Ready for a break

Today is my last day in the office for a week or so, and I am definitely ready for the break. A synopsis of next week’s events:

  • Sunday - flying out to Orlando.
  • Monday - Freescale Technology Forum begins.
  • Tuesday - Becky flies out to meet me. The girls are staying with my folks. (Thanks again, Mom and Dad!) Oh, and it’s our ninth wedding anniversary.
  • Wednesday - more FTF during the day, and we’re seeing Blue Man Group in the evening.
  • Thursday - FTF in the morning, then it’s off to be beach bums.
  • Friday - whole lotta nothing. We have a hotel on the beach in Cocoa Beach. Should be nice.
  • Saturday - fly home in the afternoon. We have an overly-long layover in MSP, but such is life.

I shall come home a more rested person. It will be glorious. :-)

Notes on a Tuesday Morning

I’m getting ready to go sit in an all-day meeting with some customers that are in town. Not real exciting, but should be some good discussion. Mostly it’s just looooong. At least food is provided. :-)

Ordered a case for my new iPod yesterday; it’s the one that Tony recommended to me the other day. I expected that if I ordered early on Monday morning that I had a good shot at 3-5 day UPS shipping getting it here to me before I leave for Florida on Sunday. But as of this morning it still hasn’t shipped. If I don’t see some movement by noon today, I’m gonna talk to Tony and get one back-channel.

Went to Texas Roadhouse last night with the family and my mom and sister who are in town visiting. Didn’t think I’d eaten too much last night, but this morning I can feel it. :-(

My Florida trip is coming up in less than a week. Orlando. We have tickets to see Blue Man Group, Becky’s going to Sea World one day while I’m at my conference, and then we have a hotel on the beach for a couple nights before we come home. And the girls are staying with my folks. 5 more days…

Sheesh, It's Monday already?!?

So for it being a weekend, it was a busy one. A synopsis:

Saturday:

  1. Ran a 5k in the morning. Finished in 31:33. It was stinkin’ hot outside.
  2. Sat and watched the parade go by. With two cute little girls, you get a lot of candy.
  3. Watched the girls while Becky went to a baby shower.
  4. Went to church for an all-evening elder meeting. Boy will I be glad when this is over.

Sunday:

  1. To church, but didn’t have to lead music - only taught Sunday School. Good times.
  2. Got a couple very sweet Father’s Day cards and a couple of t-shirts. My favorite: the one that says “Those who think they know everything annoy those of us that actually do.” Hehe.
  3. Crashed some in the afternoon, then cleaned house to prepare for my mom and sister coming to visit.
  4. Watched Cinderella Man for the first time. Russell Crowe, for all his personal problems, is a heckuva actor.

Now it’s Monday and back to work. But one week from today I will be in Orlando, FL, on Day 1 of my week-long conference/vacation. Ahhhhhh. I think I can make it one more week.

Satisfaction

Well if I’m gonna gripe when I think things have gone wrongly, it is only right that I applaud when I feel that justice has been done.  :-)

I made my trip to Best Buy this afternoon with my second defective refurbished iPod.  I had been steeling myself for this visit, preparing to ask to speak to a manager if necessary.  (I’m really bad at confrontation, but this has been getting ridiculous.)  I went back to the Geek Squad counter and talked to one of their employees (one I hadn’t spoken to before).

I didn’t say much at all: “long story.  This is the second refurb I’ve gotten, and it doesn’t work, either.”  I explained the issue - the thing wouldn’t sync with the PC - it locked up after only 1 GB of transfer.  He said “let me check something real quick…” and headed off to a computer backstage.  He came back a couple of minutes later with some good news.  “Let’s just get  you a new iPod.  That should make sure it doesn’t happen again.”  FINALLY!  So I went off to the iPod counter, requested a 30 GB black iPod, and headed over to Customer Service for the cashier to ring up the transaction.

Here’s where it gets better.  They weren’t just gonna give me a straight exchange for a new 30 GB iPod (which in itself would’ve been an upgrade from the 20 GB iPod that I took in originally) - they were essentially just gonna refund back the $299 I paid for that old iPod and then credit it to me.  When I realized that was the case, I suggested that I would instead like to take that $299 credit and apply it to a $349 80 GB iPod.  The cashier was amenable to the idea, so I headed back to the iPod counter, got the 80 GB unit, and paid $50 from my pocket to get the new iPod.  As a little bonus, Best Buy’s promotion this week gives you a $30 Best Buy gift card with the purchase of said iPod, so I got that as well.

As I sit here tonight typing this up, iTunes has copied over 622 of 5773 songs onto the new iPod. I don’t think I’ll sit up to wait for the sync to complete…  but I will sure enjoy having an iPod back.  Thank you, Best Buy, for finally getting this right.

Not again!

UPS dutifully delivered my second refurbished iPod this afternoon. The battery was pretty well dead, so I hooked it up to the wall charger for a few hours until it said it was all charged up. Then I hooked it up to the laptop, setup iTunes to sync 18 GB of music, and crossed my fingers. Would this one work?

No. iTunes claims that it’s synced about 350 songs, and then it gives a file write error and dies. I tried removing the song that it died on from the sync list and syncing again, still no joy. The iPod totally locks up, has to be reset, and doesn’t end up with more than the first 11 tracks of the first album on it. Now, I like Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but I’m gonna need the iPod to hold more than that.

So I guess it’s back to Best Buy tomorrow for yet another return. I’m not good at being confrontational in the store - usually I figure that the person behind the counter doesn’t have much control over it, so why be hard on them? But this time I won’t wait long before asking to see a manager. I waited two weeks for this second refurb, and it turned out to be trash, too. I want a gift card. I know their policy says I need to get another lemon before I get a gift card, but I really don’t want to have to wait another two weeks just to find out whether the next one is any good.

Grrrrrrr.

iPod today?

Got an automated UPS phone call a few minutes ago saying that my iPod would be delivered today, and giving me the tracking number.  Good thing it went to voice mail - no way I would’ve been able to catch the tracking number with only one live listen.    UPS’s tracking system agrees that the iPod is on the truck and out for delivery.  Now I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that this one works.

Bullet Points for Friday

  • Still no iPod. I’m hoping for today, but I’m just about tired of hoping.
  • Did an insurance review with our agent yesterday. It’s always a bleak affair; her job is to suggest all the things that might go wrong that we should be covered for. Ugh.
  • On the upside, Laura went to sleep at 7:30 last night. Earliest in a week.
  • On the downside, she came into our room at 11 wanting to sleep in our bed, and pitched an hour-long fit when we made her sleep in her room.
  • Ordered a hard drive enclosure from Newegg yesterday to give me someplace to put a 160 GB hard drive I now have free. While my total storage space will still be paltry in comparison to, say, Geof’s or Mark’s, it’ll still be nice to have more space.
  • I’m not leading music at church this week, but I still am teaching Sunday School. Still gotta prepare.

The trip to Best Buy, or, why you should think when you design a computer system.

So, as planned, tonight I went to Best Buy to find out what was up with my iPod replacement. Long story short, I took my original one in for repair, they sent me a refurb which was also dead, so I took it back, and they were going to send me another one. Two weeks elapse. We pick up on the story tonight as I talk to a member of the “Geek Squad” at our local Cedar Rapids Best Buy.

I explain my story. I brought in the refurb for the second return 12 days ago. The guy wasn’t able to enter it into the system yet, but assured me the system would let him enter it by the end of the day, so 3 - 5 business days and I should get a new one. 8 business days later, I’m back. I talked to them last Friday on the phone and they said yeah, the service tag just closed, so expect the iPod in a couple of days. Three days later, still nada.

So the guy looks it up in the computer and finally says “I think they sent it here by mistake. Let me go look.” So he goes into the back room, and eventually comes out… with the refurb I returned 12 days ago. And then he goes to explain. Yeah, they couldn’t enter it into the system until the previous service ticket closed. And the previous service ticket didn’t close until June 8th. It ends up the way their return software is designed, the service ticket doesn’t close until the one I sent back in is repaired and returned to store stock. Absolutely ridiculous! So my returned iPod has just been sitting there on the shelf for the last 12 days, with nothing happening.

I can draw a couple conclusions from this: First, the guy who told me he could have the service ticket entered “by the end of the day” was lying to me. Certainly he knew how the system worked. He just wanted to get me out the door. Second, they have some very poorly designed software. You telling me they didn’t think about this case where a refurb is itself bad? Or did they think about it and dismiss it as an acceptable error? Either way is unacceptable.

So now I have a new service ticket in hand, and can expect another refurbished iPod to be delivered via UPS in 3 - 5 business days. If that one is bad and requires a return, I’ll be interested to hear how soon they tell me they can enter it into the system… I won’t be too accepting of another two-week wait just to get a return into the system again.

I just want my iPod back...

After BestBuy’s impressive performance in getting me my first refurbished iPod, it has now been 12 days since I was promised my next refurbished iPod, and I still don’t have a replacement. I called the “Geek Squad” representative last Friday; he looked it up on the computer and assured me that my second service ticket had just closed out on Friday, so I should expect my iPod in “one to two” days, and if not, I should contact him.

I decided to be gracious and assume that he meant “one to two business days”, seeing as UPS doesn’t typically deliver on Saturday or Sunday. So I waited. No UPS man yesterday. We already have a shopping trip planned to that side of town for this evening; if I don’t get that iPod via UPS today I will be making a stop back at Best Buy tonight. I’ll be curious to see what line they’ll feed me - I certainly won’t be happy with “wait a couple more days” - at a minimum I’ll want a UPS tracking number or something to prove that my iPod has actually shipped. I’d really love it if they’d say “oops, something went wrong - can we just give you a merchandise credit for the original price of your iPod?”, but I don’t think there’s much chance that’ll happen. Oh, if it did, though? I’d put another $50 with it and get the 80GB iPod with video… Oh well, at least a guy can hope, right?

Good Qualities for a...

We were sitting in a conference room at work the other day and there was a large pad that someone had written on in a previous meeting. I don’t know the context of the meeting or the notes on the pad, but what was written on the pad was this:

  • Outgoing
  • Energetic
  • Sociable
  • Responsible
  • Respectful
  • Flexible

We took a minute to be amused at it, and then one of my co-workers asked “so what word shall we add?”

We all thought about it a second, and another co-worker chimed in, “Inflatable?”

It was all downhill after that.