Loose ends (commentary)

Twice I have left blogs half-finished. One was the thing about stupid advertisements, and today's post about why Rogers frustrates me.

The other TV ad that I think is completely stupid shows two scientists performing a blind test on a subject for a specialty iced coffee for a company I don't intend on promoting here.

Once the subject chooses the advertised company's iced coffee, the scientists try to take it away from her, and she struggles to keep it from them. The premise is, of course, that she likes it so much that she will not give it back.

But why the hell would they want it back?!? Once you have served someone a drink, and they take a sip, why the hell would you want to take it away from them. Are they planning on giving the rest to the next test subject? Yeah, that's sanitary!


Then there's Rogers.

When I bought my new cell phone from them after losing my previous one, they tried selling me one that was on the "new GPRS network". This cell phone was supposed to have better reception (despite the fact that my old Panasonic TX210 already had excellent reception).

But the new Nokia 3595 was total crap! Shortly after buying it, I could be downtown, in an elevator in the middle of a building, the reception would be fine, but if I were at home (and my home is not in the boonies), even on the top floor, I would be lucky to get one or two bars of reception (out of about seven). My old Panasonic had reception in my basement!

More recently, Rogers Hi-speed Internet has changed their email system to a Yahoo service (exclamation mark omitted intentionally). There was absolutely no warning that they would do this. They make you have to change email account settings, only this did not initally work for me. After spending about half an hour trying to find the right settings, I was still unable to access my email, so I tried using the webmail, which required me to give Yahoo all sorts of my personal information.

I tried calling their customer disservice to get help, and the automated message said essentially, "we're not going to give you customer service for your email, because we've put help pages on our website, so go there." I hung up, went to the website, and all the help pages EXCEPT those for email were working. So I called them up again, and they gave me some 'help' and I thought I had it fixed, but it still wouldn't download all my email.

I later found that they have enabled spam protection (finally!), but they did it so that my options were
(a) enable bulk protection so that they mark junk email as spam and move it into a folder, thereby preventing the messages from being downloaded from the server, and getting an error every time you try to check your email (and not being able to check for false positives unless you also log onto the webmail), or
(b) disable bulk protection, meaning they don't mark the messages as bulk and you have to use your own spam protection.

IMO, they really fucked it up, and I gave them a mouthful on their feedback page.

- RG.