How to Blow Five Years of Good Customer Experience in One Easy Step

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About five years ago, I bought life insurance for the first time. We’d bought our house in the previous year and our son was about to be born, so it seemed like a prudent thing to do. I shopped around and got a good deal from Western Southern Life on a five-year term policy. For the next five years, they debited $19.50 a month from my checking account and, in case I died, a significant portion of our mortgage would be paid off; I thought we were both happy with this arrangement.

For reasons not related to my satisfaction with the company, I was planning on letting the policy expire. Then, earlier this week, I got a letter from Western Southern saying “The recent change in your Pre-Authorized Check payments will become effective with the next withdrawal from (my bank account).” Hmm, what’s this about? No “Would you like to renew?” note. No “Here are some policy options for you” call. Just “We’re changing your billing.” (Admittedly, we recently moved, and perhaps some mail was lost in the forwarding process? I don’t think that’s been happening, but how do I know for sure?)

But the stupid part is how much they changed: the monthly premium went up to $244.50. (More than twelve-and-a-half times more.) When I called to not-so-politely decline this coverage, I was told that, as I hadn’t called to change my policy, they just put me on one of their “standard rate” policies.

So, this company, which I’d had a good feeling about before, just became a swamp of leaches and con-artists in my mind, luring customers in with good deals and waiting for them not to notice the increased debits. How many people fall for this trick? For how long?

Why would a company that’s trying to build long-time relationships with customers do this? Don’t they see that this gives them a sleazy, fly-by-night reputation? Don’t they see that anyone they do this to will never work with them again?

A Great Caper Movie

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We just saw Inside Man and I’m pleased to say, it’s a great, entertaining, and exciting movie. I’m reminded how much I like Spike Lee‘s movies, from the early, funny ones (She’s Gotta Have It) and the overtly political ones (Do The Right Thing or Jungle Fever) to his later, harder-to-categorize ones (Malcom X or the truly terrific Summer of Sam). I haven’t seen everything of his, and some of what I have seen hasn’t been as good as I had hoped it would be, but there’s no question that he’s both a genius and an incredible movie-maker.

Inside Man is, first and foremost, a caper movie. And like the best caper movies, it combines suspense, great tradecraft, and a stylized look. On top of that, it captures the look and feel — and attitude — of New York (and real New Yorkers) in a way that only Spike Lee movies do; this movie was not filmed in Toronto.

Just go see it.

As He Did Think

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I finally read Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think for the first time this week. For something written in 1945, it’s amazing; for that matter, if it had been written in 1975, it would have been just as amazing for its uncanny predictive power. He outlines something very close to the modern digital era. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Of course, it’s off on many details, comically so in some cases. His discussion of “dry photography” and the process of distributing books in microfilm form remind me of the pneumatic tubes of Brazil. With transistors still two years out, I guess “thermionic tubes” were the right technology to talk about; that they’re now used only by die-hard audiofiles might surprise him.

Where Bush falls short about technology is in not predicting the pervasiveness and connectedness that we have. Yes, scientists and researchers use modern day “Memexes,” but so do people looking for people, movies, restaurants, travel, trivia, porn, and a million other topics. The information in our memexes is distributed among a wider array of machines, all connected, giving a much larger field of information available to everyone. We also use the internet for forms of communication — blogs might have been predictable but eBay probably wasn’t — that I don’t think Bush envisioned.

Bush was better on technology than social trends. He didn’t foresee shifts in gender roles; these days, scientists type for themselves and “a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches” are not transcribing the thoughts of great men. He predicted that books would be the unit of transfer, where the web “page” model is much finer grained. That almost all of us are still typing, rather than speaking for human- or machine-transcription, is an artifact of something else that I think is hard to predict: when we’ll adapt machines to our behavior and when we’ll adapt our behavior to what machines do easily.

But all that’s incidental to the astounding accomplishments of prediction in this essay. Search engines are trying to deliver on the potential of the Memex and he described information retrieval better than most people can today. The combination is digital photography and “radio” (or, as we think of it, “wireless”) is probably ahead of where he predicted and book digitization is almost there. His description of browsing and navigation make an interface of windows, scrollbars, and a pointing device (though not a “lever”) seem almost obvious.

(Props to The Atlantic for being true to the spirit of the essay by making it easily accessible.)

A first for me in the kitchen

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I was a vegetarian* for 16 years, which included the time when I learned to cook. So, I’ve never learned to cook meat and most of the meat I’ve cooked has been on a George Foreman grill. (It’s a supersized waffle iron on an angle, but the results are surprisingly good.)

Since I started eating meat again, though, I’ve loved short ribs, which I was introduced to at Charlie’s cafe. So tonight, we cooked the short ribs from Judy Rogers’s Zuni Cafe Cookbook. And, I have to say, I’m very pleased with how they came out: tender and savory.

The cookbook is different from most I’ve used. The prose sections are a lot of fun to read. As Deborah Madison says in her blurb, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book. The recipes are also more textual than algorithmic, if you will — prose descriptions of what to do, rather than more mechanical steps. And it seems to demand a little more from a cook; for example, you need to understand the adjectives she uses (“scant” appears a lot; how much do you cook something to brown it “gently?”). But at the same time, it’s actually a very easy recipe to execute and I felt confident that the dish would turn out well the whole time.

[* Actually, I was, as a friend describes, an ovo-lacto-pescatarian. That is, I still ate dairy, eggs, fish, and seafood. Within that, though, I was very strict.]

A cheese worth making a trip for

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When we were recently at the Ferry Building, we picked up some burrata mozzarella at the Cowgirl Creamery shop. Eating it is an amazing experience. It’s soft, it’s sweet, it’s salty. A few tomatoes — even if there are no good tomatoes this time of year — and a good bread, with a little bit of olive oil, and you can’t do better.

It’s worth going out of your way to try this out. I’ve heard that, in the bay area, the fabulous A-16 serves it, but that I can pick it up and take it home makes me happy.

At least the internet never turns into a pile of grey sludge on your doorstep

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This is rainy season in San Francisco. It’s also, unfortunately, the time of year when Pacific Bell SBC at&t delivers new yellow pages.

I just about stopped using the yellow pages nearly a decade ago, long before I started working at a search engine and long before there was good integration of local information with general searches. Certainly by the time I had always-on internet access at home, I gave up using a printed yellow pages except in the rarest of cases. If the local business has a website — almost always true for a restaurant, for example — and you can find it, the web is great. If it doesn’t, the presence of online yellow pages means you’ll at least get the basic contact information and, in some categories, third party reviews and discussion.

On the other hand, I have at least one friend who swears by the physical yellow pages these days. He loves how easy it is to find the big, credible players, because they buy display ads. And those big ads contain lots of information, often including open hours, manufacturers whose products the store carries, a map, and details that might give you a feel for the business. Exactly what you’d hope to find on a website.

Many of those display ads are placed by local businesses that don’t have a website. For example, one of our local hardware stores (Tuggey’s on 24th) has no website and the other (Cliff’s Variety on Castro) appears to have added a website only in the past few weeks. (Go, Cliff’s!)

So, when this year’s yellow pages turned to a pile of liquidy grey sludge after a couple of hours of waiting for us on the front steps, I wasn’t particularly disappointed. What surprises me is the people who would still be disappointed. And more surprising are the merchants who spend a significant amount of money to reach those people, but don’t even attempt to reach people like me.

Why is Audible.com so unpleasant to use?

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Given my long commute, I swear by audiobooks. I used to borrow books on tape from my library, but for a little more than year I’ve been a customer of Audible.com and download books. While no service is comprehensive, Audible does have a very good collection of books.

Audible’s site, however, has always been terrible to use. This makes no sense: they’re a web-only business, so they should have put some effort into their site. But the navigation was always difficult, downloading was awkward, and, most importantly, the site was always too slow. Fine, the downloads take a long time, but navigating the site should be quick and zippy. (Here’s a hint, folks: put the big downloads on a separate pipe from your home page.)

Audible recently changed their fee structure (a little more money, but credits roll over from month to month — probably a good thing) and, at the same time, redesigned the site. I’m not going to comment on the new green-on-green look, but the substance of the redesign has two good changes and a few bad ones.

Good change #1 is that downloading is much more straightforward and is now set up for downloading multiple files at a time. Good change #2 is that they no longer make use of broken JavaScript for every link, so that middle-button-click now opens pages in new tabs for me.

The bad part is that navigation seems even worse than before. Each page used to have genre and category links in a sidebar and a search box in the upper right; both are now gone, replaced by, respectively, a tips box that always seems to say “Great choice! You spent money with us!” (my paraphrasing) and a viewer for the current contents of your shopping care, which seems useless for those loyal subscribers who tend to pick one audiobook at a time, as their plan allows.

Unfortunately, the site, if anything, is slower than it was before. So slow that images time out all the time, breaking their fragile HTML layout in odd ways. So slow that one of every ten of my page views ends up with a “couldn’t contact server audible.com” message. So slow that I find myself needing to do other things (like write flames about Audible) while I try to navigate their site. Sigh.

It’s not as if there’s not good examples of online bookstores…

While I’m grumbling about Audible, why do they give the same filename to all the parts of the same book? For example, I just downloaded Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. It comes in three parts. Why are all three files, when I down load them to my Mac, named “OnBeautyUnabridgedPa_mp332.aa“? I assume the “Pa” is a vestigial reference to “part 2,” but why doesn’t that get precedence over “Unabridged” or “mp332” — both of which, from my perspective, are boilerplate.

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I think I like WordPress

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So, I used to write a blog by hand in HTML. Then I wrote some tools to generate it from XML. Then I went back to hand-written HTML. And that explains why I average about six posts a year.

Perhaps blogging software isn’t a bad idea at all…

My next task is to pull the old, handwritten posts into WordPress. Then maybe I’ll play with themes.

Sad news

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From Inside Scoop:

Sept. 1 will be a sad day for fans of chef Sachio Kojima of Kabuto A&S Sushi (5121 Geary Blvd., near 16th Avenue) in the Richmond District. He has sold the business to Jinsoo Kim and Eric Cho, who own Ariake Japanese Restaurant, just a block away at 5041 Geary Blvd. (at 14th Avenue). Until Aug. 31, Kojima will be training Kim’s and Cho’s chefs in his style.

Last year Kojima gave up his lease at his popular Japanese restaurant and moved it across the street to a smaller space. The idea was to downscale and operate the new place with his wife and children. Now Kojima plans to move about five hours north of San Francisco, near Mount Shasta. He said his wife, Ayako, who has cancer, needs to drink pure water, and that that area has it in abundance.

In the early 20th century, travelers came to the region to “take the waters” from the many springs. Kojima plans to open a small sushi bar there. Kim, one of Kabuto’s new owners, is an experienced sushi chef, having worked for seven years at Ebisu in the Sunset. He also has cooked French and Japanese cuisine for many years. He says the partners plan to close the restaurant for just a short time, reopening in early September and keeping Kojima’s style.

Dinner will be served nightly except Sunday; lunch might be added later. Currently, Kabuto is open for lunch and dinner Thursday through Tuesday.

(Originally not posted to my blog, but sent to friends and family via email.)

Legal Evangelicals and Values Secularists

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I found Noah Feldman’s suggestions for the relationship of church and state to be both unsatisfying and pernicious. The unsatisfying portion is that it is weakly argued and filled with wishful thinking in favor of his own opinion; he picks and chooses bits of history to support his case and argues that a “solution that will work must bind us to the past,” but there’s at least as much history which he cites that either disagrees with his narrative (early public schools that were teaching “sectarian Protestantism in disguise”) or which he says doesn’t approve of (19th century treatment of Catholics generally).

What’s pernicious for me is the strawmen he sets up of “values evangelicals” and “legal secularists.” Since I’m pretty sure Feldman would call me a legal secularist, I object more to that caricature than the other one. However, using his terminology, I think I’m values secularist; that is, I have strong moral values — that I’d describe as “progess,” “fairness,” and “compassion” — which I think should influence politics. (I suspect Antonin Scalia would consider himself, in Feldman’s terms, a legal evangelist.) Feldman leaves no place at the table for a atheist who wants to see moral arguments in politics or a religiously motivated person who wants to read the original meaning of the consitution. The reduction in his argument to these two sides lets him try to split the difference with his proposals, without addressing anything of substance.

Consider, in the context of the public debate over teaching evolution, this statement of Feldman’s:

Secularists who are confident in their views should expect to prevail on the basis of reason; evangelicals who wish to win the argument will discover that their arguments must extend beyond simple invocation of faith.

Like most secularists, I am confident that reason should have prevailed in curriculum disputes; it has not. I am sure there are many advocates of creationism who believe it is based on more than faith. Do Feldman’s proposals — encouraging the inclusion of explicit consideration of sincere religious belief but shutting off state funding of religious activities — really get us closer to any agreement here? I think not; I think they legitimize moving away from reason as a basis for argument and into a nasty, strict majoritarianism.

Sandra Day O’Connor is retiring; thus we will probably get an altered jurisprudence of the establishment clause. Feldman has a new book out which advocates for less state money but more political influence for religion; will the coincidence mean that he gets credit for what is at least half-likely to occur with a Bush appointment to the court?