When Stupid People Use Computers (Humor from InfoWorld)

Let’s face it: some people should just NOT be allowed near computers.

Photo by °Florian

InfoWorld, a magazine that is seldom considered a bastion of humor, has a series of hilarious articles with real-life stories about seriously stupid things that IT people and Hackers did with computers.

They are a great way to kill some time and leave you feeling smugly confident that you are, at least, not that stupid.

Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories

More stupider user tricks: IT horror stories redux

Stupid hacker tricks

Stupid hacker tricks, part two: The folly of youth

Trek Vapor 3 Helmet Liners and a Tale of Poor Customer Service

Here’s the tale:

I bought a Trek Vapor 3 helmet last year. After using it for a few months, I went to wash the helmet liners because they had accumulated a lot of sweat and grime–as will any piece of cloth that is on athletic gear that comes into contact with skin. The helmet liners fell apart–they must have been held together by water soluble glue–rendering the helmet useless. I complained to Trek customer service and, instead of fixing the problem, they just made me mad.

The Disintegrating Trek Vapor 3 Helmet Liners–After One Wash

My original email to Trek customer service:

I have to say that I am very disappointed in the Vapor 3 helmet I purchased from Trek.

After several months of use, I took out the removable pads inside the helmet to wash the grime and oil out of them. They detach by velcro, so I assumed they were made to be removable and cleanable.

To my surprise, when I washed the pads, the cloth on either side of the foam fell off.

How was the cloth attached to the foam? With water-soluble glue? However you attached it–you made the wrong choice. A helmet liner gets sweaty and needs to be cleaned. Any part of helmet that gets sweaty, should be washable without it falling apart.

This is a complete and utter disappointment. The helmet is now useless without the helmet liner. It was a total waste of money.

I am requesting you send me a new set of helmet pads/ liner to replace the defective ones you shipped with the helmet.

On second thought, better send about 10 sets in case the new ones dissolve when I get them sweaty.

My mailing address is:

John Berns
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Din Daeng, Bangkok 10400
Thailand

Trek Vapor 3 Helmet – With Disolving Helmet Liners

To which they replied:

Thanks for writing and riding Trek bikes. Trek warrants each helmet for a period of one year from the date of purchase against manufacturer’s defects in materials and craftsmanship. We also offer a one year crash replacement policy. To exchange your helmet, please send it along with your original sales receipt to:

Trek Bicycle Corporation
Attn: Helmet Crash Replacement
801 W. Madison Street
Waterloo, WI 53594

You can also take your helmet, along with your original sales receipt, to your local Trek dealer and exchange it there.

Well, I think they could have done more. After all, the product should never have been put on the shelves. Why should I have to PROVE that there is a problem with a product they must know has a serious problem?

Here is my rather long and angry response:

That’s a rather ridiculous offer and it angers and offends me that you even suggested that.

To start with, let me tell you why you should care that I am upset.

To begin with, the Vapor 3 is a defective product by design. You should already know that fact and be willing to take a customer at his or her word and fix the problem–a customer that is sold a defective product should not have to make a concerted effort to convince the company that made the product to make right.

Furthermore I am a long-term Trek customer. I have owned 4 Trek bicycles and currently own two bikes; a road bike and hardtail mt. bike. I have a Trek Vapor 3 helmet (that is now unusable), Trek gloves and other assorted Trek gear. I am a customer that spends money buying Trek products. That’s a probably the best reason a company can have to care.

Here’s the problem:

You guys made a seriously flawed product. Athletic headgear that is made to be in contact with a sweaty part of the body and that falls apart when you wash it is just plain flawed. Somebody in product design or manufacturing really screwed up on this product. It never should have been shipped. Period.

Now, you are telling me I should jump through hoops and send you the helmet so you can see the problem for yourself before you fix the problem? That’s not just wrong, it’s stupid.

Why your request is impractical to the point of being ridiculous:

I live in Thailand; you should already know that if you ready my complaint, I put my address in there. Do you know where Thailand is? It’s half-way around the world from the address you gave me to return the products to. Now, I could send you the helmet by air courier–that would cost more than the price of the helmet. I could send you the helmet by surface mail, but that’s still probably half the price of the helmet and it would take months. My head is too valuable to go unprotected in Bangkok traffic for months. And why should I shoulder the costs of fixing a product that was flawed to begin with? I am already pissed that I got a crap product–why insult me more and tell me I should waste more time and money proving to you that the product is flawed? I mean–you guys must know this is a problem already, don’t you? Shipping you the helmet requires a great deal of effort on my part, requiring time and effort to package the helmet and take to a shipper. More of my time than the helmet is worth, I am afraid. Hell, the time I spent writing the original email was time wasted that I should not have had to waste. This email is even more time wasted.

Take to the bike shop I bought it from? It’s impractical, it’s rather far and the time and expense to get there is more than the helmet is worth.

Besides–I have no clue where the receipt is.

What do you think this is? A shady ploy to bilk you out of a set of helmet pad / liners? Sorry, I have more important things to do than to try and swindle Trek out of $0.59 worth of helmet liners.

But if you are still convinced this is a shady scam, see the attached photo: the liners are really falling apart. There, now that I wasted 5 minutes snapping a photo will you believe I am not trying to scam you out of fifty nine cents worth of helmet liners?

My suggestion, that you just ship me a few of the helmet pad / liners was a pretty simple solution to the problem. They weigh about 5 grams and it would have taken somebody 5 minutes to put it in an envelope and email it to my address. Problem solved. Customer happy. And it would have required less effort or expense then you receiving a damaged helmet from me and re-shipping it back.

It would require a little initiative on your behalf and a company that supports service reps that are willing to take some initiative to satisfy an unhappy customer. Well, obviously this is not the case.

Now you have a customer (me) that has a useless product (the helmet) and a very, very poor image of Trek Bikes.

With a little effort this situation could have been avoided. Instead, either through wrong-minded corporate policy or general laziness, you squandered an opportunity to build lasting good will and a give a good customer had one more reason to stay loyal to your brand.

Oh–and you would not have had a customer telling as many other people that he can that he thinks your products and customer service are sub-par.

http://www.johnberns.com/2008/04/16/trek-vapor-3-helmet-liners/

– A Former Trek Customer

That’s this blog post.

I don’t understand most company’s policies on making good on customer problems. They often force the customer to go to great lengths to achieve recourse which, at least in my case, further aggravates me. Not only did I get a crap product, I get a run-around to remedy the situation. Now I have a crap product and a company that I feel is jerking me around. Pffft. Why bother? That’s the last time I will buy their product.

Bye Bye Trek! It’s Been Nice Buyin’ Your Products–Until Now!

Now, it a company hears my complaint and takes immediate action (and I even told Trek what they could do and the cost of it is mere pennies by my estimate), they could have made me very happy with almost zero effort on their part.

But alas, they just alienated me.

Facebook Sez: Party Tonight, Hangover Tomorrow!

Analyzing the data embedded in social networks is always a blast.

The Facebook Lexicon allows you to graph the relative occurrence of words posted to The Wall by date. Even more fun, you can graph more then one term at a time.

So, what happens when you graph the occurrences of “party tonight” and “hangover?”

It’s not often that a graph makes me laugh.

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder

Image by guppiecat

“Stuff your eyes with wonder … live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that … shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass!”

Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

Cool 3D VR Demo Based on Wii Remote

Loved the demo: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=976 .

I am not a gamer–but with a 3D environment based on technology like this, I could get hooked.

Dreaming of Bánh Mì

OK, maybe it’s not really Bánh Mì because it’s made in Laos, but I am dreaming of the baguette sandwiches they make on the street along the Mekong River in Vientiane, Laos: roast red pork, a bologna and pate on a baguette with lots of veggies and sweet pickles… oh, it’s worth the 12 hour train ride!

Lao and Back

Quick trip to Laos to get the visa sorted; leave Monday night and back Thursday morning.

At the Lao border crossing.

Not the best time with Barcamp Bangkok around the corner, but there was no other date I could do it. Luckily, everybody working on Barcamp is wired so as long as I have an Internet connection, I can do as much as if I were still in Bangkok.

Vientiane is changing fast. More tourists every trip, more guest houses and upscale eateries, more paved roads. Still, it has it’s charms. Slow pace. Tree-lined streets. I love the cafe society here; lots of cafes and coffee houses and people are there with books and laptops thinking, dreaming, meeting, working. You don’t see that much in Bangkok, sadly.

Prices on the rise in Vientiane as well. I am not sure if it’s the high season so prices are up or it’s that demand is outstripping supply, but a room that is a box with a bed and nothing else is now pushing B300 a night. Pretty pricey by SE Asian standards.

But the highlight is still the food. Foot-long sandwiches on crispy baguettes that are stuffed with red pork, pate and bologna for US$ 1.60. Vietnamese Pho and Bun. Swedish bakery. Cheese. Wine. BEER LAO.

Every time I have a Beer Lao it strikes me that it really smells and tastes like a lager beer. Yum.

Two days here is too long to be away with Barcamp coming up, but not long enough to eat everything I want to eat.

Motorola Rockr (iPod Phone) – Boycott Intentional Cripplining of Technology!

What a great idea.

What an idiotic implementation.

The Motorola Rockr (press release, photos) is a great concept: integrate the two must-have portable technology items (phone and MP3 player) into one device.

Intentionally crippling it (allowing ONLY 100 songs, even if you upgrade the memory) is one of the stupidest ideas I have seen foisted on consumers of late.

When will corporations learn that consumers want devices that are crafted for their convenience, that are open and expandable, not crippled?

My guess is Apple forced this limitation on Motorola so they would not have a product that would compete with their iPod products. Sure, you have a phone with and iPod in it–but we still want you to buy a full-featured iPod that can hold more songs.

But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of buying an integrated device?

Boycott the Rockr. Let the Apple and Motorola know that people want consumer-friendly, expandable technology–not crippled technology.

More from Playlistmag.com:

Steve Jobs announced that the ROKR would play up to 100 tracks (including songs and podcasts), yet that figure doesn’t jibe with the size of a standard Flash memory chip. By Apple’s calculations, 100 songs takes up approximately 400MB of memory. Is someone producing a 400MB Flash chip now?

iTunes 5 keeps track of the number of tracks authorized for playback on the phone so even if your 100 tracks have used only 350MB of the card’s capacity, you can’t add more. Similarly, although you can swap in a new card that contains new tracks, those tracks won’t play until they’ve been approved for playback by iTunes.

Postings at My Travel Blog

It’s been a while since I have posted to this blog. Since I have been outside the USA I have been posting more on my travel blog. But that’s not saying a lot either…

Information Becomes a Commodity

I have realized that almost all information has become a commodity. It’s the services wrapped around the information that now has value.

Let’s use web search and Google as an example.

What people want is information and that information is often found one some obscure web page. Let’s say, for this example, the fact we are searching for can be found on 300 web pages; none can charge for the fact because it’s distribution cost is so low and the competition is high; it’s a commodity with almost zero value.

So, which page would you choose?

When you compare them side-by-side, some pages will have better accuracy and communicate the information better, that’s the one you probably want–and Google has figured out a way to put that at the top of the list.

Google provides better relevance and accuracy in its search results. That is a valuable service and it is not a commodity. (At least not yet; Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft and others are trying though…)

Most web pages make little to no profit by providing the information, yet Google has created a huge amount of value (and profitability) by wrapping a service around commodity information all across the web.

(The fact that the #1 ranked web page is (likely) more relevant has won them the opportunity to sell advertising and perhaps product, that is the value they derive from publishing the fact.)

I have some ideas about how to improve services for delivery of travel information and travel products and provide a high level of value to travelers.

That is my mission over the next few years.

Stay tuned.