Category: humour

Thanks to Damien Mulley for his suggestion. I’ve complained to ComReg in the past but it doesn’t seem to do any good. However, I’ve managed to find a helpful person higher up the eircom organisational tree to smooth over some of our difficulties and get our line installed. It’s a shame that this process can’t be easier & faster.

Having spent around 100 minutes on the phone trying to get eircom to arrange a broadband line for our new business premises in a reasonable time I’m angry as hell. We’ve waited around 6 weeks for the telephone line to appear & they now can’t switch on the line for another 2 weeks. This seemingly artificial schedule is going to cost us yet more money. Customers can rest assured that we have backup broadband connections and that our servers are safely ensconsed in data centres but still…
What’s bugging me here is that the eircom representatives and support that I’ve spoken to over the phone:

• don’t understand the technology but adhere rigidly to an ordering process
• don’t appear able to pass a customer onto someone more knowledgable
• can’t maintain call context when they refer you to someone else, a basic call center activity

It’s less than impressive and particularly frustrating when you have to contact them to get a line.

I’ve invented a new buzzzword (renamed an existing one). “Blaqgging” is weblogging to counteract the effects of jet lag. Having spent all but 2 of the past 29 hours awake I can’t vouch for the quality. To provide some context here I’m currently safely ensconced in the Hampton Inn, Logan Airport, Boston where I’m staying the night. For the 2nd time ever I decided to chance getting a ticket in an airport and it couldn’t have been a worse move. My shannon-boston flight that was supposed to arrive at 6:30 was 25 minutes late in landing. Add in over an hour of delays for luggage reclaim and a missing (no shit!, 40 minutes late) ternimal shuttle bus & I was never going to get outta there last night. However, for all you regular US visitors I can sincerely recommend the prompt service and low cost of AirTran airways. They found me a direct flight 1st thing this morning from Logan to Virginia at less than a 3rd the cost of the US Airways equivalent. What’s more amazing is that it was at 10:30 last night yet the cost was just over a hundred dollars.
So here’s my top 5 tips to avoid Air travel frustration:

1. Inform your longhaul airline (mine was Aerlingus) well in advance if you require a specially prepared meal. Coeliacs like me may have to explain to them what a coeliac is and why they can’t eat lasagne
2. Book your connecting flights if you’re arriving in the airport after 3:00pm and don’t want to be stranded overnight.
3. Check out the AirTran and JetBlue sites for connecting flights in the US. They’re both very cheap and provide good service. Especially AirTran.
4. Don’t puke on or near the staff no matter how nauseous you feel
5. Don’t confuse the European idea of reserving/holding a ticket with the American concept. It could just have been tiredness of the part of both the staff and I but I ended up with a round-the-world-to-get-next-door itinerary from US Airways that they assured me was exactly what I was looking for. One call to AirTran convinced me this wasn’t the case.

Selling software (especially websites and eCommerce products) to businesses is fascinating. Many businesses dismiss you straight away with “that’s not how it’s done here” or “we do that in-house”. The really fascinating thing is examining the nature and quality of what they do in house and how limited it often is. It can be nearly impossible to explain to a business that…

• their own IT personnel are disinterested, useless or both
• their website is poor
• they know little about IT but are too afraid to admit it
• they’re convinced that their business model won’t have to adapt to take new technologies & trends into account

Over the past week I’ve encountered several companies where branch offices recognise there’s a problem but headoffice doesn’t think the business model can be streamlined or modified in any way. It’s time for a bit of objectivity here. Personally, I’m too pedantic as we should have launched our main site ages ago but I’m still fine-tuning the content (as opposed to this blog which is deliberately slapdash) However, many businesses that I’m encountering have no clear idea of why they have a website, what it can do for them and how important the design is in establishing them as a credible organisation in the year 2005.