Status-Q

Thought for the day from The Dilbert Blog:

If you lived on a planet with almost no gravity, would you be able to fly just by peeing?

Discuss.

Cambridge-London-Toronto-San Francisco-Seattle-London-Cambridge. Lots of interesting meetings with lots of interesting people, but it wasn’t helped by my catching a bug on the flight out, so that many of the meetings were conducted in a haze of jetlag, ‘flu, and ‘flu-combatting drugs, with me sitting as far from the other participants as reasonably possible.

I was kept alive by Hap & CD, who welcomed me into their Seattle home despite my ailments, and administered TLC at every turn. I told them I felt like an elderly Powerbook, whose battery wasn’t too good, and after it ran down to zero during the day I had to go back to them to get it charged up. By that time, though, my lid was pretty much shut! Don’t think I was a very inspiring guest, but I was a very grateful one.

Now I’m on the train back home from the airport, blogging to keep awake. I have a couple of days to unpack and repack before heading to Johannesburg on Wednesday where I’ll be installing a couple more Ndiyo systems…

Am reading the Scoble/Israel book, Naked Conversations: “How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers”, and wondering whether the Ndiyo news announcements should be more like a blog and less like a series of informal press releases….

There’s a first time for everything. I found myself needing some dental treatment at short notice, and after arriving at the surgery, I was shown into the treatment room and told that the dentist would just be a few minutes.

Well, you’re never alone with a Blackberry, and so it was that yesterday I sent my first email from a dentist’s chair…

A very nicely done spoof.

Fame at last! Bill T has quoted part of my ‘Gizmo, Skype and the Garden‘ post in his BBC article.

Google Pages is simple but effective. Another entry in the list to suggest that Firefox will become the new desktop.

Here’s a quick test page that I created, partly because I couldn’t resist that photo…

The thing that annoys me most about sitting on the phone in a call-centre queue is the underlying assumption. Companies who do this are saying, in essence, “You are our source of revenue. We rely on you. But we consider your time to be less important than that of our lowliest operatives”.

Anyway, that’s why I was grateful to John for the link to this NYT article about gethuman, “a consumer movement created to change the face of customer service”. They have tips on how to bypass the IVR systems and get to real people.

Companies are slowly waking up to the downsides of annoying their customers. My own bank, LloydsTSB, recently made the news by ditching the scripts that their employees used to follow. I always found their phone support to be good, but it’s even better now.

I hope this could also have a beneficial side-effect: the greater the variety of queries that the operators have to deal with, the better trained they’ll need to be and the more interesting their jobs will become. Well, we can hope…