Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager

The good news is that some people who have too much time on their hands also seem to have a little talent.

Lost in the desert.

Very bizarre: I open my email program, and there's no new email for me. There's been only a couple of new emails since yesterday morning. And none of them are the ones I'd expect to receive even if my correspondents were all on vacation: daily news summary emails, wine lists, spam.

Hmm: the only email I've gotten since 3 a.m. Saturday has been addressed directly to my ISP account, and everything that's missing would have been addressed to my alumni forwarding service at Duke. Hmm.

So I've left the Duke IT people an on-line "problem sheet" and they've sent me an automated email that they'll get to it when they get to it.

If you've sent me something recently and I haven't responded --> I'm using this as my excuse.

Update:
Yes, the email link above works fine.

The Duke IT people got around to it. Well, what they actually got around to was telling me that they aren't responsible for the alumni forwarding service - the alumni association is. And to be helpful, they give me the snail mail address for the alumni association. Thanks. A lot.

I've been busy.

Yes, yes, I know. I haven't been writing much here of late. I plead overwork and silly deadlines at my horrid job, and many hours of watching World Cup matches and referreeing domestic feline disputes. I'll try to be better, but I make no promises.

Customer "service", AOL-style.

You know, not unlike the way that a bull services a cow.

Very funny article in the NY Times yesterday about someone's attempts to cancel his AOL account. Funny, that is, so long as it doesn't happen to you. It took a 21-minute phone call, 15 of which was waiting to talk to a live person. The best part was the conversation with the customer service person, also known as a "retention specialist", who wouldn't let the customer cancel even though the customer used the phrase "Cancel my account" (and close variations) thirty times in that five-minute conversation.

How do we know about this conversation? The customer recorded it. At the moment, the customer's website is down because of all the hits it's received, but YouTube has an NBC news story about the conversation, including a lot of the call.