Saturday, January 15, 2005

All Things Come...

Phone guy finally showed and managed to fix the problem in about three minutes. He's from San Jose, he says. The local company is so overwhelmed with trouble complaints that they've brought hundreds (he may have said "thousands") of technicians from other cities. He started work at 7 AM this morning and is expected to make at least two more stops tonight. Tough job.

I want to emphasize that I wasn't complaining earlier about the repair people. They've got a lot of fixin' to do and it would be absurd to expect them to always be able to predict how long each stop will take. (He was here for maybe six minutes. His previous stop, he told me, took two hours.) I just think that if companies want us to use the 'net more to transact business, they could give us something back — like more accurate info — via that same connection. And I guess I'm also amazed when they urge us to use their website instead of the phone but manage to make it less efficient. (I forgot to mention. I originally tried to schedule this service call through the phone company site but it wouldn't accept the appointment.)

Okay, I'm off to the market. Finally.

• Posted at 8:36 PM · LINK

Still Waiting...

No sign of the telephone repairman. You know...the one who was supposed to be here between 1 PM and 5 PM?

• Posted at 8:13 PM · LINK

Venting...

One of my phone lines is out. It's been out for more than a week but that's okay. I have a couple of lines, and I'm sure that after the big rains that hit Los Angeles, there are folks who need a repairman more than I do. So I didn't flinch when, eight days ago, they said the earliest appointment they could give me was today, Saturday the 15th, between the hours of 1 PM and 5 PM.

Well, he — I'm assuming it'll be a "he" — still isn't here yet. A nice lady in the phone company repair division says he's still coming. Of course, at 5 PM, another nice lady in the same department told me he'd be here within the hour. These are not the first two nice ladies in my life to string me along and lie.

There's got to be a way in the age of the Internet and cell phones and pagers to make this process more efficient. Those nice ladies have computers in front of them that tell them exactly where the repairfolks are, how many appointments are ahead of mine, etc. When the service people leave one job, they phone in or otherwise inform HQ that they're on their way to the next. How difficult would it be to route that information to the consumer? Imagine if on a day when I'm expecting a visit, I could get periodic e-mails that say something like, "Repairman 37 is completing Service Call #6 for the day. You are #9. His current estimated time of arrival is between 7 PM and 8 PM." I could even route those to an account where I could pick them up via my cell phone. That way, I could go about my business and have a more useful idea of when I need to be here. I'd planned to go to the market and buy some things, dinner included, after the guy left...but that was when I thought that would occur by 5:00. Had I known I'd still be waiting here at 7:30...

My phone company (SBC) keeps trying to get me to contact them via their web page. When I call them, I sit through endless announcements that I can order services, check the status of an order, request service, etc., at their site. Which I'd do if that site ever worked. So far, every attempt to transact business that way has taken twenty minutes and led to a notice that my business cannot be processed at this time and I should phone them...which means listening again to all those recordings that say I should try using their website.

Assuming they ever get the site working — a big, perhaps foolhardy assumption — I would certainly use it. I'd especially use it if it did things I like just described, keeping me informed of when the repairguy's going to get here. How can a communications company be so bad at communicating?

• Posted at 7:40 PM · LINK

It's Still the Trousers

After languishing way too long on a shelf over at Warner Home Video, Eric Idle's long-awaited sequel to The Rutles will finally have a DVD release on or around March 1. Longtime readers of this site will recall that I saw it at a screening in May of 2001 (as noted near the bottom of this page) and enjoyed it a lot. Mr. Idle plays the same annoying documentarian he played in the 1978 "mockumentary" (we didn't call them that then), All You Need is Cash, along with playing the Paul-like member of The Rutles. The sequel, Can't Buy Me Lunch, amplifies and expands on the saga of the Pre-Fab Four and you can pre-order it by clicking here. Between this and the Broadway debut of his Spamalot, Eric Idle's going to have quite a month of March.

• Posted at 6:34 PM · LINK