Hilarity ensues.

McCain loves the hot girl-on-girl action, apparently.

Don’t hotlink images.

Class dismissed.


New comment on your post #158 "Magellan GPS - Poor Customer Service"
Author : Magellan (IP: 12.x.xx.xxx , irouter.thalesnavigation.com)
E-mail : magellan@lackofsupport.com
Comment:
Well, need we say more. I agree that we need improvement, but it won't happen. In fact, everyone is being outsourced to india, which is a fact. Go with a garmin. They are hardeer units to use and you may get beter service, but don't know for sure.


The good news is, they admit they have a problem. The bad news is, if my little insider “friend” is accurate, their management is too short-sighted (ie, placing savings from farming out customer support) to do what it takes to fix things.

You should NEVER have to jump through hoops to get warranty service on an item. If you register it online, you shouldn’t need to dig around for an old receipt, or trek over to CostCo and have them locate the transaction in question. I don’t need to bring in a sales receipt when I get my car serviced at the dealer. I can go to any dealer in the country, and if I’m within the warranty time/mileage, it gets fixed. Period.

Magellan’s not alone on this one. Apparently, Nikon makes you jump through hoops to get warranty service done on their cameras too. Fortunately, I did my homework on this one, and I’ve got it all neatly filed away if God forbid something happens to my camera gear.

(more after jump)

Lately, I decided to play around with it a little more. First, I tried to ensure the compass was calibrated (according to the manual, it should be done with every battery change). No dice – calibration sequence froze on the first step. Reset calibration? No dice. Advanced manual calibration? Still no luck. Ok, strike 1. Next up, I take a look at the weather stuff – the geek in me figures it’d be interesting to see what the air pressure does on a flight somewhere. Turns out, the unit isn’t logging temperature or pressure data either.

So, I e-mail Thales tech support via the web, figuring this would be a straightforward warranty service, as the unit’s got either a 1 or 2 year warranty. Takes ~2 working days to get a response. In one of the e-mails, their customer service rep indicates that I’ll need a receipt in order to get the unit repaired. Naturally, I push back – who gets a full-fledged purchase receipt with their Christmas gifts? Gift receipts often don’t even have a description of the item – just a barcode for store lookup.

CSR tells me to go ahead and send the unit in along with a written statement indicating that the unit was given as a gift new in 12/04. So, I sent it off, and got an e-mail 5 days later telling me that the unit will need to be replaced at a cost of $130 + S/H. Ths unit has not been subjected to abuse of any kind – it’s spent most of its life in a padded case on my desk at home, actually!), so this is unquestionably a manufacturing defect.

The unit costs ~$200 new. I know CostCo as a policy caps their markup at 15%, so they bought it from Thales for no less than $170. The manufacturer markup on consumer electronics is more than 25%, so they’re trying to make a profit on defective merchandise.

But, I figured there was one thing I could try. I went over to CostCo, and they were able to print out the transaction record from their systems that shows when the unit was bought, purchase price, method of payment, etc. They can even see that Marcie bought a box of Honey Nut Cheerios at the same time. So, thumbs up to CostCo for helping me out on this one. I called Magellan to get a fax number to send the receipt to – spent 30 minutes on hold.

Fortunately, the transaction record was sufficient, and I got a new unit shipped back a week later. Still the whole experience just rubbed me the wrong way. Requiring a receipt is a dumb policy, especially in the day and age of Photoshop. I could have taken an existing receipt from CostCo, scanned it in, and edited in the right information. What’s even more irritating is that this makes me feel like Thales / Magellan doesn’t stand behind their products. It’s pretty clear that this was a manufacturing defect in the unit, as the compass/weather system most likely never worked in the unit, based on how I can see the heading update in the new unit while standing still now. Not only am I pissed off and not going to be a repeat customer, but I’m not going to recommend Magellan GPS units to anyone.

Note to Magellan, if you ever see this – here’s how this transaction should have gone:
1) Customer Service should have responded within 1 business day of my original contact. First contact was a waste anyhow, as all they did was request information I’d already provided in the web form (and was even in the body of the e-mail they sent me!), so in reality, it took ~5 business days to get an RMA issued.
2) If I say it’s a gift, take my word for it. I shouldn’t need to bend over backwards to produce proof of warranty. I was lucky that this came from CostCo, and that they could look up the purchase information in-store
3) Phone service – 30 minute hold times are unacceptable, especially without providing feedback as to how long I’d be waiting.

To their credit, once Magellan accepted my receipt as proof of purchase, the replacement unit was on the way within 2 days.

In short, customers should not have to jump through hoops, before or after the sale.

Instead of getting repeat business (because face it, I’m a gadget guy – someday I’ll probably want to upgrade to a better GPS) from me, I’ll buy a unit from Garmin, TomTom, etc, and recommend others do the same.

In 2003, when the BBC switched off the encryption on its satellite feeds, allowing anyone who bought a receiver (including the French and Belgians) to watch free satellite TV, the studios went nuts, saying that they would lose licensing revenue from continental Europe.

Hollywood swore it would boycott the BBC: No movies for you!

The BBC stood fast — after all, anyone with a camera can be a filmmaker, but to be the BBC, you need 29,000 employees and 78 years of history — and when the studios’ fiscal year wrapped up, they came, hats in hand, to the BBC, asking if they couldn’t please have some of the money they were accustomed to for satellite licensing.

Meanwhile, over here in the good old USA, I have to resort to hacking my TiVo in order to copy movies off to DVD and edit out the commercials. Why? TiVo kowtowed to the entertainment industry, and stores all of the shows it records encrypted. Fortunately, said encryption was trivial to bypass, and thanks to my StarzHD subscription, I have a nice selection of near-DVD quality recordings.

Then, I bought the new Dave Matthews Band CD, “Stand Up”. It’s one of those non-”Red Book” compliant audio CDs that contains extra crap for copy protection. Again, trivial. I bypassed it by holding down the Shift key while insterting the CD into my computer. I’d like to think it’s the schlubs over at RCA/BMG that are the tools behind this, and not DMB, but a relatively taping-friendly band like DMB that’s popular enough they might as well have a printing press spitting out $100 bills in Dave’s basement ought to be able to “Stand Up” to their label.

It’s not like I’m seeding BitTorrents of the album – all I want to to make high-quality AAC files to feed to my iPod. Stop treating me like a criminal.

Fortunately, WordPress does have a pretty good system for moderating comments. If you put a link in the comment, it automatically goes to moderation. Then, if it has a banned word, IP address, etc., it gets automatically /dev/null’d.

It was the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. “Stand down,” came the order from embarrassed national security types.

Nice to know the folks in Washington are on the ball.

This just in…
A 24-year old amateur golfer from Lowville, NY was thought to be a serious threat to Tiger Woods’ dominance of golf after shooting an unbelievable 74-under par at a tournament at Pebble Beach. The golf world breathed a sigh of relief when they discoverd it was just Ben Johnson on his PlayStation with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004.

What gets me is the tortured logic the airlines use to justify some of their rules. Here’s a quote from the article:

The ticketing rules, adopted in the 1980′s, are primarily intended to prevent business travelers from buying cheaper leisure fares, and how often they are enforced is a matter of some debate. Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines, said the carrier could detect back-to-back or hidden-city ticketing more easily than it could someone’s buying a round-trip ticket to fly one way. “It’s almost impossible for us to know why someone didn’t use the second half of a ticket,” Mr. Wagner said.

Nevertheless, he defended the airline’s throwaway ticketing rule. “If somebody books a round-trip ticket and never intends to fly that second portion, that’s lost revenue for us,” he said.

Huh? You’ve already got my money for the trip. If you’re selling round-trip tickets and not making money on them, you’ve got deeper issues a good finance wizard should look into.

Here’s my dumb airfares story. Back in 2002, I was planning to go home for my birthday from Chicago to St. Louis. Normally, I’d drive this. A couple days before, I got word I needed to be at a plant trial on Monday morning in Lowville. So, I start looking for fares from St. Louis to Syracuse, returning to Chicago. Best I can do is around $900. Coincidentally, to get to Syracuse from St. Louis, you end up having to go through Chicago anyhow, so my ticket was for STL-ORD-SYR (Sunday) SYR-ORD (Tuesday). Then, I decide to see how cheap it would be to fly home, making my routing ORD-STL (Friday), STL-ORD-SYR (Sunday), SYR-ORD (Tuesday). The fare?

$600. Go figure. I save the company $300 by taking one extra flight. Too bad I didn’t get to pocket the savings…happy birthday to me!

In another related article, they quote a guy as saying “we had markets where we had 70 and 80 different fares filed for a given city pair.” Why? The low-cost carriers are the only ones making any decent money, and they usually only have 4 or 5 fares for any given flight.

Here’s my favorite bit:

As Warren E. Buffett has often pointed out, if one tabulates all of the airline industry’s finances since the day the Wright Brothers bounced into the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903, one will discover that, cumulatively, there has not been a single penny of profit.

Rutgers University has turned its attention to a new area of health concern: The Simpsons. A team of researchers analyzed 63 episodes of the hit cartoon show for health-related messages and was alarmed by the study’s findings. “Fats, sweets and alcohol, particularly beer, doughnuts and salty/fatty snacks, accounted for 52 percent of all foods eaten in this program,” said their report. The study indicated that 40 percent of The Simpsons’ health messages run counter to those promoted by health professionals. Fans argue the satirical show portrays the doughnut-devouring characters as balding, drunken losers, but lead researcher Carol Byrd-Bredbenner is not amused. “We should be able to weave some good health messages into The Simpsons … Perhaps we could have more pasta and less doughnuts.”

Your tuition dollars at work, kids. The day Homer Simpson eats a bowl of pasta willingly is the day the show jumps the shark.

Mmm…donuts…

Someone got here via searching for “picture of Ben Johnson who is a Canadian sprinter”. I come in as the number 2 result by virtue of saying:

Maybe you’re wondering to yourself, “Who is this Ben Johnson guy?” Well … I am not related to the notorious Canadian sprinter …

Maybe Google needs to figure how how to parse natural language queries. Or, the person searching should have used Google’s image search tool.