Brad’s Blog

Telemarketers (ugh!)

Sun, 5 Oct 2008 10:52:54 -0700

Do you hate telemarketers? Probably most of us do. I know I do. We can all list the litany of their sins: they call at the worst times; they try to hard sell us something we don’t need or want; they aren’t put off easily; they won’t stop calling if asked; the list goes on and on.

I’m fighting back.

For the past several weeks I have been getting robo-calls from, it turns out, a company who admits to being called Carpet Care from San Francisco trying to sell their carpet cleaning service. It’s a really annoying computer call that starts off with a screechy Sarah Palin-like voice saying, “Hi, I’m Daisy. And just for today we have this special offer...”

Well, I don’t have any carpets. So it stands to reason that I don’t need them cleaned.

I first tried logic with them. After listening to their spiel, I pushed the appropriate button to speak to a representative. I explained the situation and asked that they take my name off their call list. They said they would (yeah, right!). When they called back a few days later, I again waited to speak to a representative and threatened them with an FCC complaint because my number is on the do-not-call list (a fat lot of good it did in this case). No dice, they kept calling back. [By the way, the FCC can’t really do anything about it, it turns out. I guess our lawmakers didn’t include any enforcement provisions when they wrote the law. Way to go!]

A lot of you are thinking “why don’t you just hang up?” Well, I did that for a few weeks. But I started thinking that they won’t learn that this type of marketing is offensive to people until it cost them real money. So I have a new tactic.

Every call I get from now on I sign up for their service. The first time I did it, I think the person at the call center was completely startled (tells you how effective this really is, but that’s beside the point). Now, each time they call, I give a non-existent address and make an appointment for the earliest possible time. They come out searching for the address, it’s not there, they have to skip the appointment; it costs them something.

I’ll chronicle how long it take for them to get it. You should try it, too. Let’s get a movement going.

We eat what we grow

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:09:44 -0700

Several times this season we got to harvest our fava beans. We put in about 6 plants, and because we never grew them before, they ended up being too close together. No matter, once they started, they were unstoppable.

We ended up with several harvests of 2-3 lbs. each over 4 months or so.

Life cycle of the Meyer Lemon

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:57:56 -0700

It is amazing to see the entire life cycle of the lemon on a single tree!

Starting with the buds...

Raised Bed Gardening, Part 3

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:50:21 -0700

Planting the bed was fairly straightforward. We had started some seedlings earlier this summer, so we had a head start. We planted some cabbages and some escarole. Lettuces grow well in the San Francisco fog belt. We haven’t had much luck with cabbages due to the cabbage root maggot, the larva of a fly that prefers this type of plant. But we thought we would give it one more shot in the bed.

Some of the transplanted escarole is doing better than others, and some of the cabbages have established very well.

Raised Bed Gardening, Part 2

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 10:16:35 -0700

The next step was to fill the bed with soil and to place the drip system. This bed took 22 cu. ft. of potting soil (11 bags) in total. I extended the existing drip system to place a 1/2” feeder line in the corner. A 1/4” emitter line with an inline valve was placed and routed to form 3 emitter rows.

Raised Bed Gardening

Mon, 4 Aug 2008 09:19:10 -0700

Recently, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom authorized use of the Civic Center Mall as a 21st Century “Victory Garden.” The original Victory Garden was planted during WWII when food was scarce and private homeowners used back yards for growing vegetables. This was written up in the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, and was discussed on blogs as well. It is sponsored, in part, by Slow Food Nation who is planning a huge event this Labor Day to harvest the food grown and promote the “Slow Food” movement culminating in an educational “food fest.”

The joy of nature

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:13:56 -0700

Outside, on our deck, we put out a bird feeder a few months ago. Originally, we jokingly referred to it as entertainment for our (strictly indoor) cats, Kaede and Tessa. The cats would sit by the door to the deck and stare at birds as they flew to the feeder and back to the tree where they nested. And they would chatter.

Good Company, Part 2

Mon, 7 Jan 2008 20:45:59 -0800

Another Good Company

I don’t want to turn this blog into a rant about the places where I buy stuff, but I had another remarkable experience with an online purchase. A week before Christmas, I ordered some software from Amazon.com. I happen to like Amazon a lot. They generally have decent prices. They generally have the merchandise in stock. They generally manage to deliver my orders on time, if not early, even if I choose the free shipping option, which I usually do because I’m basically a cheapskate.

For this order I chose to pay for their “standard” shipping since we were traveling right after Christmas and I was afraid that if it were delivered while we were gone, the package would end up in delivery purgatory. I checked daily to follow the progress of my order. Amazon makes it so easy compared to many other sites. On the first day I was very encouraged to see that delivery was scheduled for December 24th since we were not leaving until the 27th. When I clicked “Track Shipment,” it said that shipper was notified. As the week wore on, this status hadn’t changed. Okay, I figured, this is the holiday season, and maybe UPS wasn’t updating the system regularly. Even though I knew intellectually that it was all done automatically when the package is scanned I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been picked up at Amazon.

December 24th came and went without any hint of a package. A day after Christmas, I checked the status, and again it was unchanged from the day the order was originally shipped. Something was wrong, so I emailed Amazon to ask what was up. I got a reply within a couple of hours saying that indeed, the package was lost in transit or in the warehouse or wherever, and would I like a refund or have them reship the order.

This is where the story gets a little odd. The instructions were to reply to the email indicating my preference. I replied asking them to replace the order, but to please ship it to arrive on January 2nd after we had returned. I didn’t get any acknowledgement by the next day, so I repeated my response. Shortly after, I got a notice saying that the replacement shipment was on it’s way and it was being shipped via next-day (at no additional cost to me). As if this was a good thing. And normally it would be, right? But we were heading for the airport in a couple of hours, and here we are again, in delivery purgatory. So I email them again, explaining the situation, and asking them please to contact UPS and have them hold the shipment. This time when their reply started with “I am sorry that this package did not reach you because of a problem with the shipping address,” I knew something was up. We are probably dealing with an email-reading computer that was looking only for certain words, like “refund” or “replace” and could not understand the meaning of “Deliver on January 2nd.” Such is life, I would have to deal with it when I got back from our trip.

UPS did deliver the package on December 28th as promised. As it happens, our cat-sitter was there when they delivered it so she was able to sign for it. Purgatory avoided. Luckily. End of story.

Well, not quite. Today, the doorbell rings at around 8PM. Who could that be? It’s DHL carrying a shipment from Amazon. They shipped out another replacement! Now that is service.

I’m going to return the duplicate shipment, of course. But it is funny because just this past Saturday in the New York Times, Joe Nocera wrote an article commending Amazon for replacing a shipment that was delivered to a neighbor in his apartment house, but he never got it. As he points out, Customer Service is a big deal for him, and it is for me, too.

Good Company, Bad Company...

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:24:58 -0800

We have all been through the experience of calling a company's customer service. You know the drill - on the phone you go through a maze of menu choices and if you are lucky, you will get a friendly voice on the other end. If you contact them by email, you will get a canned boilerplate reply that doesn't actually answer your question because a computer "reads" and interprets the question.

I had two recent occasions to contact customer service in the past couple of weeks. The two incidents exemplify the extremes of good customer service and bad customer service, and I need to share them with someone. You will be the first.

The Good...
We like to buy our milk from Stornetta Dairy, a local company whose Clover organic milk was the best in a tasting comparison we did some years ago. A short time ago, they changed their packaging, adding those plastic screw-top pouring spouts to the standard milk carton. Since we like to buy organic and try not to use much plastic packaging, I wrote an email to them expressing that the new packaging seemed incompatible with the organic concept, and besides, the company that does the composting for San Francisco could no longer take those cartons. Within half a day, I got a very lengthy and thoughtful response from the VP of Product Research and Development. He explained in detail how the recycling was accomplished, and how they felt the new packaging offered a product that had a longer shelf life once opened. The company obviously put some thought into it before they made the change. I was a bit disappointed at the response, but didn't press it further. Well, I obviously was not the only person who contacted them because a couple of weeks later, I get another email, this time from the CEO. He heard the community, they went back and did research, and this time concluded that, as he put it, "less is more" and made the decision to revert to the original packaging and eliminate the plastic. This really stood out as unusual in this day and age, and reflects a responsible company. GOOD COMPANY. We continue to use their products.

The Bad...
When we remodeled our kitchen a few years ago we installed an Insinkerator Insta-hot water dispenser. We love the thing and for a while it became the most heavily used appliance we had. Unfortunately, the quality control proved to be not that good. Less than six months later the heater tank failed. Since it was under warranty, they sent a repair person out to replace it. Ok, there can be infant mortality in products, so, although they replaced our unit with a refurbished one, we felt they more or less met their obligation. About seven months later and it was out of warranty, the faucet failed and the cold water valve would not close. When I finally reached a customer service representative, I eventually convinced them to replace it at no charge. So far so good, they honored their warranty and even went a step beyond. Fast forward 2 years. The hot water dispenser developed an off-taste and smell. I changed all the fittings and filters and finally traced the source to be the water tank itself. Though we didn't know it at the time we purchased it, the tank was made of polyethylene. After years of exposure to near-boiling water it was not surprising that the plastic was breaking down. I used the Insinkerator website to ask if this was a known problem and how to resolve it. I entered the information including the model and serial numbers, and waited for a reply. Nothing. I called up, and again I was greeted with silence. They would not even acknowledge that there could be an off-taste and smell in the unit. Last month I purchased a replacement, and unfortunately, because of the inherent design of the faucet, I had to buy another Insinkerator. At least the new design had a stainless steel tank so that there would be no issue of the material breaking down over time. It turned out, however, that the unit was larger than the original and because of the installation, it was hard to fit it into the same location. If they would send me some tubing and fittings, it could be completed easily. They had a toll-free "Hot Line" for installation help so I called. After the usual long waiting times, the first person said there was nothing they could do. OK, escalate to the supervisor. Again I explained the situation, and again they said they could do nothing. I said that I was willing to buy the tubing and fittings and all I need was for them to give me the size and material specifications to make it easier. A paraphrase of our conversation:
ISE: -No, sorry, we don't have that information.
Me: -Huh?
ISE: -No, the engineers have the info but we can't bother them.
Me: -And there is no where else we can get the information.
ISE: -No.
Me: -In my experience if a person keeps saying no to a customer, they will not have their job very long.
ISE: -Huh?
And so on. I escalated again to the VP of customer service, but, of course, it did no good because they are trained in not being helpful.

So what do we conclude? First, that the original design had a design flaw; second, the flaw was known to Insinkerator; third, the flaw produced a chemical that is potentially harmful in humans; fourth, by not acknowledging it, they were attempting to avoid potential litigation; and, lastly, their Hot Line is so named because their goal is to ire the customer. BAD COMPANY. We will avoid doing business with them.

In the end, I was able to install it with a little ingenuity and elbow grease and the water now tastes and smells fine.