customer – Climb to the Stars

Google Groups Pain in the Neck [en]

[fr] Google Groups trouve qu'il n'est pas raisonnable de vouloir ajouter plus d'une dizaine de personnes à la fois à une newsletter nouvellement créée.

I’ve used Google Groups to set up a newsletter for Going Solo.

Here it is, with added proof (if needed) of my hopeless lack of design sense.

When I set up the group, I did what most normal newsletter creators would do: went through my contacts to invite those who might be interested in joining. I selected 30 or so people to start with.

My action triggered a flag for review, as I might be a potential spammer:

Your request to invite X new members has been flagged for review by our staff.

In order to protect our members from unsolicited email, Google manually reviews invite requests which meet various criteria. Your request will not be reviewed unless you provide us with more information in the form below. Reviews generally take 1 – 2 business days.

Please provide an explanation for where these new members come from and why they would want to be part of your group. Note that Google takes a very dim view of Spam. The people you invite must know you and be expecting your message. If they complain, you will be banned from our service and your group will be deleted.

Great.

Well, I wrote up an explanation, saying I was setting up this newsletter so that people could stay informed about Going Solo (registration is closing soon btw), and that I was going through my address book to let people know about it.

Anything wrong with that, in your opinion? I think not, and Google obviously didn’t think there was anything wrong either, because they let my invitations go through after a few hours.

BUT.

Now, each time I invite even one single person, my request is flagged.

What a pain! I’m going to be inviting people many times a day over the next week, as I dig out e-mail addresses. And obviously, just announcing the existence of the newsletter is not enough to get people to sign up — ever heard of lower the barrier to entry? If I’m creating this newsletter, it’s because I’m finally coming to my senses (!) and realising that not everybody follows Twitter, subscribes to blogs, hangs out on Facebook or upcoming, and that good ol’ e-mail still has some good days before it when it comes to getting information out to people.

I am really annoyed at Google Groups for making this so difficult. Shouldn’t there be a way for me to get the limit “lifted” for my group, by offering proof I’m not a nasty spammer, but a businesswoman (OMG!) who is very much aware that she will very quickly use up her social capital if she spams her network with irrelevant stuff? And therefore, that I actually need to send out invites to a few hundred people?

Also, look at this form:

Don’t you think that “e-mail addresses” field invites a reasonably large number of addresses?

I went through the help, and it wasn’t very encouraging, but I did learn a few useful things:

the “flagging limit” seems to be 10 invites at a time (talk about being unreasonably low for newsletters, bound to trigger TONS of false positives)
you can create a Google Groups account easily even with a non-Gmail address (I think I had grief with this last year when I was struggling with Google Groups not wanting to send e-mail to the client I was setting up the discussion list for)
messages from staff in the relevant threads seem to focus on filling in the fields, which I’ve been doing, of course
I’m not alone in thinking the language Google uses for the warning message is a bit over the top, particularly given the number of false positives their low trigger limit is going to create (and the fact there is no warning that such a limit exists when you fill in the huge field for e-mail addresses to invite)
I’m not alone.
There doesn’t seem to be an official Google Groups blog.

So, please. If you have friends working on Google Groups, please draw their attention to this post and issue. It’s a bloody pain in the neck.

Oh yeah — and please sign up for the newsletter. I’m going to have trouble inviting you 😉 — [email protected] also works.

Flying Home Tomorrow With Easyjet. Or Not? [en]

[fr] Vu la situation (brouillard) à Londres et l'impact que ça a sur les vols, je crains un peu de me retrouver coincée à Londres demain soir. Surtout qu'Easyjet est injoignable par téléphone entre 20h et 8h et que leur site web refuse de reconnaître l'adresse e-mail que j'ai utilisée pour réserver mon vol.

I’m supposed to fly home tomorrow from Gatwick. If you’ve been anywhere else than under a rock these last days, you’ll know that flights out of London have been severely disrupted.

This morning, I called Easyjet to see if there was any chance my flight would be delayed or cancelled. Their website didn’t yield much information besides the standard arrivals page, which told me that one flight to Geneva yesterday afternoon had been cancelled.

Anyway, the lady was very reassuring. She took my flight number, and told me that the flight yesterday had arrived on time, and that I should be fine.

Tonight, I checked the arrivals page again, and saw that both flights to Geneva this evening had been cancelled. Ouch!

This is where it gets bad. I tried to call Easyjet again, but all their lines are closed after 8pm. Great! Even the one you reach after spending 10 minutes in the menus, where you choose “if your flight has been cancelled, please press 2”. They just tell you to use the website if you want to cancel or change a flight. Well, that’s fine with me, except… For some reason, Easyjet doesn’t recognize the e-mail address I used to book the flight. They’ll send me a newsletter to the address, sure, but will say they’ve never heard of it when I try to use it to log into the website.

And the technical support line is £1/minute.

If I know there is a good chance of my flight being cancelled, I’d like to know about it so that I can make other plans. Change my flight, go back to Leeds, take the Ferry, whatever. What I’m worried about is that my flight is after 8pm. What if it’s cancelled, and I’m supposed to “contact my airline”?

All this is making me somewhat grumbly. I’d really like to get back home for Christmas.

Update: I sent an e-mail to Easyjet about the e-mail address issue. I’ll receive a response from them withing 20 working days. How’s that for an SLA on e-mail responses?

Dear Apple [en]

[fr] Lettre ouverte à Apple. Trois mois et demie depuis la panne de mon ibook et toujours pas de MacBook commandé depuis deux mois, ça commence à suffir.

Dear Apple,

I told you again more than six months ago how much I loved my ibook. Ever since my ibook moved in with me, I’ve become such an enthusiastic Apple user that my dad makes fun of me. I’ve turned my back on over a decade of faithful Windows use and even started recommending you to my friends. Over the last two years, a whole bunch of them have bought ibooks — or are now buying MacBooks.

A bit over a year ago the first cloud interrupted my honeymoon with my ibook. The motherboard died and I spent 6 weeks without it while it got repaired. I was glad I had given in and paid the “Apple Tax” (also known as “AppleCare”), because the motherboard died just about a year after I had bought my shiny new ibook.

Even though this had taken a long time, and there wasn’t any French speech recognition software for OSX, my ibook was pretty, and I still loved it, so I was not shy to let myself be photographed with it to illustrate interviews I gave.

Six months later I had to replace my power cable. But I still loved OSX and my ibook was still pretty, so my dad had many an occasion to continue making fun of me because I was loyal to you. 🙂

This year, though, all hell has broken loose. If I’ve told you the beginning of my story, Apple dear, it’s because I want you to know how enthusiastic a switcher I have been, and that I understand nobody’s perfect and can also forgive that.

In February my beloved ibook started freezing. OK, maybe the hard drive was a bit full. Sometime durin gthe month of March the frightening “failing motherboard” symptoms reappeared, so I gave my favourite Apple retailer my ibook for a transplant. A couple of weeks later, my ibook was back home, but it didn’t take long for things to go really really wrong.

At that point, my darling ibook had worked it’s way through at least 3 motherboards, and the hard drive was going belly-up too. The shop took it back in for repairs, and at the same time I tried to see if I could get an exchange.

Well, things haven’t gone too bad: my ibook was repaired (after you sent the repair shop a defective hard drive, if my memory serves me right), but then there was a problem with the wifi card connection. Around that time it seemed like you were going to accept to replace my broken ibook, even though you would only give me the bottom-line product instead of a customized equivalent to the setup I had.

When you surprised us with the MacBook, the shop agreed that if I ordered one, they would take back the new ibook I would have received and charge me the difference. Seemed like pretty good deal. On May 22nd, I finally ordered my shiny new MacBook through the shop.

Things already seemed to be moving slowly back then, but looking back, the worst was yet to come.

First, one of your representatives finally got in touch to organise the pick-up of my old ibook for the exchange. She insisted that they could only pick up my ibook at my home, during office hours. Excuse me? Apple, I know I’m a teacher (well, I was back then) and that teachers are at home all the time, but I do lead a busy life. Plus, the ibook was still at the shop (had been there for over 6 weeks), so I would have had to go to town during the shop opening hours, pick up my ibook, and then stay at home (?) one day for you to pick it up. Sorry, Apple, but do you really expect your customers to be at home during office hours? Somebody needs to review this exchange process.

Lucky for me, I have a good relationship with the store manager (given the number of hours we spent discussing my ibook problems, it was kind of inevitable). He managed to arrange for the pickup to take place at the shop. Then we lost a week (?) or so because for some reason, nobody came to pick up the ibook once everything had been arranged. Oh well.

Last week, I dropped into the store and was greeted with good news. The replacement MacBook for my ibook had arrived. Neat! But what about my “real” replacement, the customized MacBook we had ordered two months ago? Still nothing.

To this day, the last news I have is “not before next week”. I won’t hold my breath, though. “Not before” isn’t very encouraging.

So you see, Apple, I’ve done my job as an enthusiastic switcher and Apple evangelist amongst my friends, and even in the local press through photographs like this one:

I’ve been patient through my (many) trials, but this is just starting to be too much. I’ve been without my laptop since April 9th, the day it broke down. Today? July 26th. That’s three months and a half. That’s way too long. Not to mention my dad is really having fun poking at my Apple-love now.

So, dear Apple — I’m aware you’re having trouble delivering customized MacBooks or something, and I know you probably can’t do much in my particular case. But maybe — maybe — you could work a bit on making things a little less painful for faithful AppleCare’d customers?

Thanks for listening. Thanks for caring.

Yours still,

Stephanie