There are plenty of examples out there regarding customer service on the social channels that are good. Companies using their own customer service departments to monitor tweets and public Facebook posts or posts to pages that actually get handled. However, this falls apart for many companies that outsource their social networking channels as well as their customer service departments.

Social Network service can be ruined by having a marketing agency handle replying to reviews and postings without a direct tie to the company they are servicing. This leads to complaints falling on people that have no real power to help the customer having issues. I’ve complained about Comcast in the past regarding service issues, but their Twitter team is actually employees in the customer service department. Which means that they can listen and actually help fix issues.

My latest issue was with TMobile’s Twitter team. I had an issue lately with my bill after combining my wife’s and my accounts into one bill and contract. I was switching from unlimited text messaging my own account and 1000 message limits on my wife’s account (which she consistently used under 100). Because of the switch the messages that she and I had sent out since the last bill were thrown into a limbo state that their billing system thought was overage use. I got charged $45.20 + tax for the overage. The bill I got had just come through and wasn’t due to be auto-paid for another 20 days. I called in.

This is where the Service Theater idea comes in with outsourced customer service departments. The poor CS rep that I spoke to couldn’t do anything to help me. She told me that the money would be credited back to my account in the next billing cycle (March). I told her that what she was suggesting was ridiculous and that I would like to speak to a supervisor. She put me on hold for a few minutes to go check to see if a supervisor was available. Once she came back, she told me that all the supervisors were busy helping other customers and that it didn’t really matter since the supervisor wouldn’t be able to help me with anything either.

I don’t fault the CS Rep for any of this. Her hands were tied in regards with what she had permission to do. The calls are so scripted that delving off into uncharted territory leaves the agents unable to handle slightly different from the script. I wouldn’t even be surprised that the “my supervisor wouldn’t be able to help you” comment is on a script for ornery customers (which I was).

The last part of service theater was the twitter team. I’ve complemented Tmobile on their service before, and did so when I switched Megan and I to the same plan because we were saving money. They were very quick to respond on Twitter and always have been. However, when I complained about the bill I got silence. When I complained about the silence, I got silence. When the matter was resolved and I tweeted about it again, I got a reply that they were happy that it was resolved. When I questioned them on the fact they hadn’t replied to any of my complaint tweets I was told that they can’t respond to every one. I’m translating this to: We can’t do anything if you complain anyways, so we just don’t reply.

Luckily this whole thing had a good ending. My account isn’t going to get charged the extra $45.00.

I laughed my way through this:

How to Plan a Wedding without Losing Your Mind (or being an Asshole)

Favorite quotes:

About people helping:

So they’re honored guests, not slaves, right? Got it? Okay.

AND

Be grateful for the help you’re getting, no matter how big or small.

Or, as my father said during his wedding toast, “Don’t be an asshole.”

I’m redoing a menu page for a new menu relaunch for a restaurant’s website that I host. When I created the menu page they had a Pie dessert option which they are now removing. I made myself laugh when I saw the following:

<!– The following line is the saddest line ever –>
<!– End of Pie –>

I made myself giggle.

With Megan being pregnant and being more exhausted than normal; I’ve taken over a lot of the cooking duties. In the past when it was my responsibility for dinner we would eat out. However, that’s not entirely possible considering that we’re trying to save money for the baby and an emergency fund (since it will affect not only us anymore).

This means that I’ve had to start standing in front of the stove and prepare something that’s mostly healthy, filling, and can provide us with some leftovers for lunches.

I’ve never been afraid to cook and have even held a job cooking in a bar before. But Megan is an amazing cook/chef (chef because she’ll create her own concoctions based on what’s available). This means that I’ve been spoiled rotten the past few years that we’ve lived together because she has taken care of the preparation for 90% of the meals that we have eaten.

This switch over process has been forming over the last month or so and I’m not entirely disappointed in the results with myself. I already knew how to make a lot of the stuff that I’ve been cooking, but had not had a lot of practice doing it.

So for the past three weeks or so there’s been a lot of fresh stir fry, hamburgers, pulled pork, beef stroganoff, and some other really easy stuff to make.

Last night I took it up a notch (a bit). I made turkey breast, mashed potatoes from scratch, and steamed broccoli. The only thing really difficult was the mashed potatoes. I’ve never made them from scratch before and I made the rookie mistake of not cubing the potatoes before boiling them. They. Took. FOREVER. Ended up pretty delicious, if not super chunky, though.

Being that I’m taking over a good portion of the cooking, and Megan is getting sick of so much stir fry; I’m starting to meal plan now.

The menu for this week is all mine (except for Tuesday night) thanks to recipes I found in a few of Megan’s cookbooks:

Sunday: Spinach Tortellini and Garlic Bread
Monday: Ramen Beef Stir Fry
Tuesday: Grilled Cheese & Roasted Red Pepper Tomato Soup
Wednesday: Cheesy Beef Hash & Green Peppers
Thursday: Chicken Fajita Bowl
Friday: Breaded Pork Chops & Green Beans
Saturday: Indian Take-out (India Palace) <– I could try, but those guys are good.

I’ll try to add some pictures during the week, but Megan has done her part and written up the menu already.

On Sunday night I watched “The Big Waste” on Food Network. I was Appalled.

Here’s the description from the page for those that don’t like to click on links:

First class chefs Bobby Flay, Michael Symon, Anne Burrell and Alex Guarnaschelli tackle one of the most massive problems in food today – waste! Divided into two teams, with only 48 hours on the clock, they are challenged to create a multi course gourmet banquet worthy of their great reputations, but with a big twist; they can only use food that is on its way to the trash. The chefs’ hunt takes them from grocery aisles to produce farms, and orchard lines to garbage piles, as they attempt to source enough ingredients to feed a gathering crowd. Bobby and Michael square off against Anne and Alex, as they challenge their views of food waste and how and why it is created.

Don’t get the description wrong. They weren’t pulling rotten looking food out and feeding it to people. They were taking food that wasn’t perfect (usually visual only) to the consumer and saving it from the trash. This included vegetables, fruits, meat, baked goods, ingredients and other things. They used a food safety inspector to make sure that temperatures were good from a safety perspective which was a nice touch.

How is it possible that we have become so needy as people that we can’t handle anything less than perfection in the way that our food looks? I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else.

Apple has a little bit of a bruise on it? Not for my apple pie/cut up apple/in my mouth usage of this.

One of the farms reported 40% of the food they grow goes to waste (compost). WTF?!?!? The images they showed of the compost pile looked like what a “perfectly fine to eat” produce section in the super market would be. I can’t remember correctly if the show also said that America wastes ~40% of the food in this country as well, but it was mentioned a few times.

I did learn a few things though. When a tomato gets too much water it splits and heals giving it a scarred outside texture. However, this makes it better to eat, but harder to look at. Put it in sauce. I learned a lot about tomatoes from Bill’s post on tomatoes and this adds even more to it.

Sadly I had just been grocery shopping before watching this. So I’ll have to wait until next time to pick out the vegetables/fruit that are just as good as the others but just don’t look as nice. I’ll be applying this rule when I go to the farmers’ market as well. Insert “It’s what’s on the inside that counts analogy” here.

Hopefully this spring I can get a good garden going and not waste 40% of my food.

Thank you for reading.

</rant>

When we first got Jeff we thought it would be funny to show him the laser pointer. However, he just scratched at the carpet.

Lately we tried it again (after finding the laser pointer). He no longer scratches at the carpet, but he is obsessed with it and now I have video to prove it.  Sorry about the overlaid music on the second one, but there was a cialis commercial on in the background.

link to video

Look at how fast his tail moves in this one.

link to video

He’s obsessed with the pointer and when he comes back in from outside immediately starts looking for the light  and now that he’s figured out where it comes from (and that we control it) he just stares at us.

Dear Readers,

I am proud to announce that i’m going to be a dad. Sometime around 7/17/2012.

Also, this baby is blog fodder (obviously) and you can see updates as they happen at http://bambino.iamdez.com

Ever since we’ve got Jeff we’ve been trying to find a good toy for him to chew on and something that would last his intelligent chewing.

We’ve tried the compressed raw-hide bones, but they only last him for a few days and they’re $10.00 per bone so we try to limit how much time he gets on them so they last longer.

Yesterday we had to made a run to Petsmart to grab dog food, cat food, and kitty litter and decided to try out a new toy for Jeff. We got some good reviews from one of the employees including the quote “Someone came in and cleaned us out of the refills last week”.

We were not disappointed. The StarMark Everlasting Treat Ball was an instant hit with the pup. We stuffed the dispenser side with his favorite regular treats and he started going to town trying to get them out.

2 1/2 hours later he was still going on it when he suddenly decided to get a drink of water, head outside for a bit and then crash on the couch. So here’s Jeff post first-time treat:

I woke up at 5am on Saturday morning to make sure to get the dog up and ready for a 3 hour car trip. We left Minneapolis around 7:30. The trip went pretty well and we only had to stop once to get the dog to take a piss. I’m not even sure he needed it, but just to be safe after two hours being laid up in the backseat of a car.

Being that my dad has four dogs I was a little worried that there might be the pack aspect of bringing in another dog, but really those dogs didn’t really care and went about their normal business.

He did pretty well walking around the farm with us, but he really didn’t care for the cattle at all.

Had a good family Christmas. It was PACKED in my grandparent’s house. 35 people in a tiny area always leads to bumping into someone all the time. Good thing Megan and I got there a bit early to get a spot.

Getting back to the farm and letting the dog out for quite a while to run around he was pretty exhausted after that.

Well, not really all of the holidays, but tomorrow at least. I don’t make it home a lot. The last time I was there was last Christmas. I don’t know why I try not to go home. It’s mostly enjoyable while we’re there, but I’m always anxious to get back on the road.

To be clear, it’s a three hour drive from Minneapolis to my dad’s farm in western Minnesota and this will be the first time that Megan and I have made the trip with the dog. All in all; this should be an interesting weekend, and this will be the first time that we spend the night out there in over 2 years (usually it’s a day trip).

Leaving early enough tomorrow morning so that there’s enough time to get Jeff out and playing around and expending some energy before we kennel him in my dad’s place and head to my grandparents’ house in town for the Christmas celebration.

I’ll be anxious to leave again, but this time having spent more time out there. I do have some house stuff to get ready out there as well since I’ll be putting it on the market after my tenants move out at the end of the year. I’ll be sad to see the house go being that I’ve put a lot of time and money into it and it’s a beautiful place, but at this point it’s just a budget drainer and I can spend $700/month on a lot of other worthwhile and productive things.

I wrote a blog post over at my employer’s blog called “Don’t make it hard for me to do the right thing“. You should read it.

I’m not going to post the full text over here for the sake of not having duplicate content on the web. However, I just want to say that the entire process was not only hugely frustrating, but extremely rewarding. The following assumes that you’ve read the link above.

That post morphed from a detailed one listing how the vulnerability was executed to a story about the ethics of reporting. It was extremely difficult to keep the detail out of the post while still providing good context. It also helped the have a few amazing editors looking at it to make the story flow better and be more smoothly told.

The original XSS bug I found was that you could comment as anyone you wanted to on the first newspaper site, but that quickly turned into posting executable javascript as a username and potentially doing whatever I wanted to.

In the first response from the CRM after reporting the vulnerability not only did they blow me off and treat like I was one of their clients, but they feigned responsibility for any of it and put it back on me (the apparent client) to fix templates. This tells me that they KNEW ABOUT IT but only offered tips on how not to do it.

I almost gave up at that point, but this was after I’d already started communications with the sites that were vulnerable therefore I already had a relationship in place with people that this actually affected and I wasn’t going to cause more work for them by giving up. That, and I’d promised not to go public with anything until they had a chance to fix it.

The final contact to the CRM was just plain out of boredom. I was desperate because a plea to the sales channel, the online chat that no one is ever online with (even during business hours) and calls to the support/sales lines since they’re one-in-the-same.

I’m still glad I waited. I’ve got some decent new contacts.

Megan and I went shopping this past Saturday to get some things that we needed for ourselves and for our upcoming trip to Hawaii. Megan gets a lot of coupons and offers from JC Penney so we decided that we’d head there first and check out their sale and see if there were some things we liked.

As I normally do, I checked in on Foursquare. I was surprised to see a check-in special from the store for $10 off a $50 purchase. I wanted to try it out at the register so I kept the screen up on my phone waiting for checkout.

After browsing and picking out items for a while we got to the register. I showed the cashier the phone with the screen and her face went blank. I’ve seen that look before. It’s the “WTF did you show me?” look. Her verbal response was “usually mobile coupons have barcodes”. Argh.

I noticed there was a code of some sort on the deal and gave the cashier the code. Nothing happened. It was at that point I noticed a tiny bit.ly link in the text on the deal (a non-custom one). I tried to click on it… nada, copy the text… nada. Once I had it memorized to enter in my phone’s browser it was then that I noticed that my phone actually had no reception.

Gave up at that point. Went out to the car and tweeted about it. Yesterday I got a reply from the official JC Penney twitter account that I should email them about the situation.

I did.

They replied today with an update that not only had they contacted the store manager to provide information so that cashiers could be trained for foursquare specials. They also shared my email with their mobile marketing and digital media teams for review.

They also asked for my mailing address so that they could send me a $25.00 merchandise certificate. The fact that the foursquare deal is $10 off a $50 purchase means I win!

Here’s the deal with this. I didn’t really expect a response (one of the reasons I didn’t use their handle in my original tweet). Also, I never actually expected to get anything out of this. Knowing that someone was listening and that they passed my email on was good enough for me… but 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

So, thank you to whomever from the JC Penney CS team for listening.

This will be the last update I make about my standing desks. Why? I’ve converted back to a sitting desk.

Back in May I converted my work desk to a standing desk after having a standing desk at home since moving in on March 31.

This past weekend my home desk was converted back to a normal sitting desk. Today I converted my work desk to the same fate.

I liked having a standing desk, but it ended up working out better as a convenience thing instead of a long term solution.

Trying to concentrate on going through a test plan, writing test plans, writing in general, reading, and other things it was horrible for. Gaming was fine on it because I got sucked into it and didn’t notice the slowly building ache in my legs or feet. However, when I’m trying to concentrate on something that wasn’t necessarily fun made for difficult to keep concentration.

At work it was a bit different. I didn’t have time to deal with lack of focus. For the last month or so I’ve been anywhere in the office except my desk. Usually the kitchen table, but my poor elbows are all bruised now from resting on that thing. Today was the final straw. When I came in and sat down at the table my elbows screamed out in pain of bruising. I got a coworkers help and lifted my desk off it’s blocks, snagged a chair from a conference room and am now back in a sitting position.

I did learn some lessons from the experience though. Posture is key for me. I think this is true for anyone, but prior to this experience I was horrible at sitting. I slouched constantly and this lead to a lot of fatigue.

Along with posture is the importance for me of the height level of my keyboard and mouse. For the past 6 years I’ve used the same keyboard, Microsoft Ergonomic 4000. The importance with this keyboard is that it is set at the right height to give all the benefits. For me this means a level which doesn’t work against sitting up straight.

Pretty much means I look like i’m sitting at a kid table with my chair so low. However, this means that sitting up straight is a requirement due to the height of my keyboard.

The thing I’m most looking forward to is the ability to work at my desk and not sweat. I run hot. This has required the use of fan on me at all times, which isn’t necessarily a good thing for people near me at the office, and rather annoying at home.

I guess it’s not really a failure. It was an interesting experiment, but not a long term solution for me.

Work has been crazy lately with a few big projects I’m the tester on hitting the testing stage. Lots of long hours and in office three meals a day. But that’s no biggie, we trade in our flexible schedule for these moments periodically, but not often.

Last night was the first night we left Jeff out of his kennel overnight while we slept. How’d it go? He slept on the couch. Apparently the whole night because NOTHING moved downstairs. Even his water was at the same level in the morning. I think we’ll try this again tonight.

We’ve been leaving him out when we go places for longer periods of time. The worst thing he’s done is get into the garbage, but that’s our fault since we left it out and not on a stool anyways.

It’s almost Halloween, which means that we’ve got decorations. Megan was able to convince me to get excite about Halloween decorations. This is a ‘holiday’ that I’ve never really gotten into. My lack of costume creativity due to the lack of costumes available for giants like me (not exactly a costume) have always made me meh when faced with planning.

I’ll probably do a separate post on this, but I’ve switched my home desk back to a sitting desk. It’s just too hard to concentrate on long running tasks and that’s exactly what I’ve needed to do lately.

I’ll likely switch the office desk back to sitting some time this week. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Clockwork kitchen table, lounge, or open conference room lately. I need to be at my desk more since it’s really setup for my working concentration & comfort.

This switch will also likely get me off the couch and in front of my desk. I don’t tend to be too productive from the couch due to the lack of a separate keyboard and mouse.

As software testers, we are called on to deliver bad news first, good news second. We sometimes shoot from the hip in an ask questions later type of method just to make sure the bug gets logged before it gets forgotten and comes back to bite the company, and possibly yourself, in the ass. This works well, as long as you have a good set of steps and the backup of documentation for why it’s a bug, you’re good to go. However, we often carry that personality feature beyond our project code which often turns out to be a bug in the new context.

When we go beyond code in our testing we can very easily be seen as arrogant and ignorant. Don’t get stuck in testing mode when you task switch to replying to emails. Make sure you’re reporting in the correct place when you don’t have your tracking system to depend on. An incorrect reply with what could end up being invalid information will come across as disrespectful to the people involved in your reply.

So, keep filing those bugs, and keep looking at the finer detail points to make the software you test the best software that it can be. Just make sure that you turn that blunt part of your brain off when it’s not required.