Air Canada has a bad reputation these days; in many ways they are a case study for what not to do in customer service. I recently flew on Air Canada and had some delays in the flight. The way most of the Air Canada staff handled the situation just proved that bad customer service makes for extremely upset customers. It would have been so easy for Air Canada to not make things worse, if they’d just followed a couple of basic customer service rules.
In all the discussions about weblogs.com closing down, it’s good to see that people are going to be able to get their data. And that lots of people are stepping up offering to help convert that data into other formats. This is a service not always available in the commercial world, unfortunately.
The first (non-blog) version of laurenwood.org was hosted on a commercial ISP that was sold to someone else, then someone else, etc. Since I’d paid a year in advance (silly me) I didn’t really notice until it was time to renew, and then I couldn’t find out who to pay! The whois registry gave me a phone number, the people at the end of the phone claimed to not know who I was or what my website was, or even the name of the company I’d originally signed up with. It was no surprise when that site eventually just disappeared from the web. Fortunately I’d copied most of the data by then, and now I either host myself or make regular backups of sites (such as textuality.com) that are hosted elsewhere.