The 7 is for "7 Years too Late"

A GREAT piece on Microsoft's slide into irrelevance by Fake Steve Jobs, the essence of which is this battery of rhetorical questions:

How did all these billions of dollars slip through Ballmer's fingers? How did Microsoft find itself a leader in nothing and playing catch-up on every front -- in MP3 players, on the cloud, in search. How did Amazon roll out S3 and not Microsoft? How did Google control the search market? How did Apple take over online music retailing and MP3 hardware? How did Microsoft let that market for smartphones get away from them? How is it that everything about Microsoft's business is backward looking?

Sure, Windows 7 is coming out soon. [Cue musical fanfare and cut to vox pops.] After eight years (almost to the day), that'll finally bring Windows users to a level that kinda sorts approaches what's already been available on OS X for quite some time. And then in another two years, as their OS development cycle brings another system upgrade, Apple will once again extend its lead even further. When it comes to checking my calendar for key technology-related dates, the release of Ubuntu's "Karmic Koala" on October 29 holds much more excitement. Windows 7 is merely Microsoft's attempt to recover after fumbling Vista; Ubuntu, however, is making Linux into a viable OS alternative for the mainstream user.

It's also worth reading this New York Times profile, which, as FSJ points out in a follow-up post, dances the dance of feigned deference while trying to get a simple message across: that Microsoft is a lumbering, outdated behemoth.

Calling on the Internet to Do What It Does Best

MY ELDEST daughter is now at the age where she points to everything, even things she recognizes, or even if it happens to be a vague object off in the distance that only she can see, and asks, "What's that? What's that called?"

She's posed this line of questioning several times with regards to a particular bush that we regularly pass on the way to the park. With both of us unable to give her a satisfactory answer, she's taken it upon herself to name it "yellow fruits."

So, with the aid of the above photos, I'm calling on the collective power of the Internet to help identify this bush, which in late summer began to produce yellow, sometimes orangey, speckled apple-sized fruits, grows about waist-high at its peak (though it appears to have been pruned, as it forms a decorative perimeter to a grassy lot), and is fairly unremarkable as far as its green, rounded, slightly ridged leaves are concerned.

Doing this the usual way, that is, by Googling for "yellow apple-sized fruit" turns up a lot of searches about yellow apples, but otherwise hasn't been very helpful so far. I'm hoping the crowdsourcing/social media method turns up some results.

Please leave any and all useful suggestions in the comments, and thanks in advance.

[UPDATE: We think we may have a winner: the Japanese Quince, aka Chaenomeles.]

Like Punching Pillows Underwater

WELL, color me impressed. I'm left reeling by a combination of the power of social media (particularly since I've been guilty of calling Twitter's utility into question) and the fact that someone from Creative actively sought me out to rectify things.

Less than an hour ago, as California was just rubbing the sleep from its eyes and my "Simple Solutions to Creative Problems" blog post detailing my customer service saga had been live for under twelve hours, Creative's social media rep contacted me via IM. The conversation started like this:

Hi there, are you online? This is Tawnee from Creative.

I just caught wind of your blog, I'm so sorry to hear about your experience. I was exhausted just reading what all you had to go through

I'm thankful you wrote the blog though, as it gives me a better insight to what our support process is like. I run social media here at Creative-- so luckily, you were able to find help through this outlet.

And then she offered me a superior set of Creative speakers as a means of compensation and replacement.

This level of concern and generosity was wholly unexpected, and, quite frankly, has completely changed my disposition towards the company. Amazing how a gesture like that works. Yesterday evening I'd sworn off anything with the Creative logo; this evening they're at the top of brands I'd consider again when making this sort of purchase in the future. Yes, you could rain on the parade by arguing that their overture was nothing more than a cynical attempt to make a public restitution for a public problem, but that's almost beside the point. I don't think any company truly delights in appeasing unhappy customers. The important thing is that I don't feel that I've wasted money and time, and I genuinely feel like I was listened to, that someone heard my frustration and dissatisfaction and took them seriously.

The most maddening, demoralizing part of any customer service runaround is that you're left feeling like you have no voice, no efficacy, no leverage other than your own sense of indignation. It's like you're punching pillows underwater. Thanks to Tawnee, I don't feel that way now towards Creative. I'm no longer a faceless consumer to them; someone there knows my name. And raising every consumer out of that hopeless anonymity ought to be the incontrovertible aim of all customer service.

Simple Solutions to Creative Problems

MY RUN-ins with awful customer service are nothing new.

But they seem to be happening with increasing frequency of late; one such recent off-putting experience was with Creative.

It goes like this. About six months ago I bought a set of Creative I-Trigue 3000 PC speakers. I'd spotted them on the desk of a friend. They had a nice design, good sound, and were reasonably priced. Not a bad trifecta.

So I ordered a set from Amazon. The first unit arrived and didn't produce sound from the right channel. My first thought, as it ought to be, was that I'd incorrectly set up a system that by all accounts should be very easy to set up. I carefully re-plugged in all the wires, then did it again. Then I went online to see if, for some reason, my iMac wasn't capable of playing 5.1-channel sound, or if something needed to be adjusted in System Preferences. In the end I realized that the speakers themselves were defective and I got in touch with Creative.

Two days later, I finally got an e-mail response: Take it up with the retail outlet.

Amazon, despite some of their more glaring screw-ups, is a company that does understand the importance of customer service — no matter what you've bought, no matter which Amazon you go to (.de, .com., .ca, .co.uk, and so on). As soon as I lodged the complaint, they offered printable mailing labels with which to send the product back (at their expense), and they immediately sent out a replacement unit. That replacement promptly arrived within 48 hours.

The replacement system was and is not perfect. When I adjust the volume with the desktop knob, the sound fluctuates between VERY LOUD and then very soft AND THEN LOUD AGAIN before finally settling somewhere in my desired region. But it was tolerable, and I was beginning to suspect that tolerable was the best I was going to get from a Creative product.

No knob jokes here, folks. Move along.

After a few weeks had passed, we realized that we were going to be moving back to the States. And, of course, I thought it would be nice to take my new, tolerable PC speakers with me. But Creative, unlike almost every other electronics manufacturer on the planet, had skimped on their cinder block of a power supply. It wasn't dual voltage auto-switching; it was limited to 240V, and therefore only good in Europe.

Internet searches revealed that there was a 120V power supply for the US version of the I-Trigue 3000, so I sent this e-mail to Creative USA in early June:

Dear Creative, I would like to purchase a Creative 12V/2.9A power supply for use in the US (120V). I believe the part number is MAG120290UA4. I'm currently using this Creative speaker system in Europe and the power supply (part number MAG120290TH4) is only for 240V outlets. When I move to the States in late 2009, I'd rather not have to purchase a whole new PC speaker system. Can you please tell me how best to go about this? Thanks in advance for your help.

And I received this reply:

Thank you for contacting Creative Labs. You may order a new 12V 2.9 A power adapter for $11.99, plus shipping and sales tax by calling us at 1-800-998-1000. Someone is available to assist you Monday - Friday, 9am to 6pm central time.

Best Regards,
Flaxn (15745)

Simple and efficient, no? All I had to do was call a toll-free number and pay a nominal price to have working speakers in the US. Thanks, Flaxn (15745)!

As I was preoccupied with the process of actually buying the house we'd be moving to, I put off calling for the time being. In September, though, I was ready to order and called the 800 number.

That phone number, however, was no longer a proper customer service line. It simply redirected me to the Web. Here is the actual message, which loops indefinitely, in its entirety:

Hello, and thank you for calling Creative Labs. For product information, technical assistance, or to place an order, please visit us on the Web at www.creative.com. That's www.creative.com.

In less than ninety days, the company had decided to shift every aspect of its customer service to the Internet. That might not have been such a bad thing if I weren't ordering an out-of-the-ordinary part. But for something like sourcing a replacement power supply, their website is absolutely useless.

So I Googled. I trudged through web page after web page. And I finally came across a Creative technical support number that led me to a real, live human being. The customer service rep on the other end, after hearing a story that was now growing longer and more irritatingly convoluted, told me that he couldn't help me and that Creative USA was now handling all its orders through Amazon.

That's right. The guy at Creative technical support told me to take up a manufacturer-specific problem with Amazon. And to indicate that he was indeed conclusively passing the buck and sending me on my way, he gave me the generic 1-800 customer support number for Amazon. How I longed for the polite, informative helpfulness of Flaxn (15745).

Thus began a continued hunt for this cursed power supply and series of e-mail exchanges with a rotating cast of customer support reps: Zhao Yu, Xu Xin, Xiao Li, although not necessarily in that order. I was forced to repeatedly restate my business before, in response to the exasperated e-mail that follows, I got something that indicated a human mind had actually taken the fifteen seconds necessary to process and comprehend my query:

Dear Xiao, Xiu, and any other customer service rep I will be passed on to,

I am well aware that this item is not available for sale in your US store or through your authorized retailers. Last night I spent more than two hours on the Web and the telephone trying to locate it through one of Creative's formal sales channels.

What I was hoping was that you might find a spare MAG120290UA4 power supply in one of your warehouses (surely there has to be an extra lying around somewhere?) and then sell it to me or, as a gesture of goodwill, ship it to me if it is no longer officially for sale.

The hoops I've had to jump through so far just to get a straight, human, personal answer to this inquiry have left me with a very negative feeling toward Creative, and at the moment I'm not terribly inclined to buy another Creative product in the future.

Please let me know if you can locate a MAG120290UA4 power supply for purchase or as a complimentary replacement.

The final, definitive response had this to say:

With regards to your enquiry, I am very sorry but unfortunately, we do not have replacement parts for the power adapter of the Speaker System. However, if your product is still within warranty, you can send it in for RMA, If your product is already out of warranty, I am afraid that you will not be able to purchase the replacement parts. I apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Which, I have to be honest, still doesn't make a lot of sense. There are power supplies in stock for official RMAs but not for purchase separately? And is the hassle and expense of me sending back a tolerable speaker system as an RMA really better than the alternative, that is, just mailing me the power supply directly?

At the end of every e-mail response from Creative was the text: "To provide feedback on your 'Creative Experience' please click on the following link." Believe me, I tried to provide feedback as many times as I was given the opportunity. But the link, wouldn't you know, was inaccessible for the entire duration of our correspondence. Now, ten days later, I've noticed that it's working again.

This farce gets an extension of sorts with a steam-venting tweet of mine from yesterday, which prompted the following reply from @CreativeLabs:

@nostartnoend I'm sorry you feel that way about us. Is there anything I can do to help?

To which my own response is: Yes, Creative, there is. On a personal level, find some way to get me a 120V power adapter for my I-Trigue 3000. (I'm still willing to pay the twelve bucks for it, and I'll continue to quietly put up with the fact that the volume knob is dodgy.) On a more general level, rethink your approach to customer service. Your first commitment should be to top-quality products, so that customers don't end up with multiple defective units. And your second commitment, almost on a par with the first in terms of importance, should be to provide first-rate support when those products don't work as expected.

The more barriers you erect between Creative and its customers, the more you try to replace considered responses with blanket autoreplies, the more responsibility you slough off to third parties like Amazon, the more you will simply piss people off. The sour experience will drive them away from Creative, and it will negatively influence potential customers as well. This is not rocket science, and yet it seems like the first cost-cutting measures most companies try to implement, like hacking away at their customer service infrastructure, are the ones that are clearly the most counterproductive.

To put that all in some kind of nutshell: deferential, face-saving replies on Twitter are simply no substitute for Flaxn (15745).

[UPDATE: When you're done reading this, please refer to my follow-up post to see how the situation was ultimately resolved.]

Young Republicans

"[T]HE modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old."

I'm surprised that it took Paul Krugman, normally a pretty astute observer of this sort of thing, so long to come to that conclusion. But at least someone besides the Daily Kos is drawing attention to the hypocrisy of this particularly vile strain of Republican thought and behavior. Patriotism, as Johnson's oft-quoted saying has it, is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel, though one might want to make a further pedantic distinction between patriotism and nationalism; and this juvenile glee over Chicago's thwarted 2016 Olympic bid proves that love of country is not quite so close to the heart of Republican sentiment as they might like us to think. Their complaints of liberals who ambush and then duck for cover behind political correctness (and here I would say, no, President Carter, racism was not behind Joe Wilson's outburst; it was crass, misguided populism) will lack much substance until "I love America" stops being bandied about as though it were a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Diagnosis: Sarcoidosis

TWO days ago, after two months of on-and-off visits to the doctor, I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis.

I wrestled for some time with the idea of turning something so private into a public announcement, but I thought there was nothing much to gain by keeping it to myself. I'll admit that I'm loath to be even loosely associated with today's hyperconfessional culture, where deeply personal matters are cheapened into Facebook status updates. However, my reluctance to add my own voice to that shameless free-for-all was countered by the importance of raising awareness of a disease that, until yesterday, I personally never even knew existed (it was one of those rare instances where I learned the German word—Sarkoidose, for the record—before its English equivalent) and the fact that other newly diagnosed sarcoidosis sufferers might stumble across this post in the future and perhaps end up feeling less frail and vulnerable than I did. Loneliness and futility are the last emotions anyone wants to grapple with after being diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness.

There are plenty of online resources about sarcoidosis, so there's no great need for me to re-describe the disease in any detail here. The Wikipedia entry, as always, is a good place to start, followed by the Sarcoidosis Research Foundation, the Cleveland Clinic page on the disease, this page on potential Chinese and Western remedies, the SILA support forums, and finally this UK page to restore a tiny bit of optimism to the proceedings. What it boils down to (and please excuse any minor errors that stem from my crash course on the subject) is an adverse reaction of the immune system, particularly the lymph nodes, in which granulomas—that is, clumps of cells that ordinarily fight infection—coagulate and fail to dissolve. They collect and cause inflammation in sensitive organs and, ultimately, internal scarring. If the scarring is severe, the afflicted organs (e.g., lungs, heart, liver, eyes) are irreparably damaged and can fail.

My own experience: In mid-July of this year, I had two back-to-back booster shots (polio, tetanus, and measles; then hepatitis B). A few days later, for reasons that might or might not be related to those inoculations, my ankles became swollen, hot, and extremely sensitive to the touch. Not long after, my lower joints seized up arthritically. It reached a point where I felt as though I'd aged fifty years in as many hours; I could hardly stand when getting out of bed in the morning. By the time I made up my mind to see a doctor, who prescribed ibuprofen (which, incidentally, did work to reduce the swelling and almost crippling discomfort), the worst of the joint pain was over and a dry cough, the result of a tight-feeling airway and a tickling sensation in the throat, had set in.

Some days since then have been better than others. Occasionally I have had long coughing fits, but for the most part it has been mild. Persistent irritation more than anything else.

A series of blood tests in mid-August and again in late September revealed that I had continuously elevated levels of angiotensin-converting enzyme, or ACE (114; "normal" is about 40). While the last round of bloodwork was still being analyzed at the lab, I was sent to have chest X-rays, which, upon the scrutiny of a specialist, revealed swollen lymph nodes in the lungs. Combined with the radiologist's hunch that it might be sarcoidosis, the high ACE levels and previous joint problems—along with additional symptoms such as night sweats and fatigue—pointed almost unmistakably to that diagnosis. There is apparently still a slight possibility that it could be the cancerous Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has similar symptoms and has affected distant members of my family, but for now all signs seem to confirm the initial conclusion.

That pronouncement is something I've been mulling over with mixed feelings. To be sure, I now have a much clearer idea of what's afflicting me and what may come of it, but there was a certain bliss in the ignorance of its true name. With the doctor's utterance of one five-syllable word, Sar-ko-i-dos-e, an annoying cough has suddenly transformed into something serious, possibly debilitating, even deadly. The future that I had no problem envisioning at the beginning of the week has been pushed aside by one that is more uncertain, more ominous. I think of my wife and young children, of the house we've just bought, of a burgeoning freelance business, and I imagine what it will be like to try enjoying all of that in a diminished capacity. And, yes, those unhappy projections constrict my throat and sting my eyes.

There's the past to consider, too. Was that infrequent tightness in my chest some kind of indicator? And when did that even start? Three years ago? Four? Back then, was I on to something when I felt that my breathing had become more shallow, or was I simply noticing the inexorable process of aging? If they were indeed indicators, could I have used them to prevent the more serious symptoms, or would those indicators only have enabled me to identify the inevitable? And what of those inoculations in July? Would avoiding them also have avoided triggering this outbreak? Would it have been worth it, or would I have fallen prey to one of those illnesses instead?

It's incredibly tempting to take these questions, for which there will probably never be answers, and use them to construct an entirely fictional but satisfying narrative. Because I like stories with clear causes and effects. I like things to make sense, to have a logical flow that leads to a generally foreseeable outcome. The idea of my body spontaneously deciding to destroy itself does not fit in to that well-ordered scheme. Nor do the statistics. This is a disease that primarily affects women, North Europeans, and black Americans. So how did I end up squeezing my own sorry self into that slim remaining percentile? And does that mean I will join the equally marginal ranks of those for whom this disease is fatal?

To best combat a disease with no known cure, they say the most important weapon in one's limited arsenal is a positive attitude. To maintain one, I have to leave off this abortive questioning and those grim time-traveling exercises in which I see my children wanting to run in the park with their Daddy, who, for as long as they can recall, has never been able to do much of anything without becoming breathless and tired and grows visibly older and feebler every year. It's hard, though; this kind of mental activity, however counterproductive, is something my brain regards as almost recreational in nature, especially when the conceived world it became so comfortable with has been demolished. Quickly, assimilating this inconvenient influx of fresh data, it sets about creating a new one in which to operate. This is natural, I guess, and in time, as even the abnormal becomes normal, it will begin to subside. But that will not completely change the fact that I would prefer hard answers, that I would like the angels of the future to whisper my detailed fate into my ear, that I would like to assure my immediate family that all will undoubtedly be well. I know those things would elude me even in health, but the inherent precariousness of life seems so much more sinister when each day we awaken to a stark, needling reminder of our own mortality.

And so my mantra: Breathe deeply (lungs permitting). Chin up, chin up.