Category: Rants

Rants about polit­ics or oth­er issues

Customer Service at Air Canada

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. 

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”

Chai Blues @ YVR

If you’re fly­ing out of Van­couver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port through gates E91 — E96 (part of the U.S. depar­tures area), avoid the coffee/snackbar there.

If you’re fly­ing out of Van­couver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port through gates E91 — E96 (part of the U.S. depar­tures area), avoid the coffee/snackbar there. It fea­tures stale bagels, con­des­cend­ing and slow ser­vice, and weird-tast­ing chai lattes.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Chai Blues @ YVR”

Surveys

As a small busi­ness own­er, I often get people call­ing up with some sur­vey or anoth­er. They want to know wheth­er my busi­ness is grow­ing, wheth­er I’ll be hir­ing more people this year, and what soft­ware and ser­vices I sell. If these sur­veys are the basis of the eco­nom­ic polls pre­dict­ing what’s hap­pen­ing this year, I’d advise the world to dis­count most of the answers. The ques­tions sounds like they were writ­ten pre­sup­pos­ing par­tic­u­lar answers; since the ques­tions often don’t make sense the answers won’t either.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Sur­veys”

Technology Works?

I’ve been slowly work­ing on a tutori­al for using entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs that I prom­ised the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion Tech­nic­al Com­mit­tee (ERTC) I’d do (I chair the TC). As befits a prop­er tutori­al, I figured I should test out the bits as I’m writ­ing them in more than one imple­ment­a­tion, just so I can warn people of the poten­tial pit­falls. This has proved to be a frus­trat­ing exper­i­ence for me, and I can see why so many people say tech­no­logy is just too hard.

I’ve been slowly work­ing on a tutori­al for using entity res­ol­u­tion cata­logs that I prom­ised the OASIS Entity Res­ol­u­tion Tech­nic­al Com­mit­tee (ERTC) I’d do (I chair the TC). As befits a prop­er tutori­al, I figured I should test out the bits as I’m writ­ing them in more than one imple­ment­a­tion, just so I can warn people of the poten­tial pit­falls. This has proven to be a frus­trat­ing exper­i­ence for me, and I can see why so many people say tech­no­logy is just too hard.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Tech­no­logy Works?”

Sometimes you have to laugh

The Nigeri­an spam action shows no signs of dying down, but some­times you do have to laugh… on scan­ning the TAG archives I came across this post­ing in which the sub­ject line is STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL but the email has been sent to no few­er than 6 pub­lic W3C mail­ing lists, as well as a bunch of mem­ber-con­fid­en­tial mail­ing lists and oth­er email addresses. I sure hope the thou­sands of dir­ect recip­i­ents keep it con­fid­en­tial, as requested ;-).