Blessed by the Potato

There was recently a problem with Bell’s phone lines in Markham. It had been ongoing for weeks, and though it didn’t affect me directly, I do have friends and family caught up in the problem. It’s not a constant problem: the phones become useless in the rain. So it has to be raining, which makes diagnosis tough, especially when Bell doesn’t take the issue seriously enough to send service techs out until the day after a complaint is made. Even then, many times the techs (though themselves pleasant and hard-working) didn’t seem to be fully informed: one person might complain and Bell would dispatch a tech, and another person next door would do the same, and Bell might dispatch another tech, and the techs would never be told that the problem was affecting more than one house.

In the power outage of 2003, we were without power for days. The battery backups for our radios and cell phones went dead, as would the backup batteries for a competing phone technology like a VOIP system or Rogers digital phone. But Bell’s POTS worked, and continued to keep us in touch with the power company and our relatives across the country while the blackout was resolved. It is said to have “five nines” of reliability: it works 99.999% of the time, which comes out to about 5 minutes of downtime per year.

That is the one reason we are still with Bell: the call quality and clarity is so much better than a cell phone, and the reliability cannot be touched by VOIP or digital systems.

Except for customers in Markham, where Bell has failed them. In an area spanning several blocks, affecting many customers, their phones simply stop working in the rain. Sometimes it’s merely bad quality: crackling and popping noises that drown out any attempt at talking, though perhaps in theory some communications could still be made (e.g., dialing out to 911, at least enough for them to receive caller ID information). Sometimes though, the phone fails to work entirely. No dial-tone, no ringing in, nothing.

That this has been going on as long as it has is unacceptable. I understand that intermittent problems are the worst to try to diagnose and fix, but rain, though intermittent, is not exactly beyond our ability to predict. Bell gets the weather network, too. Bell could have laid all-new wire in that neighbourhood by now, and at least should have looked ahead to the forecast and had someone standing by to try to finally solve the problem the next time it rained.

But the phones weren’t ringing in Markham. Though they are ringing in Bell’s call centre. One long-time customer has called almost 20 times now, first to get the technical problem resolved, and then to get the customer loyalty one fixed.

This doesn’t even directly affect me, but I’m pissed off. Reliability really is Bell’s only selling feature: though Robbers Rogers certainly doesn’t put too much effort into competing for POTS customers, Bell is not really all that price competitive. Certainly not for feature-laden phone packages. And people aren’t exactly staying for the cheery and helpful customer service. So when reliability is gone, what’s left? I ask Bell: how are they going to make this right?

So far, they’ve offered to refund a portion of one month’s bill: the local calling component, which was largely nonfunctional anyway. But no refund of the long distance plan (which was equally useless for much of the month), no good faith go-forward discount, no sorry-for-the-terrible-inconvenience incentive, no cash to compensate for the many cell phone minutes used up while the landline was dead in the water. In short, no admission that taking weeks to solve a problem might be anything other than par for the course.

Bell: it’s time to step it up.

I find the most dangerous thing is to be close to solving a problem. Sure, not getting anywhere is frustrating and just generally no fun… But it’s when I’m just that close to finishing something or making a breakthrough that I find myself awake at 5 am, just needing a few more minutes to taste victory.

After graduating, I need to come up with a gift idea for myself. My dad doesn’t know what to get me, and I have no idea what to suggest. He’s thinking he’d like to give me something that I’ll have for a long time and might actually use, like a watch or ipad or 2nd monitor. But I can’t imagine really using any of that: I used to get like really anxious if I didn’t have a watch to know the exact time, but that phase has long since passed, and I hardly wore a watch at all the last decade or so since I found they irritated the skin on my wrist. Then once I realized I was reaching into my pocket to grab something to check the time anyway, I just started using my cellphone as a clock to cut down on the stuff in my pockets. And other than angry birds, I have no idea what an ipad might do for me that my blackberry, kobo, and laptop aren’t already doing in a superior way.

But other than shooting down his suggestions, I have no ideas of my own.

The problem is all I can think about after stretching the budget for so long is rent and groceries. Which is not helped by being faced with the prospect of my contract running out in just a few more months with no job lined up… I’m just not far enough up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to think of gift ideas right now.

Wayfare saw an interesting ad for a house recently, claiming among other things, that there were 5 new appliances.

Now, this listing was very familiar: it was the house we’re renting now (and leaving soon). The thing is, we can’t figure out what the 5 new appliances could possibly be. What counts as an appliance? I guess we’ve got the dishwasher, stove, fridge, washer, dryer, and maybe the mini bar fridge in the basement. So 6 potential appliances that could make up the advertised 5. Except, only 2 of those are actually less than 3 years old (what I might consider “new” without stretching the truth too much): the dishwasher and the mini bar fridge. Maybe the fridge and stove are new-ish: they’re still in decent shape, but even though I haven’t searched too hard for a date of manufacture, I’d guess with a fair bit of confidence that they’re at least 5 years old, and likely more than 10. Not exactly new.

Even then, that only brings us to 4 (mini-fridge, fridge, stove, dishwasher). Neither the washer or dryer can count by any rational use of the word “new” — they’re possibly older than I am.

So what’s the 5th appliance? We’re trying to figure it out. There are some straightforward answers: perhaps the landlord is planning on replacing some of those appliances so they will be new for the next tenants. Maybe he’s counting the air conditioner, or the new doors we installed. Perhaps the medicine cabinet? More troubling answers might be if he just recently counted appliances when visiting, and is including our stuff like the microwave, storage freezer, or toaster oven that we bought for ourselves (and will be taking with us). Perhaps he’s confusing “new” with “working” and is counting the ancient washer and dryer.

Or maybe it’s just an honest error, which reinforces the need to take ads with a grain of salt.

The book is now live on Amazon. It’ll be a while longer before I can get it into the Kobo online store. Once it’s live in both I’ll do a more thorough promotional post.

I have to say, after putting so much work into formatting the book in what is, IMHO, a very professional manner, the ebook formatting capabilities were very lacking. There was no footnote option, so all footnotes are now endnotes. I had at the end of several chapters a collection of key points in little “call-out boxes” with bulleted lists highlighting the take-home message. While those lists are still there, the boxes are not, so they don’t stand out as much. Even the straightforward tables didn’t translate well, so I had to insert them as images (with an accompanying loss in visual quality). In all cases, limitations are as far as I could determine, so there is a possibility that I might yet figure out how to format the book the way it was meant to be. Suddenly I have a lot more sympathy for software developers that release a beta product and patch it later (one upside to ebooks)!

Edit: It looks like Kobo strongly prefers to only do self-publishing with authors that have ~10+ titles, and they’re suggesting I go with a consolidator/publisher. All of the ones they recommended are American (the book is for Canadians, which is part of why I wanted to focus on Kobo). I’ll have to take some time to read through their offerings and costs to see if any of them will work — I can see right away some of them want to take a step back (after working so hard to create the epub and get an ISBN myself, some of them want to start from the Word doc stage). Most offer to push the book to a number of retailers, including Amazon (which I already covered myself).

So for now, until I find some time to figure Kobo out, if you want the book you can either buy it from Amazon in Kindle format, or send me an email and I can set it up so you can pay me by PayPal ($5 Canadian) and I’ll send you a DRM-free PDF and ePub formatted file by email (good for your Kobo reader or any number of other non-Kindle devices, including your PC).