Jun 08 2012

Amazon’s outstanding customer service

For many months now, the portable music player that I’ve used while running (a SanDisk Sansa Clip+) has been cutting out. The screen gave out completely, and then last week it finally died. I decided to buy the updated SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip, and, of course, purchased it from Amazon.

Just like all of the other purchases that I make from Amazon, this one was slated to arrive in two days. Amazon typically ships via UPS, and this order was no different… except that I never received the item. UPS sent me an email update stating that the package had been left at my front door. Oddly, though, I didn’t hear the delivery person knock or anything. When I went to look for the package, it was nowhere to be found. My guess is that 1) the UPS agent delivered it to the wrong address, 2) the UPS agent marked it as “delivered,” but didn’t actually do so, or 3) the UPS agent did indeed deliver it, but one of my neighbours or someone else in the community stole it. In any case, it was not the fault of Amazon.

I called UPS, and the recommended that I contact Amazon, even though it wasn’t Amazon’s error. I contacted Amazon simply to see what my options were. Within moments, the Amazon customer service representative emailed me a confirmation of my new order, and said that he had put it in as an overnight shipment for the inconvenience. Really?! An inconvenience? It was no inconvenience at all, and I was just trying to see if there was anything that could be done. Not only did I get a replacement sent out at no charge, but they sent it via the fastest available shipping option so that I could have it more readily. Now that’s customer service!

Out of all the years that I’ve been shopping with Amazon, I have only had one other problem (which they remedied promptly as well). So, not only are problems infrequent, but when they do arise, Amazon’s outstanding customer service representatives readily rectify the situation. They consistently go above and beyond for their customers, and that is why I will continue to bring them my business whether or not they have the absolute lowest price available. Customer service greatly contributes to the overall shopping experience, and that is far more important than price alone.

Thank you, Amazon!

Cheers,
Zach

Jun 07 2012

Vote for Libera at the Great Exhibition 2012

Libera, the phenomenal boys choir with whom I work, is a contestant in the 2012 Great Exhibition, which celebrates the “Greats” of Great Britain. They are currently in the category of “Undiscovered – Britain Music / Entertainment.” Though that is their primary category, they even have a chance of being in the Top 10 overall (that would take less than 1000 more votes)! Please take the time to go to their section and vote:

http://www.thegreatexhibition2012.co.uk/greats/libera-boys-choir/

Registration is free, easy, and only takes a few moments. You can then say that you helped get an outstanding choir some well-deserved recognition throughout the UK.

Libera - Robert Prizeman directing

Thanks for the help!

Cheers,
Zach

Jun 06 2012

YUM sorcery

As a Linux Engineer, every now and again I stumble upon a nugget of glory when looking through the BASH history on one of the machines in the datacentre. Today was one such day. Two of the “Linux Developers” (and I use the term quite loosely) came into the lab and wondered over to my desk. I knew that they were there to ask me about installing packages from the RHEL 6.2 DVD after the initial installation, as I had an open ticket regarding the matter. After explaining to them the myriad differences between installing using rpm and installing via YUM, they were still having a bit of trouble getting some packages to install correctly. I hopped on one of the machines on which they were working, and found the following four entries in the history:


# yum install libc
# yum install libstdc
# yum install unix
# yum install internet

The first entry, I can understand. If one isn’t really familiar with a dependency list, seeing libc.so.6 or something similar may lead to trying to install libc instead of the appropriate package of glibc. The second entry I can also somewhat understand, but searching would have yielded the correct package name. The third entry is pretty awesome; installing an entire commercial Unix environment from within RHEL would be an impressive feat. 😉 The fourth entry is pure gold though. Syntactically, would that be a request to install networking functionality? Networking tools? The entire world wide web? Who knows, really.

I finally realised why the last command was entered. Apparently, none of the other commands worked and the developer noticed that the repository was not available. The reason that the repo was not available had nothing to do network error, but rather, that there were no repositories specified in /etc/yum.repos.d/.

I just thought that I would share some of the humour from a typical day’s work. 🙂

Cheers,
Zach