The SoapBoxers

There are so many ways to waste time on the internet, but I’ll focus on just a few.

Snopes
OK, this can actually be pretty useful. Snopes is a leader in the industry of myth debunking. Snopes currently lists 43 different myth topics, ranging from Disney to politics. There’s even a category devoted to debunking dozens of myths about the 911 attacks, including:

– Osama Bin Laden owns Snapple – false

– Bert (from Sesame Street) appears on posters carried by Bin Laden Supporters – true!

It can be interesting simply to browse the Snopes archives. Many of the myths are mind boggling, and they make for very entertaining reads. Snopes can also come in handy when your friend forwards you the latest email about an outrage that is occurring in congress. You can search on key words and get the information you need to tell your friend that someone is yanking his chain.

The articles on Snopes are well researched, and the sources of their information are clearly noted at the end of the articles.

Says-it
Says-it allows you to create add your own text to signs – church signs, bank signs, danger signs, and more. Here is an image I created.

On a forum that I subscribe to, one member uses a custom church sign as his signature – with custom messages that poke (good natured) fun at other members.

Says-it was also used to design the logo for this blog.

GraphJam
GraphJam allows you to quickly create custom charts. Pie charts are my favorite, mostly because I like pie.

You can easily waste a lot of time looking at all the cool graphs that other people have designed. Here’s a quick graph that I came up with.

Note that GraphJam is a part of the ICanHasCheezburger family of sites (probably best known for LolCats) – so if you haven’t wasted enough time on GraphJam, you can always jump over to some of its sister sites.

A few months ago, our natural gas detector’s alarm went off. A guy from the utility company was quickly out to the house to take a look. Within about a minute, he had deemed it to be a false alarm. At that point, however, he did not simply leave. He poked around the utility closet and began giving suggestions (which were appreciated). At one point, he noticed water under the water heater and recommended having this checked out very soon. This was the weekend, so I kept an eye on things. I noted that the spot under the water heater was dry about 90% of the time. The odds of it being wet at a time when I was looking into the utility closet were not good. If the guy from the gas company hadn’t noticed it, it probably would have been too late. I absolutely hate cleaning up water messes.

There was a sticker on the water heater, recommending calling a particular business for service. It was a pest control business, which definitely seemed odd. However, I have seen business doing some very unusual things as a sideline, so I figured I’d give the guy a call, on the off chance that he was the correct person to call.

Not surprisingly, he was not the correct person to call. He got quite a chuckle out of the fact that his sticker was on the heater. He did recommend another local business. He had recently had his water heater replaced, and he had been happy with the service.

I called the water heater guy. He told me that, most likely, the water heater was shot. This was not a huge shock, and since it was probably as old as the house (15 years) it was probably time to bite the bullet and buy a new water heater. He indicated that he could sell me a heater and install it, or I could purchase a heater elsewhere and have him install it. I asked for a price quote for 40 and 50 gallon heaters. He gave me the quotes and strongly recommended the 40 gallon heater for my family of three. I tend to get a good vibe about a person’s honesty when they try to sell me the less expensive product.

I decided to buy a heater at a local store and have the guy install it, as it was a bit cheaper that way. I made some measurements and compared them to the specs for the 50 gallon water heater. I should have just barely enough room.

The guy came to do the installation. He nearly fainted when he saw the cramped quarters of the utility closet (there is absolutely no wiggle room, which seems like a rather poor design). He grabbed a tape measure, and much to my dismay, he declared that I am a half inch short on space!

So I go back to the store, and buy the 40 gallon model. The installer came back the next day, and before long, I have a perfectly functioning water heater. The installer had a very pleasant demeanor and shared advice and stories with me as he worked.

Less than a week later, my neighbor asked if I like the job that this guy did. My neighbor’s water heater also bit the dust. I gave a glowing recommendation, and the water heater guy soon had another happy customer.

This is a great example of how someone is rewarded for providing high quality customer service. This guy turned one original customer (the pest control guy) into two more customers by simply providing good customer service.

Since I know there are a couple of local readers, I’ll give the business a free plug : it is Hawkeye Sewer and Drain.

Parking spaces can be hard enough to find to find, especially when people take up two spots so that their precious vehicle doesn’t have to be anywhere near the vehicles of the unwashed masses. In one particularly gutsy case, I saw a vehicle taking up eight spots – it was parked at a 90 degree angle to the correct direction and was straddling the midpoint line that divided the halves of row of spots.

The flashing signs say “construction 2 miles ahead, merge left” but these drivers decide to keep going full speed ahead until the last minute, at which point they try to force their way into the left lane, to the great annoyance of people who played by the rules. The message they’re sending is clear – their time is more important than ours.

They’re not only running a ripe red light, but they’re making a dangerous left hand turn when the cross traffic has the right of way. They’re an accident waiting to happen.

The road is a sheet of ice, and these drivers are zipping from lane to lane at 70 mph. Take traffic conditions into account when you’re driving.

These folks take a good thing too far, driving 20 mph when there are light flurries. A rear end collision is inevitable.

Traffic is backed up for a mile, and people at the back of the traffic jam begin honking. Seriously, I have 100 cars ahead of me – what do you really expect me to do?

Click on the photo to see a larger version

This photo is one of my all time favorites. I had just moved back to Iowa a couple of months earlier, and I had the day off from work. It was a beautiful day in March, and I jumped into my ’99 Taurus and hit the road. I drove north to Guttenberg and headed down the Great River Road – a road that hugs the mighty Mississippi River.

It was a leisurely drive, and I stopped in several towns along the way to admire the view, enjoying a burger and fries at a Dairy Queen along the way.

Eventually, I reached my turnaround point – Bellevue. I stopped at Bellevue State Park (Nelson Unit) to walk around before driving back home. The park has nice view of the river, as you can see from this photo. You can still see some bits of snow and ice on the river. I really liked this scene, and was ready to take some photos. At that point, I noticed the train. It was in the distance, and it was stopped. I waited a half hour for the train to finally start moving. The end result was this photo – the train snaking through town, against the river backdrop.

Good things come to those who wait.

I got a phone call last night. Here is the gist:

Me: Hello?

TVG: Can I speak to Melonie?

Me: Who? [wanting to verify that I heard them correctly]

TVG: Melonie.

Me: Oh, you mean MeloDy. Is this a telemarketer?

TVG: No, I’m not a telemarketer. I’m with TV Guide.

Me: We’ll resubscribe when we feel like it.

TVG: Can you put her on the line?

Me: We will resubscribe when we get around to it.

TVG [in a demanding tone]: Just put her on the line.

Me [in an agitated tone]: No. You’re not going to tell me what to do.

TVG: OK, I’ll just call right back.

Me: If you do that, you’ll be in trouble.

TVG: Trouble? What kind of trouble?

Me: Yes. I’ll file a complaint with the state Attorney General’s office.

TVG: What sort of complaint?

Me: Harassment by means of repeated phone calls.

TVG [laughing]: How do you even know who I am?

Me: You already told me you were with TV Guide, moron.

[I hang up]

I’ll admit, the moron comment was unprofessional

However, let’s break this down the other side of the conversation.

1) Make an effort to get the customer’s name right.

2) This was the second call we have received in the last few weeks regarding our TV Guide subscription. It expires in August. When we got the first call, we told them not to call back – that we would just renew manually when it got close to renewal time. Yes, we understand that there may be a price increase in the future. We’ll take that risk.

3) Don’t demand to speak to someone in my household. You do not have the right to speak to them. If you’re a law enforcement professional, I will listen to your demands. If not, I’m going to decide who can or can’t talk to. That’s just the way it is – the person who answers the phone is a gatekeeper. (Note: I did know, for a fact, that my wife didn’t want to take this call. If this was the sort of call she would want to take, I would have given it to her, of course.)

4) Don’t lie about being a telemarketer. You’re trying to sell (market) a subscription renewal on a telephone. Tele + market = telemarket.

5) If you don’t think the FCC or AG’s office can track you down specifically, you’re wrong. Call logs (external as well as your employer’s internal logs) can be used to determine exactly which telemarketer made a specific call. Keep that in mind the next time you feel like getting nasty with a customer.

6) Oh, hey, guess what? In the course of this call, you managed to put a really bad taste in our mouth about TV Guide. Honestly, the product has gone downhill recently, anyway. The listings have gotten very generic (“NFL Game” instead of listing the teams, for example) and the new larger format of the magazine has been a change for the worse. The onscreen guide on our TV (free with our digital cable subscritpion) is considerably more accurate than TV Guide anyway. We plan to let our TV guide subscription lapse when it expires. My wife has been a subscriber for 10 years or more.

Golden rule of telemarketing: don’t annoy your existing customers.

My wife was not rude and didn’t provoke this, so it was very bizarre and unprofessional.  How do these people keep their jobs?

I wrote up a nice 300 word summary of the problem and submitted it through TV Guide’s “contact us” function.  I suggested that they retrieve the call logs for calls made to our number and listen to them (if they record the calls).  I also suggested that firing these people might enhance the customer experience.

Schedule of posts
Starting in January 2009, I will attempt to stick to this schedule each month. However, life may alter these plans at any time.

Day 1-5: Consumer experiences

Day 6-10: Book review (this will run heavilty toward mysteries and baseball books)

Day 11-15: A general news topic

Day 16-20: Sports – very likely to be heavy on baseball

Day 21 – end of the month: one or two posts on a variety of subjects

I once had a credit card through MBNA. I loved this card. It was an alumni card that proudly displayed my alma mater.

Then, Bank of America bought MBNA. Suddenly, things got bad. The web site functions no longer worked like they should. In particular, paying the card online became much more difficult. Many times, it didn’t work at all. Other times, it process the wrong amount (generally the minimum payment instead of the amount of the bill). I was double checking what I was doing, and clearly this was the fault of Bank of America. News stories at the time pointed to problems they were having with integration – apparently I was a victim.

One month, we didn’t get a bill. We didn’t notice until the next month, when we got a bill with the $29 late fee.

Typically, a credit card issuer will give you ONE freebie late fee. You simply call, and they will waive the fee.

This was not the case with Bank of Ameria. Not only did they refuse to waive the fee, but they refused to escalate our calls to a manager, and even hung up on me once (for no real apparent reason – I wasn’t using abusive language or anything, I was simply demanding to speak to a manager).

Finally, after repeated calls, we managed to get the fee waived. Honestly, I can remember exactly how this miracle occurred.

However, I was sick of Bank of America by this point. I cancelled by card. OK, we ran a fair amount of purchases through the card, so they lost a few bucks in transaction fees. No big loss, right?

We have our mortgage through CountryWide. As you know, CountryWide has been purchased by Bank of America. We are refinancing our mortgage on Monday (shaving 3/4 point off our rate). We are switching lenders. We didn’t even consider CountryWide/BofA as an option. We simply don’t trust Bank of America at this point. With all the problems we encountered with the credit cards, we have fears that they won’t handle the escrow properly or will make other errors.

Does anyone want to guess how much this will cost Bank of America over the course of the loan? It’s a rather large amount … certainly much larger than the $29 fee they fought to keep. If we had encountered positive customer service during the credit card debacle, we would probably be keeping our loan with CountryWide/BofA.

This will likely become a mini-series … statistics are great, but can be abused.

Today’s focus is on the “transitive” property of statistics. My example will be an issue that many people are well aware of. The issue is important and is a problematic societal issue. I am definitely not suggesting that the problem doesn’t exist – but I am suggesting that the arguments have at times been twisted to say things that the number don’t necessarily support.

Fact 1: Members of group A are paid less than members Group B for the same work
Fact 2: Members of group A, on average, have salaries that are 50% of those of members of group B

thus, the creation of
“fact” 3
Members of group A on average make, on average, 50% of members of group B, for the same work.

The only problem with this is that this is overly simplistic. You cannot blend the first two facts. Too many other variables exist.

Let’s illustrate:

Group A, 100 people
6 brain surgeons @ 135,000 = 810,000
94 engineers @ 45,000 = 4,230,000
Total = 5,040,000

Group B, 100 people
50 brain surgeons @ 150,000 = 7,500,000
50 engineers @ 50,000 = 2,500,000
Total = 10M

Let’s test facts 1 and 2

Fact 1: Are members of group A paid less than members of group B for the same work? Yes. They make 10% less.
Fact 2: Are members of group A, on average, paid ~50% of the salary of members of group B? Yes. 50.4%

But when we come to “fact” 3:
Members of group A on average make, on average, 50% of members of group B, for the same work.

This is not true. Members of group A make 90% of what members of group B make for the same work.

Keep an eye open and you’ll see occasional use of the “transitive” property by otherwise reputable sources. Why? Either because the person doesn’t know any better, or because it’s easier than delving deeper to find the “split” statistics – and 90% of people aren’t going to see the problem. The key point here – when you read the news, you should not only scrutinize the facts for accuracy, but also the logic used to piece the story together. The best statistics in the world cannot undo the harm of illogical thinking.

End note: With this particular example, there is the issue of why members of group A tend to have less than members of group B. Is this due to personal preference, lifestyle choices, or a lack of opportunity. This is a good topic for discussion, but it is beyond the point of this article – that people need to analyze the statistics more closely.

I got a call from a telemarketer last week. It was one of those calls where you can chop the interest rate on your credit card. I decided to tell the caller that they were in violation of the “Do not call” list and that I would refer subsequent calls to the attorney general’s office – so I hit the button to talk to a human.

Then the call got weird.

I hear a woman in the background. “Can we get some soy sauce with that? A lot of soy sauce. We both like soy sauce. Can we get like ten each?”

The conversation goes on like this for a bit – clearly she is using her cell phone to order lunch while she is supposed to be answering calls. Eventually, my one year old daughter makes a sound in the background. The call realizes what has happened and focuses her attention on me in the only way possible.

Yep, she hung up on me. Hopefully this was one of those calls that is being recorded for training purposes.

My wife and I were at Target this weekend and decided to check out a GPS navigation system they had on sale.

After trying to find them in electronics, we are directed back to the massive and glorious automotive section.

We get back to automotive. Sure enough, several GPS units are on display. Sort of. The guts have been taken out and replaced with a piece of paper showing showing a navigation route. It reminded me a bit of the fake TVs and computers that furniture stores use as props. Full color, of course – they spared no expense.

The strange thing, though … is that the store had taken the precaution to lock them down. Certainly, the temptation to steal a plastic GPS shell with a paper insert would simply be too great for most thieves.