Online Customer Service

Ski season is quickly approaching and so I have been looking to replace some of my old equipment. Generally you can find good deals on the Internet. You do have to be careful though as you may run the risk of getting ripped off. Fortunately there are services like "Google Trusted Stores" to help ensure you do not get taken advantage of.

Saturday afternoon I found a great pair of ski bindings for my son's new skis. I found them on a site I trust with a retail presence in Utah. I purchased them and paid the $7 to have them shipped to the house. Sure I could have gone into the retail store, picked them up, and saved myself some money. However the convenience of not having to go anywhere was well worth the small price. A few days later I got a call from my son asking if he could open the package. I told him he could whereupon he hung up so he could use both hands to rip open the packaging. A few minutes later I got a call back and he explained that only one part of the bindings arrived.

I happened to be at a department offsite and so I couldn't follow up with the seller. When I got back to my office I could not get a hold of them on the phone. They did have a chat app on their website and so I opened the window and asked if a second package might be coming any time soon. Nope, the warehouse had made a mistake and shipped one of two boxes. I needed to take a picture of the parts that arrived along with the packaging. I had a slight problem: everything was in Utah and I was in California. I tried to get my son on the phone but he had taken off for an evening activity. Fortunately my daughter helped me out and sent me the requested photo. I forwarded that to the website and the customer service guy created a new shipment. He even went so far as to personally go to the warehouse, get the second box from the shelves, and send me back a picture of the bindings along with the shipping label. To make things right, he even threw in a few extra low-cost items.

People make mistakes. When you purchase something from a physical store, you have a much lower chance of mistakes being made. I appreciated the customer service representative trying to make amends. Fortunately it is only September and my son doesn't need the skis for a couple of months. I would hate to think how upset we both would have been if snow had already started to fall and we wanted to go skiing the next day. So if you plan to buy stuff online, make sure you don't need it immediately. Otherwise you could be very disappointed.

Final Answer

My son finally made it home safely after two years in Armenia. I have been struggling with the decision on what computer to get him for his first year in college. I presented several choices to him and let him do some research for several days. He came back with a computer choice. Then I felt I needed to make one last look to make sure we reviewed all possible options.

There are several online computer vendors that allow you to specify the features you are looking for and so I visited Best Buy's. They have a store really close to my house and so I knew I could order it, have it shipped there for free, and pick it up rather quickly. I used the configuration tool and put in the options I thought would work best for a college freshman looking to start in the Mechanical Engineering department. Surprisingly I found a computer I had overlooked. I presented it to my son as a viable alternative to his choice and let him decide. I always believe that any large purchase should be thought about for at least a day. When I go to buy cars, I often tell the salesperson I want to sleep on it before I make a purchase. They hate that but then I don't have buyer's remorse. So I let my son sleep on the decision.

He came back and settled on a MacBook Air with an Intel i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 128 GB solid-state drive. Sure I could have gotten more disk space, but with terabyte drives costing $70, why would you need to? I agreed with his decision and so I ordered the computer. The only problem with his choice is that the i7 is an upgrade and so it is not kept in stock at the Apple stores. I had to have it custom built. It will be here next week but is coming all the way from China. School starts on Monday so I hope my son doesn't need his computer until Wednesday when it is due to arrive.

You Work in Computers?

Several years ago I had someone ask me if I worked in computers. When I replied that I did, she told me that I must have any number of job opportunities because there seem to be so many computer job postings. I tried to explain that there are a lot of different areas and that while I may know databases very well, I am not a Java programmer nor would I be hired as a user interface developer. Unfortunately she didn't understand database, Java, user interface, nor the differences between them.

Today I had the chance to attend a series of presentation given by my company's staff of summer interns. My intern gave an excellent presentation on Kubernetes and I decided to stick around listening to others, trying to gauge how well he did. I quickly became aware of how many different disciplines there are in computer science. One person talked about a very in-depth graphics routine he spent the summer researching. Another talked about how she worked with game console software development kits (SDK's). It reminded me of how truly diverse jobs in computers can be.

Should you be interested in a computer job you might want to spend some time thinking about what interests you. My first professional experience with computers involved data and so I built my career around databases. My son has taken a liking to computer networks and so that is where he has found employment. Yes, the field of computers is large and varied. My only advice is that if you decide that a career with computers sounds right for you, continue learning. The field is always evolving and technologies from 20 years ago are different now. When I started out in databases, SQL was the language to learn. It is still applicable but now there are other data tools and to remain marketable, I have had to keep myself constantly educated.

In case you are interested, my intern did a magnificent job on his presentation and made the team proud.

Mobile Phone Etiquette

I am at the airport waiting to catch my flight back to Salt Lake for the weekend. Normally I would be bored and trying to figure out something to do. Today I get the pleasure of listening to someone talk on the phone. In the past we used to have somewhat private phone booths that tried to absorb some of the sound. Now people just sit in their chairs carrying on a conversation about their latest prostrate exam like nobody else can hear them. Trust me, there are conversations I really don't want to hear.

The lure of listening in on other people's conversations used to be somewhat diminished by the fact you could only hear half of it. I don't know why but people now think it is perfectly acceptable to use Skype and FaceTime in public places. Every Thursday night as I wait to catch my flight home, I see at least one person with their phone held out like they are taking a selfie so they can FaceTime someone else. Not only can I hear the usual half of the conversation, I get to hear the whole thing. Tonight is no different.

For those that are interested, yes, that scab does look infected and he really should go to the doctor's to have it checked out.

Busy Signal vs. Fax Machine

While home in Utah last Friday, I was supposed to have carpet delivered and installed. My wife and I had picked this date 3 weeks earlier so I could be there to make sure everything went as planned. That morning my wife got a call from the installer that a family emergency had come up and we needed to reschedule. My wife let me know about the delay and I went into action fixing the wrong as we had spent weeks moving out of 3 bedrooms and ripping out the old carpet. I did not want to go another day without something we had already paid for.

I made my first call to the local store where we had purchased the carpet. It is a large chain store with many locations. I did that on purpose so that in the event that one installer had a family emergency, the company would have other installers they could call on to finish the job. The person helping me on the other end of the phone mistakenly hung up on me while trying to transfer me to her manager. Naturally I called back only to get hung up on a second time. That should have been a clue that this person did not know how to use a phone.

My next call went to the customer service department of this large store. I talked with a nice lady who eventually connected me back to the local store that I had called twice before. She routed me to the same employee that had hung up on me. This whole process didn't take long to write but actually took about 30 minutes of real time thanks to all of the automated phone systems and multiple explanations I had to make. Meanwhile the local store had tried several times to call me back but kept getting a busy signal.

With the ubiquity of call waiting and other features that come standard with our mobile phones, we don't realize that old hard-wired phone lines don't include them without extra charges. Some younger people today have never heard a busy signal and doesn't know what it sounds like. The lady at the local store kept saying she couldn't call me back because she kept getting a fax machine and didn't realize that fax machines sound nothing like a busy signal.

I probably made a mistake using an old land line instead of calling in on my mobile phone. However I called from my basement and prefer a land line down there instead of my mobile. I had to laugh about this person not knowing what a busy signal sounds like.

Ultimately I managed to resolve the issue and carpet got installed at 3pm that afternoon.

Time for a New College Laptop Again

Back in February I wrote about how my youngest son will soon need a new laptop. I didn't see the urgency in making a decision at the time because heading to college seemed so far off. In two weeks he will be home after spending two years in Armenia and getting ready to attend college.

As I wrote before he will need to talk with his academic advisor to see the best recommendation for his engineering program in school. Some engineering software is only available for Windows and so a Mac might not be a good choice. Or the opposite could be true. I doubt it, but it could be.

A quick stop at Best Buy shows that there are even more choices than before. In addition to Windows or Mac, you can also choose a Chrome OS laptop. If you can get by with using online applications for everything you do, then it is a viable option. I don't think it is a good choice for an engineering student though and so I won't bother looking at one of those.

The next question boils down to budget: How much do I want to spend for my son's laptop. I always joke with my other children about how I like my youngest son the most. They all think that is true but reality is that whatever I do for one child, I have to make it fair for all of the rest. When my older son went to pick his laptop, I looked at the lowest price MacBook Pro and used that as the maximum budget. Why? That is what I got his two sisters. While time passes and laptop specifications change, Apple has done a pretty good job identifying realistic price points for student computers. Yes you can get a lower-priced computer but they don't last nearly as long as if you spend a bit more. Just look at my oldest daughter's experience as most of her college roommates needed new computers before the end of the first year.

I am often asked if brand makes a difference. The short answer is, "Yes." You want to be careful about what you purchase online. However if you are visiting a reputable store like Best Buy, they won't carry a junk brand and so your choice will boil down to features for a given price. I recommend more RAM over a faster processor. I also favor a solid-state drive over rotating disk even though you can get enormous disks for next to nothing. If you think your child will have a lot of large files, spend $60 and get an external USB drive and factor that into the cost of the computer.

Writing all of this down has helped me organize my thoughts as I get ready to help my son with his computer. Hopefully it helps you as well. Naturally I will be sure to let you know what I decide.

Pokémon Go in Japan

I am in Japan and have enjoyed being away from the craze of Pokémon Go as it is not yet here. I have seen one or two newspaper articles and CNN clips about how insane things are getting with the game back in the US. I understand that the relative quiet without the game in its homeland is about to be disturbed. Yesterday's international edition of the Wall Street Journal had an article about how McDonald's is partnering with the game developers to have virtual characters located at their restaurants here in Japan.

I wondered how long it would take before businesses decided to cash in on the success of the game. I figured that if you had a virtual character standing out in front of your store, people would come and visit your establishment as a course of playing Pokémon Go. One of my coworkers told me this might be a bad idea because game players would visit your store but not necessarily purchase anything. Real customers would then see the crowd and avoid coming in. I guess McDonalds doesn't feel that way. At least not here in Japan.