I love Apple products. From the early 1980s when my friends and I ogled the black and green screens of Apple mainframe terminal hubs in our high school computer programming classes, to the sleek design and amazing sound and graphics of the latest iPhones, I've been hooked.
And it isn't just the hardware I find impressive. The simplicity and power of programs like GarageBand, PhotoShop and Pages cannot be overstated. Someone at Apple, probably Steve Jobs, years ago crawled inside my brain and understood I didn't want to have to sift through thousands of lines of coding in order to complete a simple creative task. I'm simple and stupid, and my memory sucks. All I want and need from my computer is the ability to click and drag. That's it.
Click it.
Drag it.
Done.
Another thing I've always admired about Apple is the ability of the company's products to play well with others. Sharing files has always been easy. We could toggle back and forth on our Macs from Apple to PC in the early days, until Apple finally just started working directly with most PC-based software and we were finally able to rest our toggle fingers.
These days, however, I'm not feeling the love so much as I once did. The reason is simple: email.
My Lovely Wife upgraded to the iPhone6 a few months ago and, immediately, experienced trouble with her RoadRunner email account. We loaded it correctly and she received emails with no trouble, except that no email hung around more than a day.
I hear many of you out there saying "Go to 'Settings' and change the 'Mail Days to Sync' to whatever you need it to be." Imagine me responding, with a mildly pained and sour-pussed expression on my pale face, "Don't you think we tried that?" In fact, under the RoadRunner account on her iPhone there is no Mail Days to Sync option. There are only two options. One is turning the Mail on or off. The other is turning Notes on or off.
Speaking recently with Apple Support to solve this problem was reminiscent of my experience with Honda a couple years ago. The engine in our Odyssey was malfunctioning. Even though the economy feature was properly reducing the number of pistons in use from six to four when appropriate, it continued to spit oil into all six pistons. This led to a build up of oil and scoring that damaged the pistons and required a new engine be installed. Turns out this malfunction was well-known and existed in several models of Honda vehicles from multiple years of production. Problem was Honda had yet to acknowledge the problem was their fault. The support tech on the phone kept telling me he understood too much oil was being injected and had damaged our engine, but we had no claim against our warranty because oil was not a covered mechanical part of the vehicle.
"Oil doesn't magically jump into the engine on its own because it feels like it," I recall telling him. "A mechanical part of the vehicle moves the oil from its reservoir into the engine."
"Yes, sir," he would respond. "But that mechanical part didn't cause the damage to your engine. The damage was caused by the oil itself and oil is not a mechanical part of the vehicle."
"I hope you rot in hell." Or something to that effect.
The Apple Support folks I spoke with the other day were not condescending prats like the Honda guy, but the runaround was fairly similar. They began with several half-hearted attempts to reset the RoadRunner email account they fully well knew would not work. Then they talked to me about the difference between POP accounts and other kinds of email accounts and how POP accounts, especially POP3 accounts, sometimes cause problems when being imported into iPhones. I would then restate how we had never had this problem with previous versions of iPhones, regardless of what kind of POP was POPPING over at RoadRunner, and that's where our conversations became Mobius threads that would have made M.C. Escher proud.
The most telling moment was when I offered the Apple Support tech an emotional out and she took it. I told her I realized the misbehaving iPhone was not her fault and that she didn't have the authority to do anything about it or acknowledge the possibility that Apple's hardware and software could be to blame. You could practically feel the defensive tone melt away from her voice when she said "Thank you."
In the meantime, for the first time I can recall, Apple has me thinking of trying someone new.
© 2016 Mark Feggeler
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Linked-In, Looked-Around, Logged-Off
Several years ago, I joined the online service Linked-In. Everyone else was doing it, so I figured why not jump off the same bridge?
For those of you not familiar with Linked-In, it's basically a semi-functional, constantly changing, over-promised/under-delivered social network for business people. Think Facebook, only without videos of dancing babies and talking dogs, and absolutely no Candy Crush Saga. Linked-In enables you to keep up with all the people you worked with years ago, all the people you work with today, and all the people you wish you had worked with over the course of your career instead of all those other people you're linked to.
Not only are everyone's business accomplishments listed out for you to see when you feel so inclined, Linked-In is kind enough to send you emails -- sometimes five a day -- letting you know that Sally Whatshername got another promotion and Willy Givakrap now has three professional certification acronyms after his name.
There are passive sales pitches of all kinds from every self-employed (read "unemployed" or "unemployable") would-be consultant with a laptop and a copy of "Business Plans for Dummies" at his breakfast table. There are total strangers requesting linkage to you for no other reason than to make themselves appear more important than they really are. There are associations and groups that will want to count you on their rolls without offering you much in return except off-topic discussion forums moderated by the Linked-In equivalent of a crazy cat lady. There are people with one-thousand, one-hundred and seventeen "connections" who post comments every three hours and others with seven "connections" who started filling out their profiles in 2007 and never managed to get back around to completing them.
But it isn't simply a one-way street. There's more to it than posting your resume and spouting your accomplishments. Thanks to the recommendations feature, you can help others spout about their accomplishments.
Presently, I have three recommendations on my profile, only one of which I didn't have to beg for. I would have more recommendations, but I'm not really one for reference-swapping with people I don't really know. Not that I mind someone lying to give me a leg up, just so long as they don't expect me to lie about them. I do have a phony baloney reputation to protect, after all.
The latest viral enhancement to Linked-In is the Endorsement feature. It's perfect for people who want to say something nice about someone else, but don't want to take the time to put that sentiment into words. Kind of like buying a Hallmark card, only with a click of a button you can verify that one of your "connections" is an expert in some random field of knowledge.
I have been receiving a substantial number of endorsements lately. There are endorsements for my sales acumen, my crazy-mad revenue management skills, my in-depth knowledge of hotels, my vast motel sales experience, and many more. Some of these endorsements came from people who might even know what they're talking about!
Just today, a person with whom I haven't worked for years endorsed me for a skill she could not possibly know I have in a field of expertise that has nothing to do with any position I've ever held at any job I've ever worked. Mixed emotions flooded over me when my third Linked-In email of the day announced her vouching for my noteworthy, and previously imperceptible, abilities. I thought long and hard over whether or not I should I accept the endorsement.
Oh, what the heck. Like anyone will ever try to verify my hang-gliding skills...
© 2013 Mark Feggeler
For those of you not familiar with Linked-In, it's basically a semi-functional, constantly changing, over-promised/under-delivered social network for business people. Think Facebook, only without videos of dancing babies and talking dogs, and absolutely no Candy Crush Saga. Linked-In enables you to keep up with all the people you worked with years ago, all the people you work with today, and all the people you wish you had worked with over the course of your career instead of all those other people you're linked to.
Not only are everyone's business accomplishments listed out for you to see when you feel so inclined, Linked-In is kind enough to send you emails -- sometimes five a day -- letting you know that Sally Whatshername got another promotion and Willy Givakrap now has three professional certification acronyms after his name.
There are passive sales pitches of all kinds from every self-employed (read "unemployed" or "unemployable") would-be consultant with a laptop and a copy of "Business Plans for Dummies" at his breakfast table. There are total strangers requesting linkage to you for no other reason than to make themselves appear more important than they really are. There are associations and groups that will want to count you on their rolls without offering you much in return except off-topic discussion forums moderated by the Linked-In equivalent of a crazy cat lady. There are people with one-thousand, one-hundred and seventeen "connections" who post comments every three hours and others with seven "connections" who started filling out their profiles in 2007 and never managed to get back around to completing them.
But it isn't simply a one-way street. There's more to it than posting your resume and spouting your accomplishments. Thanks to the recommendations feature, you can help others spout about their accomplishments.
Presently, I have three recommendations on my profile, only one of which I didn't have to beg for. I would have more recommendations, but I'm not really one for reference-swapping with people I don't really know. Not that I mind someone lying to give me a leg up, just so long as they don't expect me to lie about them. I do have a phony baloney reputation to protect, after all.
The latest viral enhancement to Linked-In is the Endorsement feature. It's perfect for people who want to say something nice about someone else, but don't want to take the time to put that sentiment into words. Kind of like buying a Hallmark card, only with a click of a button you can verify that one of your "connections" is an expert in some random field of knowledge.
I have been receiving a substantial number of endorsements lately. There are endorsements for my sales acumen, my crazy-mad revenue management skills, my in-depth knowledge of hotels, my vast motel sales experience, and many more. Some of these endorsements came from people who might even know what they're talking about!
Just today, a person with whom I haven't worked for years endorsed me for a skill she could not possibly know I have in a field of expertise that has nothing to do with any position I've ever held at any job I've ever worked. Mixed emotions flooded over me when my third Linked-In email of the day announced her vouching for my noteworthy, and previously imperceptible, abilities. I thought long and hard over whether or not I should I accept the endorsement.
Oh, what the heck. Like anyone will ever try to verify my hang-gliding skills...
© 2013 Mark Feggeler
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Quaxting and Other Recent Advances
The problem with technology is its incessant constancy.
There once was a time -- our children and grandchildren will find it difficult to believe -- when being out of touch did not constitute a crisis of communication. Being out of touch did not mean cell towers had crumbled or satellites had plummeted from their orbits. It was a common occurrence, not a cause for filing missing person reports or raising the national security level to Orange.
If you left your house, you were out of touch. If you were driving from point A to point B, you were out of touch anywhere in between. If you were in school, at work, in a meeting, at lunch, in the bathroom, or at a movie, you were out of touch.
Out of touch was not a permanent condition. Once you got home, or to a place that had a phone, you magically became available again. You could borrow your friend's house phone to "check in" with your parents, or sit at your office desk and call whomever your heart desired to call. You were reachable, and so was anyone within reasonable distance of a telephone.
When we took vacations we didn't waste time uploading pictures to Facebook, or checking the latest trending tweets, or bitching about the weak 3G signal at the campground that kept us from streaming YouTube's latest viral videos. We played cards and built campfires. We made conversation. We were happy the toilets at the KOA campground were separated by walls. We visited waterfalls and wildernesses and skyscrapers and monuments, and we didn't have 98 megapixel high-resolution tablet cameras with which to capture our experiences. We had binoculars and Kodak Instamatic cameras with Flipflashes you hoped would fire when you snapped a picture. And wherever you were, mountains or city, highway or back country road, you were most decidedly out of touch.
But not anymore!
Thanks to cell phones and smart phones and email and Skype, we're never more than a megabyte away from each other. My coworkers can reach me via email at any time of any day, regardless of necessity. Our daughter can quack a complaint at her boyfriend via text -- a new skill we call "quaxting" -- without his having to be in the same county, let alone be aware of what he might have done to warrant her quaxting him in the first place. My son can even answer an iChat video call from his uncle while sitting on the toilet. Technology has broken down all walls, it seems, even the bathroom walls.
And the sense of urgency is spread evenly over all modes of communication to the extent every bing of a text or bong of an arriving email requires an immediate response. I used to laugh that my in-laws had a telephone in their bathroom. Now we might as well have suppository phones. One clench of a butt cheek answers it, another clench ends the call, and a good sneeze gets you through to 911.
Maybe by the time I'm old and gray I'll be able to put down the cell phone, turn off the video phone, shut down the internet service, and disconnect for a day or two. I better send out an email blast and post about on Facebook before I do, just so nobody sends the police to my door to check on me.
© 2012 Mark Feggeler
There once was a time -- our children and grandchildren will find it difficult to believe -- when being out of touch did not constitute a crisis of communication. Being out of touch did not mean cell towers had crumbled or satellites had plummeted from their orbits. It was a common occurrence, not a cause for filing missing person reports or raising the national security level to Orange.
If you left your house, you were out of touch. If you were driving from point A to point B, you were out of touch anywhere in between. If you were in school, at work, in a meeting, at lunch, in the bathroom, or at a movie, you were out of touch.
Out of touch was not a permanent condition. Once you got home, or to a place that had a phone, you magically became available again. You could borrow your friend's house phone to "check in" with your parents, or sit at your office desk and call whomever your heart desired to call. You were reachable, and so was anyone within reasonable distance of a telephone.
When we took vacations we didn't waste time uploading pictures to Facebook, or checking the latest trending tweets, or bitching about the weak 3G signal at the campground that kept us from streaming YouTube's latest viral videos. We played cards and built campfires. We made conversation. We were happy the toilets at the KOA campground were separated by walls. We visited waterfalls and wildernesses and skyscrapers and monuments, and we didn't have 98 megapixel high-resolution tablet cameras with which to capture our experiences. We had binoculars and Kodak Instamatic cameras with Flipflashes you hoped would fire when you snapped a picture. And wherever you were, mountains or city, highway or back country road, you were most decidedly out of touch.
But not anymore!
And the sense of urgency is spread evenly over all modes of communication to the extent every bing of a text or bong of an arriving email requires an immediate response. I used to laugh that my in-laws had a telephone in their bathroom. Now we might as well have suppository phones. One clench of a butt cheek answers it, another clench ends the call, and a good sneeze gets you through to 911.
Maybe by the time I'm old and gray I'll be able to put down the cell phone, turn off the video phone, shut down the internet service, and disconnect for a day or two. I better send out an email blast and post about on Facebook before I do, just so nobody sends the police to my door to check on me.
© 2012 Mark Feggeler
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