Archive for July, 2005
Rant: The UPS Store
Our local UPS Store (#3704) just changed management. I know because they flew a big banner outside the store that said “Under New Management.” I remember wondering why they thought that would matter to customers, and the only thing I could imagine was that perhaps they wanted to lure back customers who might have had a bad experience with the old owners.
My own experience, however, suggests that customer service at this location has decreased significantly. The old regime offered a wider range of services (including registered mail, which I like to use when sending my taxes in) and packing materials, and didn’t try to stick it to their customers at every opportunity. I just shipped my video camera back to Sony for repair. Sony sent me an email saying they’d negotiated discounted packaging and shipping materials and services. Now, to me, that means packing and shipping should be discounted. Our local UPS store guy, however, agreed to honor the 15% discount only on the labor for packing. He insisted on charging me full price for the box (how is that not a packaging or shipping material?) and shipping (sounds like a shipping service to me).
Your heart is black, UPS Store. Black as the ace of spades!
New host, same web address
Well, the blog is back up and running after moving to a new hosting provider. Let me know if you see any glitches. I’m no longer supporting older rss URLs, so if you can’t see this message, you should update your rss feed URL. 
Check out what my old team is doing!
My former team at Microsoft have continued the innvations Steve Rider and I began over there. I left the team halfway through the development of start.com/myw3b (IE/Firefox only) and I’m thrilled to see it finished. It’s even prettier than we thought it would be. Kudos to Steve and Sanaz for keeping the train moving and getting kick-ass stuff out despite Microsoft’s institutional inertia!