1. If you want something or are asking a question put it in your first message.

Every time I am interrupted by an instant message that just says “Hi” or “Rhys” I scream a little inside. This “handshaking protocol” has broken my concentration and I am now trying to work out what the person wants. I can even see that they are feverously trying to type their actual message. Why waste my previous cycles by forcing me to process a single useless “header” and wait for the actual body. Send the header and the body at the same time!! As an example:

Hi Rhys, do you have time for a quick test review?

This message is concise, expresses the point and can easily be responded to, like so:

I’m busy. Go away.

Ok, in reality it would probably be more like this:

Sure

Or if I really am busy:

Can it wait? I am in the middle of something and should be ready in about 20 minutes.

2. Send complete messages

The last example leads us into the next rule, send complete messages. Don’t leave the recipient of your message guessing. Sure, you can’t answer all possible questions at once, but at least answer the most obvious ones. Empower the person you are communicating with  by giving them the information they need to make a decision so that the conversation can end quickly.

3. Don’t let conversations drag on

If an Instant Messaging conversation is going on too long it is a good indication that the process has broken down. If possible it may be time to get up and speak to the person the old fashioned way. You’ll be able to get more information processed more quickly. If you can’t speak in person, use a telephone or if there is just a lot of information that you need to pass, write an email.

Final words

I’m sure there are more rules that could be applied, but I know that if everyone could follow the first rule I’d be much much happier.

Thank you for your reply, although “Our procedure in this type of request is only done through a phone conversation with a consultant” is not actually an explanation.

Referencing your Complaints Policy on your website (http://www.telstra.com.au/contact/complaints.htm) it appears as though email and even post are perfectly acceptable ways to place a complaint. In fact, it even listed a mailing address: Telstra Locked Bag 20026 Melbourne VIC 3001.

I assume that I can send my complaint to this address.
If you insist on asking me to call the customer service hotline again I would like to take the option described under the “If you would like further investigation from Telstra” section of your complaints policy: “If you are not satisfied with the resolution or the investigation of your complaint it will be escalated to the next level of management, or a Case Manager in a specialised customer relations area.”

So yes, I would like this escalated to whatever specialised area is necessary. Being in electronic form it should be straightforward to pass this information on to whatever area necessary (as requested in my original email). I have again attached both of my previous complaint letters to allow you to easily forward my issues on to the relevant areas.

If I receive another canned response (excluding the initial auto responder email) I will be mailing these complaints as well as another covering letter to the address listed on your complaints policy. I will also be contacting the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

So please take the actions that I have asked and if you personally can not handle it speak to someone who can. Forwarding a complaint to the necessary area should not be a complicated task and should your procedures prevent that may I say that your procedures are in severe need of re-evaluation.

Regards,

Rhys Parry

Hi,

I have attached my original complaint letter in case it has been misplaced.

Thank you for your reply. When I first read it I laughed. Despite the amount of practice you (I’m using the term to collectively refer to Telstra (whom you represent), so please do not take this as a person attack) must have dealing with complaints you don’t seem particularly good at it.

I refer to the first line of my email. That’s right, the first line: “Please redirect this complaint to the necessary area”. Nowhere in my email did I suggest that it would be even a remotely acceptable response to provide telephone numbers where I could presumably read my letter to. In fact, one of these phone numbers was the subject of my fifth complaint (see original letter attached).

Ignoring the first line of my letter is much like “showing a red rag to a bull” or “poking the bear”. More likely these terms are referred to internally as “servicing the customer”.

I chose to send my complaint in writing for the primary reason that it could be forwarded to the appropriate people without losing anything in the translation. This is highly preferable to calling up, telling the whole story only to be passed on to another operator to start all over again.

Perhaps you don’t appreciate the wonders of the written word and its impact on history. Before cavemen started drawing images on the cave wall the only way to pass knowledge was through speech. Once written words were formed there became a means to pass on information without requiring the original author present. Furthermore the communication was able to be passed on exactly as the author intended.

This system was still held back by the amount of time it took to reproduce a written document. Fortunately the invention of the printing press made rapid duplication of a written document feasible leading eventually to increased literacy in the general populace. Several years later, computers were created that could copy information perfectly at high rates. This is where we are today.

I expected that it would be a simple case of locating an email address for the necessary departments and forwarding the email to them. Clearly this must be a new technology that hasn’t yet filtered down to Telstra from the world of academia.

Consequently I hope that Telstra is more familiar with the postal service. Please provide me with the postal address details of each of the relevant heads of department that my letter should be addressed to. Also, please provide the postal details for the head of Bigpond and head of Telstra who I will also send a copy of my letter to. I will be adding an additional covering letter detailing my dissatisfaction of your complaints handling process.

If you can not provide me with this information I would like a full explanation of why this is the case. “We do not provide this information” is not an explanation, nor is “call this number”.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to your prompt reply,

Rhys Parry

(Please redirect this complaint to the necessary area)

Hi,

I recently experienced issues with my Bigpond Cable internet connection. The problem was an issue on the street. Despite spending over an hour on the phone trying to explain the situation the service representative who eventually came out was not made aware of any of the information that I had provided your operators despite assurances that they would. Fortunately the service representative that came out was competent enough to investigate and resolve the issue (which was a connector on the street).

So my first complaint is that the information that I provided was not given to the service representative despite assurances otherwise. Either your process is flawed, I was lied to our your operators were incompetent. (Or all of the above).

My second complaint is that it took nearly a week to send a service representative to my home. That length of time is ridiculous and I hope that you work to reduce that time, especially for long-standing customers on the highest level plans who are already paying a premium for your alleged service.

As the outage was going to be so long I requested temporary access to a complementary (free) dial up account. After being shunted between multiple operators I was finally put through to someone who claimed they could help me. Yet in order to set up this free account I was asked what I believe to be very probing questions to check my credit rating (e.g. marital status). Why is this information relevant for a free account? Furthermore, why is this information relevant when I already have an account that I am paying $139.95 a month for? Perhaps your levels of bureaucracy and rolls of red tape complicate this, but to require this information for a free account is absurd. That is my third complaint.

This morning I received notification that my online bill was now ready. When I checked it I was not surprised to see another example of the incompetence of your staff. I was charged for the dial-up account during the period. That is my fourth complaint.

So it seemed necessary to once again inflict the pain of your call centres on my ears. I called the number (13 22 00) as listed on your bill and was answered by a wonderful piece of voice recognition technology. It asked me what I was calling about, I responded “Wrong charge” and it offered me great rates on STD calls. When it asked again it was fortunately able to recognise that it was a billing enquiry. Unfortunately the machine then insisted on getting a phone number, a piece of information that is not relevant to my bigpond bill at all. When I answered “No number” the machine showed its dry sense of humour it listed a series of seemingly random digits and asked if it was correct. Finally I think the machine gave up and I was transferred to what I can only assume to be a living breathing person. Unfortunately the machine was nicer and had more personality. When I explained the situation (the extra charge if you’ve forgotten) she informed me that I had called the wrong number and she gave me a new number to call. This is where my fifth complaint comes in. I asked why I had to call another number as I had called the number printed on the bill. I was beginning to feel like I was still talking to a machine when the operator responded again to call the other number. She had not answered my question at all. I asked to speak to a supervisor and she told me to call the other phone number. It seemed as if your operator was taking cues from the voice recognition system and was stuck in an infinite loop. I asked why she couldn’t put me through and yet again I was told to call the number. When I ask a question I expect it to be answered (and furthermore I expect it to be answered truthfully) even if the answer is “I don’t know”. I hope that honesty isn’t too much to expect from Telstra.

So I finally gave up and called the other number and spoke to a lovely operator who I hope (but I’m not yet convinced) removed the charge from my bill. Finally someone who seemed competent and was friendly. As she had sorted out my billing issue so well I thought I would ask her about another issue that concerned me about my bill, the credit card surcharge (my sixth complaint).

I accept that there is a credit card surcharge for the bill (despite the fact that I’m already paying a premium), but what baffles me most about this charge is that it is charged on the next bill. This leads to an exciting bit of maths known as compound interest (it may be known inside Telstra as squeezing the customer). I’ll use an example to explain what I’m saying.

Let’s say the total of the bill is $100. I pay that by credit card. My next bill includes the credit card surcharge of $0.69 (0.69%), so comes to a total of $100.69. I then pay that by credit card. My next bill has a surcharge of $0.694761 (I’ve listed all the decimal places to emphasise my point). Over time the absolute value of the credit card surcharge gets larger and larger. Although this is a very small amount I believe this to be crooked behaviour and if there isn’t already a law against it there should be. This is a practice I would like to see Telstra stop. If you must charge a credit card surcharge it should be charged at the time of the transaction and be inclusive (and therefore not compound on to the next bill).

Let’s get back to that dial-up account again for my seventh complaint. Naturally I needed to get the access number for the connection (I’d already been given the user name and password). I also wanted to see if there was any additional settings that I might need to configure. Speaking to your technical support person it was a real challenge to just get the access number, but rather I was quizzed on the type of modem, told to click particular buttons, etc. I wasn’t asking how to set up a dial-up account, but rather the information to connect to one. Eventually I was able to convince the operator to go off script and give me just the raw details, but I shouldn’t have to fight to get that. I understand that some people need this extra help, but others don’t and you can make better use of your time (and mine) if your operators take their cues more from the customer than their script.

Finally I’d like to talk about the quality of your dial-up service. Actually I don’t think I can use the word ‘quality’ in that sentence. Your dial-up service and ‘quality’ are miles apart. In case you hadn’t picked up yet, this is the subject of my eighth complaint. It was slow, terribly slow, slower than dial-up should be. Slower than my old 28.8 connection. I was lucky if I could sustain 1KB/s. It was unreliable, packets were dropped constantly and many pages refused to load (including your bigpond homepage which is so bloated it’s painful to use on broadband). How anyone can justify paying for dial-up is beyond me. I hope for the sake of the sanity of your remaining dial-up customers that this is not the norm.

Thank you for getting to the end of this complaint (hopefully you haven’t just skipped to the end) and hopefully you will be able to take some lessons from this to improve your service in the future. I would expect from you a response to each of the eight complaints I have listed above and what you plan to do to improve the service so I do not continue to experience this level of frustration. I don’t believe this is too much too expect from a large organisation such as Telstra and taking this step would go a long way to demonstrating a commitment to customer service and restoring what little faith I have left in your company. I would also expect whatever response you provide to be honest and free of marketing hyperbole.

Thank you for your time,

Rhys Parry

Due to the wonderful boilerplate disclaimer on the bottom of their response I won’t include the actual response, but rather paraphrase the key points.

1. There was a boilerplate one sentence apology.
2. They suggested I call their customer service hotline. Ironically this is the number I put in my original email and had issues with the service.
3. They also gave me a separate phone number to call for my Bigpond specific issues

Most interestingly they seem to have completely missed the first line of the letter which asked for it to be forwarded to the necessary area.

I am currently writing a reply which I shall post soon.

The action that you choose to take should take into account the possible situation that you are in. For instance, if you have agreed to call every 30 minutes and miss a call in, phoning back is not a useful safeguard if the battery in your phone has died. For this reason it can be beneficial to split communication methods so as to not allow for a single point of failure. For instance, you may choose to write three blog posts within 24 hours to inform your safety line that you are still alive (for now) and even give away information on your whereabouts (photographs are especially good, doubly if they include Geocodes). Unfortunately this mechanism is susceptible to attack, and could also become unavailable if the country you are visiting happens to ban your website (again a potential single point of failure). You may even be travelling in an area where they don’t have internet access or mobile phone coverage.

Depending on where you are travelling and how much you want to mitigate risk you may need to invest in a good satellite phone (or two), an EPIRB satellite beacon or simply forego the holiday and spend the time in your fallout shelter, shotgun in hand watching the door. You do have a fallout shelter, right?

Better yet, why not utilise the system that has been used throughout time and take a buddy with you. At least then if you both lose your kidneys you get a wonderful shared experience to end your vacation.

So, having now “hooked up” with someone he has has to turn back to his friends in Australia to perform a very important duty: “Keeping track of his kidneys”. Unfortunately this plan was enacted too late and didn’t have enough detail to properly react to this scenario. Fortunately he still claimed to have his Kidneys less than 24 hours ago, but I can’t be certain he has them at the time of writing.

Don’t think this is purely limited to the stealing of Kidneys. Other problems you need to keep aware of include:

• Stealing other organs. Sure, kidneys are the main ones, but you’ve already crossed a line, so why not harvest some other organs while you are at it, such as your liver or corneas.
• Kidnapping. Even if you don’t have anyone back home willing to fork out for your ransom, you may still be worth something to kidnappers who can send your bodyparts in the place of genuine kidnap victims in order to encourage the ransomee (is that even the right word? If not, it is now) to fork out the dough.
• Slavery. Don’t underestimate your worth on the slave market.
• Being accidentally married and thus being financially responsible for your new bride/groom’s entire family

So with all these things that can possibly go wrong who in their right mind would want to even travel overseas? I’ve heard culture and life experience are a couple of reasons.

So that you can continue having life experiences that don’t involve getting you addicted to drugs and becoming someone’s sex slave in their dungeon, you can arrange a plan to communicate your whereabouts and status to the outside world. Depending on the level of the problem, a quick call to the local embassy or a crack team of mercenaries will be ready to assist and extract you from any situation lickety split.

Unfortunately my friend consulted someone else to make these arrangements, who despite their many years of watching violent television and films has not been left as paranoid about how to prevent or deal with these situations as I. It’s important to take life lessons from movies.

The first and most important step is regular communication. How regular will be dependent on where you are going and what sort of access you have to communication equipment. Communication can be either one-way or two-way. If the communication is one-way you need to establish a protocol for verifying the validity of the communique and a plan if the communique is malformed. Most importantly is the need for a duress word. This word needs to be arranged in advance when their is a high degree of certainty that the person is not under duress.
Duress words

The best part about duress words is their ability to add extra meaning to your message. For this reason it is important to have more than one. Using these words you can communicate important information to give an approximate location, description of the problem and even a rough count of how large the team of mercenaries should be.

It is important that the duress words be able to be slotted in with your normal messages without arising suspicion. Poor choices of duress words include “help”, “I’m being kidnapped” and “get me the f@# out of here”.

Because the duress words are supposed to be so normal it is possible that a duress word may accidentally be used in a communique. That’s why it is important to have a procedure to follow when a duress word is received, a communique is late or malformed. Usually this procedure would have varying degrees of action as you increase your state of readiness. You can either use numbers or colours ((That’s right, colour is spelt with a “u”)) (or a combination of the two) to help make it easy to determine where in the process you might be.

In my next post I’ll describe what steps to take as you move from one alert level to another.

This tells me three important things:

1. I should write more posts about proposing, relationships, etc
2. There must be a shortage of good information on the Internet about this topic
3. The people of the Internet will listen to anyone for advice

With that out of the way, let’s start to explore this topic that the Internet seems to deem me an authority on, proposing.

I am a student of film and television (in the sense that I watch a lot of it). Most of what I’ve learnt about life I have picked up from movies and TV. Most importantly I have learnt that life is not at all like what I see on movies and television. There is no guarantee of a happy ending. Indeed, things don’t seem to quite end or wrap up nicely as they do on film. That’s why I like film and television. I watch it because it isn’t what I see around me every day, but I can still apply broad concepts.

Proposing is all about managing risk. Indeed, everything about life is about managing risk. Risk is what makes life enjoyable. Knowing the answer to every problem is not quite as gratifying as solving the problem.

So where was I? Right, proposing and risk. The trick I suppose to dealing with the risk of proposing is to break it down in to the factors that contribute most to the risk. By recognising these factors, it should become easier to pick the best time to propose, or even if you should.

Factors are likely to be different for each person, but it is probably best to look at the long term goals and aspirations of each side to see how well they combine. If sleeping with as many people as possible is your goal and your partner’s is to be involved in a committed monogamous relationship, perhaps your long term prospects aren’t tied well together. Similarly, if you are looking to travel and explore the world and you partner wants to settle down and start a family you might also be on the wrong track.

Ideally you want to find a partner whose life path travels parallel or intertwines with yours. There is obviously going to be some compromises along the way, but when one path winds to the left, so must the other for the relationship to continue. Of course, compromise has to go both ways.

Perhaps the hardest part of accepting the risk of proposing is to accept that there is no right answer to the question (the question being “will you marry me?” if you have lost track). A “no” can be a positive step as it may make it clearer that your paths are diverging. Similarly a “yes” may lead to further trouble down the road if those paths diverge.

But as I was saying earlier, the risks in life are what make it interesting. Importantly, these risks can come with great rewards. So if you are prepared and ready, take the plunge and best of luck to you.

Several countries (Poland included) have enough balls to boycott the olympic games because of the problems. I wish we could do the same, but not because I think it would make China change their behaviour, but because it would at least affirm our true position.

Seriously, picking on monks? That’s just rough.

I don’t like conflict. I tend to avoid it in day to day life, but sometimes conflict is necessary to reach a resolution. If Tibet wants to be free I say let them be free and we should support them in any way necessary to achieve that freedom.

In true Harry Potter style, the owl (pictured left), swept into my brother’s room. I heard the commotion as Nathan shouted at the owl to get out of his room. Investigating, the owl was resting quietly in corner, but with some encouragement and the use of blanket (or possibly Invisibility Cloak), I was able to persuade the owl to leave the room through the open window.

This particular owl has been sitting outside my brother’s window for many months now. Is it merely a coincidence that the owl entered now? I think not.

True to their word, iTunes Plus was launched today, the last day of May ((Apple Launches iTunes Plus)). Despite that there was no initial announcement regarding the Australian iTunes store, fortunately it was included.

So what is iTunes Plus? Well, it’s the same music plus an extra 128kbps (adding up to 256kpbs) minus the DRM that makes it more difficult than it should be to move from one computer to another. Oh, and it’s also plus an extra 50 cents (Australian store).Eager to upgrade my library I fired up iTunes this morning and discovered that I needed to update it. iTunes 7.2 is needed, presumably because there is a lot of integration of the store with iTunes the application. After updating I had trouble connecting hopefully because everyone else was upgrading their libraries too. Upgrading my library wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. It didn’t hit me in the face quite as much as the complete my album feature does. But I managed to get through to iTunes plus to be greeted with a new set of terms and conditions.

After getting through all that (as far as I recall, the main difference was that iTunes plus purchases exclude some of the restrictions listed in the terms and conditions) I finally saw that I had 8 tracks that could be upgraded. Hopefully more will be available over time.

Unfortunately connectivity issues with the iTunes store prevented me from downloading the files straight away. Fortunately iTunes is fairly fault-tolerant and they are sitting in my download queue.

I haven’t yet run into any roadblocks with the iTunes store DRM yet, but I haven’t had to re-install OS X. You are able to burn tracks to CD, place them on up to five computers and as many iPods as you like. This is obviously a big restriction if you don’t have an iPod. These restrictions are all lifted with iTunes plus.

You may however be interested to know that your full name and email address is apparently embedded into the file ((Apple hides account info in DRM-free music too)). So don’t go putting them up on your favourite P2P network. I wouldn’t be too concerned about this, although some have pointed out that it makes it more difficult to resell. I see it as being somewhat similar to having my name and phone number in a book I bought. The other issue is that people are concerned about people stealing iPods. Personally I think you’ve got bigger problems if someone is stealing your iPod (they can likely steal other things too).

Of course, you aren’t allowed to use tracks from iTunes as a ringer on a mobile phone (even with iTunes Plus, although there is no technical restriction). Personally I hope this condition is just about good taste. It will be interesting to see if this changes when the iPhone is released.