Category: ‘Technology’ · TangleBones

An Open Letter to Customer Care Teams

Dear Cus­tomer Care Team-​members,

I know you don’t care about me or my prob­lems. I know that they only put the word “care” into your job title so that a) we’d asso­ciate you with Care Bears and have a harder time stran­gling you (not gonna dis­suade me though), and b) man­age­ment can snicker behind your back. So let’s not pre­tend you’re fool­ing anybody.

Regard­less, you don’t have to rub our noses in it by lying to us. Tack­ing this onto the bottom of your emails:

Please do not respond to this mes­sage as no one will receive it.

That’s just bull­shit. You cre­ated an auto­mated system for receiv­ing and track­ing the form that I filled out to com­plain about what­ever it was your com­pany screwed up in the first place. Why not give me an email that does the same thing?

Anyway, I know you’re not lis­ten­ing to this either, so I’ll go back to scream­ing into this hole in the ground. Maybe some­body in China will care.

Burn in Hell,

Jemal

Minus Plus

Another reason to love feed read­ers: they catch stuff even when they shouldn’t. Still, I love Garfield Minus Garfield. Even with Garfield.

An Open Letter to Google, Re: Google Apps For Your Domain

Dear Google,

I think it’s pretty clear that I love you. I mean, I did every­thing I could to get into the Gmail beta as soon as pos­si­ble, I held con­tests to give away Gmail invites, I try to con­vince every­one I know to use Google prod­ucts, and I only ever use Google for search­ing. Every prod­uct you guys come up with, I’m will­ing to try. And most of them I like!

So when the Google engi­neer who was fixing our search appli­ance at my old job tried to talk me into using Google Apps for Your Domain (GAfYD) to host my email, I was a will­ing con­vert. I mean, it’s Gmail but with my (not so) cool domain name! I duti­fully updated my MX records, for­warded all of my old mail, and started enjoy­ing the high life. Sort of.

You see, half of your apps don’t seem to know about GAfYD. My Google Reader account has to be tied to my Gmail account. Since I don’t ever get any email from the Reader team, this isn’t a big deal. But today I got an email from the AdSense team let­ting me know that I could no longer use my GAfYD Gmail address to access AdSense, and must instead use my plain old Gmail address. That I don’t use. That just for­wards to my GAfYD Gmail. Which is kinda dumb. 

I know you’re a big com­pany. And I know that coor­di­na­tion between teams is hard. But can we please straighten this out? I know that you guys employ some of the smartest people in the world (Hey Kev!) over there, so let’s put those big brains to use!

With love,

Jemal