UPDATE: Sort of almost there now. I think.

Today, the postie arrived with a brand-new pan, and I felt a warm glow of consumer contentment. Aaaah.

• Roadside daffodil seller
• Political hack
• Magazine editor
• The Boss

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

• The Princess Bride
• A Fish Called Wanda
• The Godfather Part I
• Rear Window

Four Places I’ve Lived

• North Carlton
• Mount Macedon
• Birchip
• Fitzroy

Four TV shows I Love

• The West Wing (sob)
• Northern Exposure
• Press Gang
• The Sopranos

Four Places I’ve Been on Holidays

• Sri Lanka
• Egypt
• Israel
• The US of A

Four of my favourite dishes

• Sophie’s special tuna pasta
• Chicken Schnitzel Wrap (word) from Alimentari
• Nigella’s Black and Blue Beef
• Any breakfast at Babka

Four Sites I Visit Daily

• Subtraction
• The Age
• Geelong Football Club
• Reasons You Will Hate Me

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

• New York
• Kardinia Park
• Arugam Bay
• Carlton Gardens, on a rug, with a takeaway Babka sandwich

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging

• Sophie
• Mel
• Doug
• Peter

Where Apple stands to gain marketshare in the long run is not by competing directly with PCs, but by doing what it does best, which is innovating. The iPod is a classic example: through innovation, Apple defined a market, and then set about dominating it. (Expect the same thing to happen to the PVR/Media Centre market later in the year). Putting Intel processors into Macs isn’t an innovation, and nor is it a step backwards; it’s just a kind of flirtation with the tech pages of the papers. The only people it’ll really appeal to is design-minded computer nerds who’ve always wanted a Mac but haven’t been able to part with VIM (or whatever); once the hacks for running Windows and Linux on an iMac are out there, expect to see these types trickling into Apple sellers country-wide.

For what it’s worth, I think the most exciting thing to come out of Macworld this year is the MagSafe power connector - as usual with a new Mac, the devil’s in the details. Forget the processor.

• Iron sheets and shirts (buy ironing board and iron first)
• Eat proper and go to the gym
• Make a business card
• Learn Javascript

I think I’ll stop there. Exhausted just thinking about it.

* A Paul Kelly concert is the only non-sporting cultural event that bunches of blokes can go to in Melbourne without looking poofy. It’s a fact. It’s also apparently the only cultural event in Melbourne at which it’s acceptable to RING SOMEBODY ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE WHILE THE CONCERT IS IN PROGRESS. Bah.

A company or business, while (usually) accommodating more than one person, is an entity in and of itself, and should be referred to as such. Only the most grammatically foolhardy would write “My Company Are Really Great”, but most seem to think nothing of the slightest variation on that construction: “Company, based in CompanyLand, are a small web design firm…”

Uggh. Just stop it.

Der.

I played my first game of Rec Footy last night. It was awesome.

Unlike most people, I’m not totally averse to an automated phone menu, as long as it’s clear and consise (no more than three layers), and comes with an escape hatch: “…or dial 6 to speak to a real human being”. This is such a no-brainer that I can’t believe I’m even mentioning it. I HATE phone menus that ask for information (like your phone number or the broadband plan you’re on), that you’re then asked for again by the human operator.

Messages For Morons

ISPs, quite reasonably, tend to announce known system outages before the phone menu kicks in: “Customers on phone exchanges in the eastern and north-eastern regions may be experiencing connection difficulties blah blah blah”. Good idea. As long as the messages are short, and can be skipped, I don’t have any objection. My ISP is taking this technique to extremes, however: first, system outage messages (if any), followed by ‘Did you know we’ve got a new dialup number?’, with instructions for changing your dialup settings. (That message has been up for more than two months now, and despite the fact that there are different branches of the phone system for broadband and dialup customers to follow, they still feel the need to inflict this entirely useless information on everybody. It’s skippable, but they don’t tell you that, or how.)

But wait… there’s more: at the END of the phone menu, but BEFORE you’re given the hold time estimate or transferred to hold, you have to be told to “try restarting your modem and computer. Most connection problems can be solved in this way… etc”. I’m not dead-against this message per se, but it’s completely unskippable, and if you’re hearing it for the third, or twentieth, time, it’s likely to make you (me) throw the phone against the wall.

Finally, there’s this: “Did you know that we offer comprehensive online support?” Yes, I did. Did you know that I’m on hold to you, my dear ISP, because I CAN’T CONNECT TO THE INTERNET? Faaaark.

Baby, can you spare an hour?

There should ALWAYS be an (accurate) estimate of how long you’re going to be expected to hold, and if it’s going to be longer than ten minutes (or even eight), you should be given the option of requesting a callback. This choice is worth its weight in goodwill gold: giving your customers numb ears and neck-cricks is a failsafe way of getting them to desert you in droves.

Your call is not important to us

Advertising messages and commercial radio should never, ever be played as hold music. Just. Don’t. Do. It. And worse: my last ISP featured ‘Radio [ISP Name]’, a pair of radio-voiced morons telling jokes and playing a couple of pop songs, in an imitation of commercial radio. But it was on a 10-minute loop, meaning that on bad days, you might hear the same abominable joke TWO OR THREE TIMES while waiting. Not funny. And lastly, while it’s probably appropriate to thank people for their patience while on hold, it’s more irritating than soothing to be told “Your call is important to us, and will be answered as soon as possible”. It’s not informative, and by the time you’ve been on hold for fifteen minutes it’s clearly just an outright lie: if my call was important to you, you’d have answered it by now. So shut up.

What’s YOUR problem?

Every tech support phone service that expects repeat visits should keep notes about a customer’s technical competence. Better than that, they should ASK you, the first time you ring, to estimate your problem-solving ability and general knowledge about technical issues. For me, there’s nothing worse than coming off 25 minutes of hold, only to be asked ‘is the little green little light labeled ‘power’ blinking?” or “the blue cord - is that plugged into your computer?” While it’s obviously necessary to eliminate simple causes when troubleshooting, it drives me NUTS to be treated like that, particularly after three or four calls about the same (complex) problem.

I almost lost it yesterday with a support guy who asked “have you tried resetting the modem?” at least three times, before asking me to “turn the modem around and stick a paper clip in the little tiny hole next to the power button”. “You mean RESET THE MODEM?” I asked. “I’ve ALREADY DONE THAT. THREE TIMES.” I don’t know if I get particularly bad treatment because I’m a woman, but it’s a surefire way to make me angry, and it’s completely avoidable. They’ve got customer databases there - I can hear them entering information into them - so why not USE them?

Case /#453521-a

If somebody’s got a problem that will require multiple phone calls to fix, then for god’s sake assign one support person to the case, give the customer a case number, email it to them for good measure, and give them a direct line so that when they call back they’re not forced to find their way through phone mazes or wait on hold.

Feel free to add your thoughts, suggestions and anecdotes about phone support in the comments - I’m going to send my ISP a loooong list.