Someone named Michael Reynolds from DDA Computer Consultants sent me unsolicited email this morning. I’m not sure who he is, but he did invite me to post the following comments here, so I will, with my comments below:

Ugliest site in the world or sour grapes? Because it’s you, I’m guessing the latter.
That is what the client asked for when it was designed …..Are you slamming the good people at Vesey’s?? I hope not. That site was a beast and we were it’s trainers - we used technology that isn’t supported anymore, we had changes upon changes asked of us that would have made moving the Great Wall of China two feet to the west seem easy and if you had won that contract you would really have understood what a money pit it became for US, not the client, MMG - also, how many e-commerce sites that early in the game paid for themselves in months???? I’ll tell you, a well-designed, functional site that allowed the toughest demeographic in the world(old people) to navigate it and purchase thousands of dollars of product within the first few days of it being ‘live’. I consider that quite a feat, wouldn’t you?
Oh, and the Cyborgs you mention from Island Tel support work 7 days a week - I know most of them and I’ve pointed out your kind words to them so if you see an Island Tel van coming down Queen Street today..well, keep to the sildwalk.
Those union boys can be nasty, right Jimmy?
Also, I have had two full days of downtime with Eastlink here in the last few weeks so I wouldn’t be so quick to ‘dis’ Island Tel and the people who work there. You should try to deal with MTT, at least in PEI there are a couple of places to find everyone you need - here they have people scattered throughout at least 8 locations in Halifax/Dartmouth alone.
Why don’t you put this on your site, quit your belly-aching and get to work! Hey, I have an idea…Have you and Jack McAndrew ever thought of joining forces? You could be called the “Irrational Rag Squad”. Yes, The IRS, I think that would be painfully correct.

After my series of frustrated rants about my week with Island Tel, I’m sad to report that the prevailing reaction from readers of this site has been “you think that’s bad — try this on for size!” What to do, what to do?

Although I will be kicked out of the web designer community for suggesting this, I think I’ve decided that design doesn’t matter. Well, maybe that’s going too far. But here’s an example.
Earlier this week I was looking to buy a Clive Pig vinyl album from the mid-1980s. A Google search turned up the Last Vestige Music Shop in Albany, New York (just 200 miles up the I-90 from my birthplace of Rochester).
By any measurement, Last Vestige’s website is ugly. You might even say it’s gaudy.
But that didn’t really stop me for a second from making a buying decision. Even the fact that I had to email them my request and wait for them to email back the URL for their secure ordering page didn’t really faze me. The purchase process, from beginning to end, took about 27 hours.
The process was not, in other words, most of the things that e-commerce is supposed to be: quick, easy, well-designed, etc.
But somehow — and I should add here that I as much of a design fascist as the next guy — none of this mattered. Indeed if anything the experience was more fun than the antiseptic process of buying something through Amazon.com.
In the end what mattered most to me was that (a) the process worked and (b) it was evident to me that there were real people at the other end of the transaction.
Isn’t it amazing that I feel a greater personal connection to the people running this obscure record shop in New York than I do to the cyborgs at the local [sic] phone company up the street.
I suppose what I have discovered is not that design doesn’t matter but, in fact, that it does matter: design a system that makes people feel like people, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s got wonkly typography and a starfield background.

Nancy Franklin writes eloquently in this week’s New Yorker about the new ABC television show What About Joan. The show really is as good as she says it is. It’s actually even a little better (I don’t mind the “Ted baxter character”). Recommended.

Reading below you’ll find a close chronicle of my back and forth with Island Tel today about a networking problem. It takes a lot out of me to deal with this sort of thing — when you depend on the Internet to earn your living, having it not work is sort of like have only occasional access to oxygen.
Midway through the day I went out and had lunch at the Noodle House, which is a weird little restaurant located in amidst the fast flood clutter of University Ave. in Charlottetown.
The funny thing about the Noodle House is that it has what I think is the most attentive and expert customer service I’ve ever seen. I eat there perhaps once every second month on average, and yet I am greeted as a welcome patron whenever I walk in the door. The owner knows that I like to read the paper if I’m eating along, and so The Guardian is always offered to me. She also has my favourites pretty well memorized, and also remembers that I don’t use chop sticks. She also remembers that Catherine likes a particular sort of hot sauce, and does like chop sticks (but not cucumbers).
The table service is friendly but never overbearing, the food is excellent and varied, the prices reasonable. The decor is sort of 1970s Country Style Donuts, but you learn to overlook that with time.
I think the friendly folks at Island Tel should go and eat at the Noodle House. Several times a week. They would learn many good and useful lessons about how to run a business that makes customers feel important and valued.
P.S. Isn’t outsourcing your first tier technical support like outsourcing your restaurant wait staff?

Veseys.com used to rank among the ugliest, most difficult sites to use around (disclaimer: Okeedokee once pitched the site to Vesey’s; we lost out to Marshall Media). I’m happy to see that those plucky folks at silverorange have renovated the site, and the results are quite impressive. The new site is a little too heavily drenched in graphics for my tastes, and the highly-formatted pages have an awkward way of clunking on in, but you can forgive most of that because, hey, they’re selling flower and vegetable seeds, and seeing images is important. Bravo.

…is “An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft.” (from the The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing).

So I talked to UUNet’s technical support line about the router which Island Tel says is blocking traffic from my IP address. They checked the router and confirmed that there is no filtering taking place there. I called back the Island Tel Help Desk and was able to talk to Cindy once more, and relayed this. She insisted that the problem must be on the other end, and suggested I keep calling back UUNet technical support until I could get someone to help me.
So now Island Tel is blaming UUNet and UUNet says it’s not their problem. So there is, it would appear, no solution to the problem.
As Eastlink, in turns out, doesn’t presently offer high-speed service to my area, I’m out of luck and, I suppose, should now move to Boston so as to solve my problem.
Sigh.

Well, I thought things were going to work out better than this, but here’s how it went with Cindy at Island Tel.
For some reason Cindy, who seemed helpful and like she was going to work on the problem until it was solved, passed the file to Tracey. Tracey called me to find out the IP address of my desktop machine, and asked me to release the IP address so they could set up a mirror machine to see what the problem might be.
About 1/2 hour later Tracey phoned me back to announce that (a) the problem was specific to that IP address, and (b) the problem was not Island Tel’s problem, but Alter.net’s problem. She went on to suggest that Alter.net was probably blocking traffic to/from that IP address for some reason… perhaps because of “inappropriate network activity” on my part (which is absurd).
I assumed she would go on to suggest that they could just take that IP address out of commission and get me a fresh clean new one, but she didn’t and when I asked, she said they couldn’t do that because “somebody else would just end up with that IP address and end up with the same problem.”
And that was it.
If I treated my customers like this, I would be out of business. I realize that Island Tel has to make financial decisions about how much or how little they are prepared to go to support their customers. In my case, it’s not far enough. I know that if I was dealing with Kevin at ISN he would hammer away at this until I was a satisfied customer, and not because he’s a friend but because it’s the Right Thing to Do.
How can I convince Island Tel that it’s in their best interests to go just as far with just as much moxy? Or should I even bother?

So now I’m on the phone talking to someone else at the Business High Speed Internet office at Island Tel. She tell me that Watts Communications does the “first tier” technical support for Residential High Speed Internet. I explain to her my current frustrations. I offer to upgrade to the Business product if it will let me talk to a technician. She thinks this doesn’t make sense, as I would be paying more for exactly the same service. She offers to transfer me directly to “second tier” support. So I get to talk to Cindy. Cindy is very capable, obviously understands exactly what the problem is, makes sure she understands all of the details, and tells me that she will call me back in 20 minutes to 1/2 an hour. I no longer feel like a jerk. Cindy even says “this is obviously time-sensitive as you have some work to get done on that server.” This is good.