Category: General

The Elect­or­al Vote Pre­dict­or 2004 web site has some sad­den­ing com­ments about the US elect­or­al sys­tem today. The sad­dest is a point­er to the BBC story of ex-Pres­id­ent Carter­’s con­ten­tion that Flor­ida does not ful­fill inter­na­tion­al require­ments for a fair elec­tion. Since Flor­ida has so many votes asso­ci­ated with it, it is a determ­in­ing factor in the US elec­tion, and any wor­ries that it is not going to fairly reflect the will of the elect­or­ate there will cause con­cerns about the fair­ness of the elec­tion overall.

The oth­er issue is that it appears that polling organ­iz­a­tions are no longer com­ing up with num­bers that can be trus­ted. When two polls in the same state come up with com­pletely dif­fer­ent num­bers, neither poll can be trus­ted. Although this is bad news for the trust­wor­thi­ness of the polling agen­cies, per­haps over­all it’s good news? If instant polls don’t work, and polls in gen­er­al are dis­cred­ited, one can always hope that one out­come will be politi­cians who do what they think is right for the major­ity of the people, rather than what will earn them a short-term blip in the polls. Of course, people will always dis­agree over what is “right”, but a little time for thought and per­haps even focus­sing on con­sist­ency with long-term goals can­’t hurt.

I hate being upsold. Rel­ev­ant upselling (I’m buy­ing a wash­ing machine, the per­son says “this soap powder is spe­cially designed to work with this style of wash­ing machine”) is one thing. Irrel­ev­ant upselling, or upselling that takes more than one sen­tence just annoys me. 

The latest example was, I call my bank about some­thing this morn­ing. We fin­ish that trans­ac­tion, I’m ready to get back to work, when the woman starts talk­ing to me about who my long-dis­tance phone pro­vider is and telling me about their offer­ings! This was­n’t rel­ev­ant to the pre­vi­ous trans­ac­tion, she did­n’t ask if it was a good time, and she did­n’t even both­er with the hitherto-oblig­at­ory “is there any­thing else I can do for you today” which used to be the stand­ard clos­ing formula. 

Hairdress­ers (and the beauty busi­ness in gen­er­al) are par­tic­u­larly prone to this; I just don’t go back to estab­lish­ments that upsell too hard.

One of the recent spams arrived as a dual text/HTML mes­sage. Pegas­us duti­fully showed me the text ver­sion (one click to the HTML ver­sion, should you wish it), which ran

Your mail­er do not sup­port HTML mes­sages. Switch to a bet­ter mailer. 

Ah, the sense of des­per­a­tion on the part of the per­son writ­ing that! The idea that someone might not be able to click on the link to dir­ectly buy whatever it is they’re selling! Of course for me, ped­ant that I am, the top­per was the bad gram­mar. If only all spam were so amusing.

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. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Cus­tom­er Ser­vice at Air Canada”