Pneumonochrome

Your talents are great
little pink pill, you help night
pass more pleasantly.

So, we all have bad experiences with services we use from time to time, and often we are perfectly justified in being angry about those bad experiences.  I’m not arguing with this.  However, it is always in one’s best interest to try not to put the person to whom you are complaining on the defensive before you’ve had a chance to discuss the problem.

I manage some computer labs, and occasionally things go wrong and patrons are justifiably and understandably upset about it.  This happened recently at my lab and the patron was given my home phone number.  He called and left a message that began with him introducing himself and telling me that he was “really pissed that” and then stated the problem he was having with the labs at the time.

Now, this problem was the fault of my staff.  They messed up.  This guy is understandably upset.  I don’t blame him.  But by taking that tone with me before I ever actually get to talk to him about things, he makes me very unexcited to talk to him when I actually catch him at the number he left for me.  What a difference it would have made if he’d said something more along the lines of: “I’m upset that this happened and would like to talk to you about it.”  Just a simple change in wording makes the message no less clear, but much less challenging.

Tip for anyone about to call someone for customer service concerns:  It’s in your best interest to be cordial to the people you talk to, at least until they have personally given you a reason not to be.

So, we ordered our copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows online and didn’t get the guaranteed same-day shipping. So, unlike the rest of what seems like the world, I won’t be reading it until probably Wednesday. I’m considering using some of my vacation time to make sure that I get a chance to read it on that day, because I’m beginning to feel just a little impatient, now that the time is actually here.

edit:  Amazingly enough, it actually did come on Saturday.  I finished it Tuesday morning, however, because we didn’t realize it was sitting in the package box at our mailbox post, and didn’t pick it up until later.

So we recently moved out of our little two-bedroom apartment where everything was crammed in everywhichway just so we could actually get it all there.  We moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the same complex, and actually have room for everything, we’re finally getting all settled in.  Well, we’ve been eating off of a card table for a while and now that we’re in the new space we decided to get a real kitchen table.  So Messy went to Ikea and got us a nice little wood table that came in a set with four chairs.  We put it together last night, and we both really love it.  We also got a real computer/desk chair (we’ve been using a plastic patio chair), where I’m sitting right now as I post this.  I really love the new chair, it has a tall back so I can lean back against it and have full back support, adjustable tension on the tilting mechanism, lever-adjustable height, a mesh back, and it swivels.  It’s quite comfortable, and I’m really loving it.  Right now I’m posting because I had a few minutes to wait while the oven heats up before I can throw breakfast in, but it’s heated up, and time for me to get breakfast going.

The address is the same, so it may not be extremely obvious, but the blog is now hosted on wordpress.com, rather than on my own server.  My ISP instituted some changes that made running my server impractical, so I decided it was time to move the blog off onto a different host.  WordPress.com is free, uses the blogging software that I really love, and (though this service isn’t free) allows me to point my old domain to the new page so you don’t have to find a new address.  Cool, eh?  I like having a managed hosting solution as well, I’m not constantly worried about maintaining the security of my server, now all I have to worry about in that regard is not giving out my login information to anyone, which I’m not in the habit of doing anyway.

I like the new look, as well, though probably not as much as the old one, but one of the drawbacks here is that I’m confined to a limited set of themes and no plugins.  That’s really just fine, in the end, though, because it helps me pare down the bulk that I’d accumulated along the way.