCost advertises “24/7 Customer Service 1-800-381-0759″ right on the front page of their website. What they meant to say, is that outside of regular business hours, you can only place an order–they can’t actually do any customer service.

At least they make the phone number easy to find–that should be worth something.

Error reporting can be one of the most difficult things bout programming software. You’re trying to tell the user that something went wonky, but not send them into an all out panic. This excellent example (of how not to do error reporting) comes from Microsoft Outlook:

The first issue with this error is that I shouldn’t have gotten it. It comes up at least once a week when I delete the message from the index window while I still have the message open in a separate window and then I try to delete the message from the message window.

• When I delete a message from the index, any windows in which it is open could be automatically closed.
• When I try to delete a message from it’s window, if it’s not where you thought it was, check to see if it moved to the trash. If it is, great, just close the window without complaint. Otherwise you can report to the user that you’re incompetent and can’t keep track of the messages.

And why not tell me which one of the possibilities the actually error is.

• It was already moved
• It was already deleted
• Access was denied

Aren’t you keeping track? Please try to pay attention.

Please, after reading the following image make the silly assumption that the CD’s in your cart can be bought for $3.99, for it is incorrect.

In fact, many CD’s in your cart will be the exact same price as they were before you saw this sale bill, because that is what nice people we are.

After ordering our new cell phones from Lets Talk, they sent an email which said:

If you have ordered an activated phone, please check to make sure the cell phone number assigned is local to your service area. If not, call us immediately and we’ll help you get another number.

By help they mean they will give you the actual instructions for getting a different number:

• Wait until you received the phones
• Call (or visit a local store for) your carrier and change the phone number yourself
• Call our customer support so we can update our records.

Over past week I have been trying to call our pediatricians office to resolve a billing issue. Apparently, though the group of pediatricians is in my insurance network, the specific doctor (who is new) is not. So anything with that doctor’s name on it will be denied, while her examinations billed without her name (just the practice name) will be paid. It makes no sense, but those are the rules.

In 4 calls to the office I have learned (in order):

• They open at 10am
• They close at 4pm
• They are at lunch from 12:15 - 1:30
• They are out for the rest of the day

I left a message. She’s supposed to call me now.

While posting on the Indy Star forums today, I got an interesting response from Northsider to one of my comments:

It’s people like you who allow these individuals to be treated like human beings which is unfortunate and sad.

Treat a person as a human being? What an outrage!

If you register the [Farmers Insurance][] website, be sure to pay attention to the following guidelines when selecting your username: * Must be between 6 and 16 characters long * It may be any arrangement of letters and numbers but it must include at least one letter and one number

Why in the world would a username be required to contain numbers?

When I changed jobs a while back I took over the desk of Paul, who is on a two year leave (serving with the National Guard in Iraq). Besides being a really interesting guy that I have never had a chance to meet, he seems to be subscribed to every free magazine known to man, and since I have his same phone number, they all call wanting to renew his subscription.

Most of the conversations have gone something like this:

Me: Hello
Her: Yes, I would like to speak with Mr. Paul
Me: Paul will be out of the office for the next year and a half.
Her: So I can call back after Christmas?
Me: No, he will be out until July 2008.

I’m sure they are well intentioned, but since they keep calling, I’m thinking of more creative ways to tell the ones that just don’t get it. Like, “I’m sorry, Paul is out of the office with a blood infection due to a paper cut he got while reading your magazine.”

Maybe this would get through–though the subtlety may not make it through the language barrier.

Until working in corporate America, I never realized how many names there are for the “clear things you write on to project onto a screen.” You may know them as a

• acetate
• flimsy
• overhead
• slide
• transparency
• vu-foil
• vu-graph

or some other name that i’ve never even heard of. Crazy.

Advice for my former dentist: If your whole office take a lunch break every day, and will not be answering the phones, put it on your answering machine message!