My talk pEi-Commerce: Handcrafting Simple, Nimble, Cheap, Distributed Internet Applications for the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference is scheduled for Friday, June 1 at 3:30 p.m.

I encourage you to register for the conference, and attend the many interesting sessions scheduled, especially the Banquet with guest speaker Roch Carrier, who graced the Confederation Centre with a wonderful appearance mid-winter and who is a compelling speaker.

7:00 a.m. - Clock radio goes off to the sound of Karen Mair reading the news on CBC. Wake up. Shower and shave. Realize I have enough time to wake Oliver up, feed him, and take him with me.

7:20 a.m. - Call CGH to ensure that we’re on track. We are.

7:21 a.m. - Oliver awake. Change. Downstairs to kitchen. Boil water, mix cereal, dig mushed carrots out of fridge. Oliver eats. Likes cereal (with apples added), but spits out (cold) carrots. No time to warm carrots. Make do with cereal.

7:35 a.m. - Out the door. Realize it’s cold and going to rain. Back inside to put Oliver in a coat.

7:40 a.m. - Arrive CGH’s house. She’s not there. Meet next door neighbour Jill and we talk about the care of cats. Wait in car with Oliver. Sing songs and play pantomime games with Indigo the black puppet dog.

7:50 a.m. - CGH arrives home from early morning trip. Into house. See great pile of luggage. Talk to dog. CGH makes tea and toast. Crazy frenetic air in the house. Dog knows something is up, but doesn’t realize that quality time should be spent with cats before they part.

8:02 a.m. - CGH, now a net addict, must check email and website before we leave for airport. Shows me piece she wrote last night.

8:15 a.m. - Load Oliver into car. Load luggage into car. Load CGH into car with dog.

8:17 a.m. - Off to Queen Street Meat Market to pick up lobster. CGH insists we take Prince St. We take Prince St. Overshoot and double back via Allen St.

8:25 a.m. - Arrive meat market. CGH goes inside and Oliver and I wait in the car. Notice there’s a sticker in the window saying Shoplifting is a Crime. Wonder if casual meat theft is a big problem. Also notice more TIAPEI membership stickers on the window than ever seen before; wonder if longstanding TIAPEI membership has paid off for the meat market.

8:28 a.m. - CGH emerges from meat market with giant, ancient black suitcase, wrapped in packing tape, filled with lobster. Find that suitcase was CGH’s mothers, previously used to ferry lobsters west, presumably in 1940s. Find that suitcase is to be sacrificed ritually upon arrival in Ottawa.

8:29 a.m. - Set off for Ash Drive to drop dog with Joan and Leith. Instructions from CGH to proceed up Allen St. to Mt. Edward Road. Proceed up Allen St. to Mt. Edward Road. Arrive Ash Drive.

8:35 a.m. - Dog transferred, along with copious instructions on care, feeding, etc. Joan looks nervous; awesome weight on shoulders. Leith looks relaxes. Note that Joan and Leith were out mowing lawn and trimming brush at 8:35 a.m.; realize am seldom up this early and this is what people must do at this hour.

8:42 a.m. - Arrive airport (no instructions on best route; turns out CGH’s knowledge of suburban hinterlands is not vast). Park in departure area. Get cart. CGH runs in to start checkin process. Load cart with bags and giant black lobster suitcase. Get Oliver. Try to push cart while carrying Oliver. Difficulty. Giant lobster suitcasse falls off. Retrieved and rearranged. Thankful for automatic doors at airport. Oliver looks puzzled and wonders if we are flying somwhere.

8:47 a.m. - Find CGH in line. Maneouver cart into placed. Say quick goodbye. While walking back to car hear friendly woman, also in line, ask CGH where she’s going. “I’m off to visit my sisters…” she says. Not complete story, but true nonetheless.

Kevin O’Brien makes some very good points in a recent note. What he points out is the classic problem of the small entrepreneurial business, which is that it’s very hard to hire people who will (a) take your business as seriously as you do and (b) will react as you react, and operate as you operate, with the same intelligence and good judgement.

In a sense, the problem that Kevin faces is similar to the problems Fruit of the Loom and others face when outsourcing manufacturing to maquiladora plants in Mexico: how do you convince a collection of poorly paid generic workers with no connection to you or your products to pay attention to quality and service? To quote from a case brought against Fruit of the Loom by its stockholders:

In its attempt to reduce inventories, Fruit had completely halted production at several of its maquiladora factories and fired workers rather than furlough them. As a result, when Fruit attempted to increase production … Fruit found it was not possible to rehire the trained and skilled workers it had fired. As a result, Fruit was forced to hire unskilled and poorly trained workers who were unable to efficiently and effectively produce goods and thus produced huge amounts of imperfect and irregular goods which resulted in grossly overvalued inventories for Fruit and Fruit not being able to produce the high-quality product needed to meet customer demand and increase revenues, while causing Fruit’s expenses to soar.

The answer to the problem is obviously not Kevin answering the phone himself 24/7, for this would lead to the end of Kevin, which is not the desired result here. Perhaps the only solution is to take customer service back in-house, and to conceptually place the people who answer the telephone at the top of the corporate hierarchy, rather than at the bottom. Set them up with profit sharing. Give them business cards. Make sure they have plenty of Knudsen Juices in the fridge. Bring them meals. Give them free high-speed Internet access at home.

This will cost more. You will have to raise prices to pay for this. But, in the end, you will have a better product than anyone else, and the market will recognize this.

The good thing about all of this? You know the underwear needs work. Your competition insists, even in the face of underwear full of holes, with the the waistband falling off, that their underwear is just fine.

Pictured here is the Reinvented Inc. corporate calling card from Island Tel. You might be thinking “Hey, why is he putting his calling card on the Internet — won’t somebody steal it and make calls to Belgrade with it?” But you would be wrong to ask this question.

You would be wrong because this is the “new, improved” version of the calling card from Island Tel. This, you see, is the new entirely useless model of the card.

Here is a rough recollection of an actual exchange between me and an Island Tel operator earlier this year:

Operator: Operator, can I help you?
Me: Hello. I’m here in the Charlottetown Mall and I want to call home using my calling card. I just got a new calling card, and I just took it out of my wallet to find that my PIN number isn’t printed on it anymore.
Operator: That’s right, the PIN number isn’t printed on the calling card any longer, as a security measure
Me: Can you tell me what my PIN number is?
Operator: No, I’m sorry. You would have to come into the office for that.
Me: Well, if the PIN number isn’t printed on the calling card, then why do I need a calling card, if all it’s got on it is my telephone number, which I already know?
Operator: That’s a good point.

You might be thinking “why don’t you just stick the calling card in one of those snazzy new card phones, where you don’t need a PIN?” And again, alas, you would be wrong to ask this, because absolutely the only thing that doing this achieves is to have the phone type in your phone number for you, which you might think is a labor-saving help, until you realize that it takes longer for the phone to type in your number that it does to type it in yourself.

I have only to assume that the corporate thinking that led to this decision probably went something like this:

• People are getting their wallets stolen by nefarious people.
• These nefarious people are using the calling cards they steal to make lots of calls to Belgrade, because the PIN number is printed right there on the card. This is wrong.
• It is our job to stamp our wrong.
• Let’s take our PIN number off the card.

The calling card portion of the Island Tel website tells me that I should have a calling card so that I can …enjoy the convenience. But there is no convenience — there is only inconvenience!

Now, you might be saying, “what about all those calls to Belgrade?” I have a simple solution to this problem: take my telephone number off the card, and put my PIN number back on, all alone.

The result? The nefarious criminals can’t make phone calls because they need my telephone number to do so. I already know my telephone number, so I can make phone calls, with the card serving as a handy reminder of my PIN number.

But what about the smart and nefarious criminals, who look up my phone number in the telephone book? Good point. But I imagine that the sum total of fraud committed by smart and nefarious criminals using calling cards stolen from Prince Edward Islanders could in no way approach the sum total of the frustration experinced by Islanders who pull entirely useless calling cards out of their wallets.

Notes: The use of Belgrade in the examples above is for illustration purposes only, and is not meant to imply that the rate of nefarious calling to Belgrade is any more than to any other place on earth. Advantage Calling Card is a trademark of Stentor Resource Centre Inc., but calling card is not. The inclusion of an image of my own calling card on this page should not be taken as an endorsement of my opinions — about calling cards, Belgrade, or anything else — by Stentor Resource Centre Inc. If you have questions about using your own calling card you can phone 1-800-561-8888.

This set of conference video is quite interesting (page is in Danish; video is in English).

What’s obvious from notes from Christopher Ogg and Dan James is that I could have probably skipped the queue, phoned Kevin at home, and got at my email last night, therein avoid the customer service assault.

Perhaps next time Island Tel loses its DNS, or has routing problems, I will call Stephen Wetmore and test Christopher’s hypothesis (which I have a feeling is completely correct).

It seems that Kevin’s intrinsic understanding of how customer service works broke down last night largely because of outsourcing issues. This goes to a point that I raise time and time again, which is don’t outsource your customer service. Customer service is what an ISP is about. Technical issues don’t matter. Bandwidth doesn’t matter. Customer service is an ISP’s product, not bandwidth.

Kudos to Kevin O’Brien for has candid explanation of ISN’s service outage last night. Also interesting to note that Dan James’ experience was almost exactly like my own, except I didn’t call Kevin at home.

Note to Internet Service Providers: stop it with the username obsession. It may be Absolutely Important for you to keep track of us in your Big Database, but it means Absolutely Nothing to we users, and is Very Annoying.

ISN service was restored at about 12:15 a.m. The following appeared in ISN’s System Bulletins section (annoyingly only available to ISN-connected IP addresses, and even then you need a username and password):

Computers Do Thing
Friday, May 25 2001

Never believe that computers don’t think, because they chose the one day I was out in Georgetown visiting family to blow up. Our connection to the Internet went down sometime this evening (around 8:15pm) and came back up an hour later. This was caused by our border router (the machine that all our traffic goes through before it reaches the rest of the Internet) crashing, probably due to a dead air conditioner. The router (and the air conditioner) have been fixed, and we are not expecting any more problems. We appologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our users.

Charles Tassell
System Administrator

Let it never be said that only Island Tel can offer bad technical support. Tonight after Larry King and before bed, I decided to check my email. Although my bandwidth to the office here comes from Island Tel, my mail is on a server across town, connected to the Internet by ISN.

So I opened Outlook, and waited for the mail to flow forth. But it didn’t. A quick ping and traceroute suggested that the problem was at ISN’s end of things — traffic was making it as far as AT&T, one or two hops upstream from ISN. My usual backup for problems like this is to dial directly in to the Charlottetown POP. But that wasn’t working either; the authentication server was picking up and accepting my username and password. And then croaking.

So, like a good customer, I dialed 892-4476, ISN’s “one number for all things,” and heard Kevin O’Brien’s recorded voice telling me to immediately press 1 for technical support. So far so good. Pressed 1. A couple of rings, and another voice announcing that I’ve called ISN’s support centre. Listen to another round of prompts. The voice tells me to press 1 for dial-up support and 2 for web hosting support. Figuring that my problem is more networking than dial-up, I press 2. And the voice comes back and tells me to hang up and dial a toll-free number, 877-476-6381, option 3. So I hang up and dial that number. And what do you know… it’s Kevin O’Brien’s voice again, same recording, just like 892-4476. Same instructions to press 1 for technical support; but I know where that leads, so I stay on the line. Eventually I’m told that if I have “urgent questions of a non technical nature” I should press 3. Well. What should I do?

So I hang up and dial 892-4476 again, press 1 again, listen to the rings again, and press 1 once I get the opportunity. Next I’m treated to 3 minutes of what sounds awfully like Yanni (does anyone in the technical support business have any taste in music at all?). And then a helpful sounding chap comes on the line and asks me for my username. Fortunately, unlike Island Tel, where one’s username is actually a kryptonic code of numbers and letters, my username at ISN is simply peter, so I give it over.

Friendly phone guy tells me that they are aware of the problem, and that there was a problem earlier in the evening which they thought was fixed around 10:00 p.m., but it seems to have come back. They’re working on it. That’s about it. No offer to phone me back once the problem is solved. No explanation about what the nature of the problem might be. The nice phone guy seems pretty much as in the dark as I am.

How should this have worked? I notice a problem. I call 892-4476. I hear a message: “Hello, this is ISN. It’s now Friday evening at 11:32 p.m. We are aware of the technical problems with our Internet service, and have traced the problem to blah blah blah. Our technician Bobby is en route from his house in blah blah blah and should be on site by 11:49 p.m. We expect to have service restored by 12:10 a.m., 43 minutes from now. To receive an automated telephone call at the number you called from when service is restored, press 1. To find out more about this technical problem, and immediate steps you can take to get access to the Internet right now, press 2. We apologize for your frustration, and assure you that we’re doing everything we can to solve this problem. Complete details of the reasons for this service outage will be posted to our website within 2 hours of restoration of service. Have a nice day.”

Assuming I press 2 at this point, I will be transferred to a real live person (being on hold for a bit is fine, as long as the hold music is, say, Los Lobos). When I get to talk to the real live person, they will have a Sympatico or Auracom account ready for me to use until service is restored (just like Air Canada used to let Canadian Airlines passengers fly on their planes when something broke).

Moral? Attitude is everything. Technical problems happen — it’s how you handle them, and kung fu them to your advantage that’s the key. Tonight I’m going to bed email-less and frustrated.

Disclaimer: I’m good friends with Kevin O’Brien, the voice on the telephone telling me to press 1. He bought me lunch at the Noodle House last week. I designed ISN’s ad in The Buzz this month. I think ISN is a good company. But some times even the good can have a bad day.