Lenovo, the maker of the products for those who Don’t.

I was about due for a customer service disaster. It’s been awhile.  Here’s the latest.

My old laptop, a Dell, less than three years old, was starting to have problems. It would crash regularly, lag like crazy, and generally was just sucking.  It happened at the worst time, too, but there’s nothing I could do about it. It was time for a new computer.  I finished my busy season, and was leaving for vacation a couple days later, and just said ‘forget it,’ and selected a Lenovo.

I finally got one too many pieces of addressed admail

I’m sending this today.

View this document on Scribd

And enclosing this…

I’ve become a cranky old man. And damn proud of it.

Privatised city workers, or why tow truck drivers are extortionists.

Sometimes I go hunting for explanations of why a problem exists, and often end up at a realisation that it has something to do with privatisation. In this case, I didn’t even have to try.

The Back Story: The HMV on Robson Street is going out of business. Today is their last day.  I went in back in December and they had signs up saying they were selling off their furniture, and to enquire about it.  I did, and bought and paid for a CD/DVD “end cap” shelf that was originally used back when this store was a Virgin Megastore.  It was still in use at the time so, long story short, I went to pick it up today.

Scotiabank Fail

Apologies for the rant, but I became very, very, angry at Scotiabank earlier tonight and I really need to get this off my chest.

I had plans to meet a friend at the Cobalt tonight. We agreed to meet there around 11 PM.  There was cover, and I’d planned to get a drink or two, and I had virtually no cash left on me.  So I needed an ATM.  This should be simple, right?

On Commerce and Nightlife

Two of the biggest culture shocks for North Americans who come to Australia (myself included, as well as virtually every Canadian and American I’ve spoken to who has visited) surround the way business is done there, and the use of alcohol and / or drugs.  I recently blogged about drug policy, so I’ll leave that one there.  The other issues are sort of related, at least in the minds of many Australian politicians, so I’ll address them together.  Much of this may be a bit of a primer for North Americans going to Australia to visit, so apologies to anyone who finds this redundant.

[Note: this blog was written while I was in Australia and I’m just finally posting it. “Here” is Australia.]

Confessions of a serial pack-rat.

So today all my stuff arrived, from Toronto.  Finally.  I’ll save the rant about the movers for another time, but I recommend strongly against Two Small Men with Big Hearts.

Anyways, the stuff I had shipped has been (for the most part) sitting in a storage unit in Oakville for the last year or so.  When I left Toronto for Sydney, I threw everything into storage that I couldn’t quite bear to part with… having given away or sold most of the ‘practical’ stuff like furniture.  In my two stops in the GTA this year (once in June for an extended stay, and then the brief weekend in October), I added some miscellaneous stuff, removing others, and so on.  I then arranged for everything to be picked up from storage and brought to me here.  The vast majority of it, it is fair to say, has gone unmissed in the year I’ve been away from it.

On Consumer Banking and Finance

Continuing my Canadian observations in Australia series (I really need a real name for these… there are still about 5 or 6 of them left, most of which were written months ago)…  consumer banking and commerce is one of those areas that are actually more nationally-divided than the others.  This is logical: both Canada and Australia leave the regulation of finance and commerce to the federal governments, for the most part.

On mobile phone services in Canada and Australia

While planning my return to Canada (which is inevitable, though totally undecided at the same time!) I’ve been investigating telecom options.  I’ve been with the same mobile phone company for the last 10 years, and realised it’s time to at least reevaluate that.  While in Canada in June/July I spent over $100 on mobile phone use, mostly due to poor planning.  Having an unlocked phone makes switching easy, so I started looking more closely.  I tweeted while doing so, and found some empathy from followers with my frustrations.

Either way, that all reminded me that I had this entry drafted and still haven’t posted it.  Continuing in my Canada / Australia blog series, here we go.  I’ve already done a lengthy entry describing internet services in Australia vs Canada, so I won’t spend any more time on it other than to provide a link to it.  My comments in that post about the technical limitations and geography hold true here too — Canadian companies’ arguments that they have to pay a small fortune for the infrastructure for a large geographical area is bunk in light of Australian mobile companies having the exact same challenge.

Why I still don’t like New Twitter

Blogging my complaints seems to attract attention and occasionally gets things fixed… it also makes it much easier to explain a problem than I can do in 140 characters on Twitter.  So here goes.

My big complaint about New Twitter is this: it doesn’t work.  And when it does work, it’s more effort (in the online world, an unnecessary extra click is not cool) to do what you did before.  I’ve had all these problems all along, which is why I stayed with Old Twitter as long as I could — Twitter forced everyone over to New Twitter this week.

I wish I had screen caps of Old Twitter to compare. But I don’t, so we’ll just go with this.

ServiceOntario fail

I fucking knew something like this would  happen. I just knew it.

My Ontario driver’s licence expired in May, while I was still in Australia.  I still have an Ontario driver’s licence: I’m still a resident of Ontario. I’m in Australia temporarily, for 10 months from arrival to departure, almost 6 weeks of which were spent in Ontario anyway.  I pay taxes in Ontario.  But I don’t have a ‘residence’ in Ontario, having moved my stuff into storage (also in Ontario, I might add), so it made this tricky.

I explained all of this to the person behind the desk at ServiceOntario.  I explained to him where I most recently lived, and where I wanted my mail to go, as I have all my mail going to a PO Box in Concord that is being checked by a friend that I trust.  It was a bit of effort to explain it all, and for him to understand it, but he eventually (I had assumed) got his head around it all.

He told me the licence would go out in the mail in about two weeks. That was June 10th, shortly before the Canada Post lockout.  I waited, patiently, for the lockout to end and for my licence to come in. It didn’t.  I waited another week or two after leaving Toronto, and it still hasn’t arrived.  So I called ServiceOntario today.  They told me they have nothing to do with anything, and gave me the number for the Ministry of Transportation.  When I spoke to the rep there, he informed me that my mailing address had been used as my residence address and vice-versa.  Oh, and that my driver’s licence had been mailed to the mailing address they had on file, being the apartment I no longer live in.  That new people live in.

Dumbfounded, I elaborated to explain I was out of the country for the next couple months and needed my licence (my temporary one that was issued when they took the pictures for the photo card expires in September).  I was told my options were to send a fax and request an “extension” (to what, I’m still not sure), or not to drive until I got back to Ontario.  There was NO process to go about requesting a correction to what was a clear error. No explanation as to how to deal with the fact that someone else now has my driver’s licence (except to say that even if it had been returned, they don’t even bother to track it!)  No way to ask that they do what they were supposed to do in the first place and send the photo card to the correct address.  Finally, no way to report to anyone that the person who did the initial processing made a really big fucking error that could easily lead to identity theft.  On the last point, I was told that I could go in in person to a ServiceOntario office and ask to speak to a manager.  In person? I can’t even write a letter?  Well, I guess blogging about it is just as good.

I sent off the fax they asked for (also, seriously? fax? Is this the 80s?).  I can only hope they receive it, send me whatever they could possibly send me (in enough time to actually make it to me), and that it’s valid for Avis car rental – I have  a car booked for three weeks in New Zealand, and my entire trip is fucked without it.

I’m not sure what’s worse — that they made such a fucking glaring error, or that they were completely unwilling to do ANYTHING to fix it. Ugh.

[Update: @Ont_Ombudsman informs me there IS a way to report problems – through his website! :)]

UPDATE:

It’s a long story, but the head of privacy at ServiceOntario saw this blog entry (via the @ServiceOntario Twitter account, I believe), and commented here.  A long series of emails later, I have my drivers’ licence card.  The error was confirmed to be on their end (there’s no way a PO Box can / should ever be entered as a “residential” address, for obvious reasons), which was acknowledged.  Since it was clearly a mistake, the addresses were corrected in my file, and they kindly agreed to send the licence to me by registered mail and it arrived yesterday.  They even sent a staff person to the address where the licence was sent (unfortunately the people there claimed not to have seen it).  Thank you, Peter, for being so proactive about this.

The Ombuds office, for their part, were incredibly diligent in following up with me on the matter. I asked them to hold off on my complaint as it appeared things were being resolved. They regularly followed up with me, only stopping after I had the card in hand and confirmed that the problem had been resolved.

Guess the system works, after all.