My hosting company shut my service off - so this is what I wrote them...

My message after they told me they were shutting my service off

A few things:

0) Thank you for your medium urgency and completely monotonous and impersonal messages regarding my service suspension.  I felt loved, and almost shed a tear.

1) The server tends to suck - is often slow / bogged down. (I have complained and told it was fixed, yeah - no, still waiting for that to happen.. )

2) $5 late fee for web hosting? Who charges a late fee - really? What are you a bank?  Isn't disrupting my (awesome) service kicking my ass enough? Hell No! Lets take it off line and spank him with Abe Lincoln for it cuz we're big and scawee!

3) I have to wait 24 hours before someone sits his pimply ass in his char, flips through his JIRA tasks - and believing he's a seasoned hacker - sets my account to "active" on some https://obscure.corporate.webapp.of.activation.awesomex0rs:8080 ..

4) Here is a link of what I looked like when I went to my website and nothing was there: http://bit.ly/zgCqFn

I'm afraid you may have lost me as a customer because of all this. However, the real tragedy is you are probably sitting there behind the glow of your monitor daydreaming about your level 81 super-warcraft-dark-elf with her +3 megazord sword of schlong swinging doom and could give a rats fuzzy ass.

P.S.
Don't forget to tell your mom you love her when you go home tonight ..

Their Response

Hello

First, I would like to thank you for bring your account current.

Secondly, I am sorry to hear you feel this way. I can assure you, that I will personally see to it that your complaints will not go unnoticed or unheard!

On behalf of everybody here at xxxxxxxx, I do want to apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you,
Jon B.

My Follow Up

Thanks for treating me like a human, Jon! I hope you at least chuckled when you read my message.

I suppose if I had a regex that was parsing my email for cave-man-speak I could have caught the fact that in 2 days my service was going to go bye bye.

Jon, tell you what: push Alan out of his chair, Alt-F4 out of his WOW account and take over for him in responding to customers like they are actually human.

Or better yet - come lunch time, sneak over to his desk, unplug his ethernet cable when he least expects it - like when he's stuffing down taco bell .. Its funny what warcraft people do when they get disconnected when they are playing; True story, I'll tell you some day.

Jon, this is one of those unfortunate times when some how management thought it would be a good idea for NOC to be customer facing - this is a BAD idea .. it is ALWAYS a bad idea.

See, in the internet world, the NOC team are the ditch diggers, the bus-boys, the "honey-bucket" cleaners. They are critical for the survival of the company, but they get crapped on if something goes wrong. Sadly, in the world if I.T. something is ALWAYS wrong and they are constantly on red alert. Therefore, they are constantly interfacing with machines, machines are logic and efficiency. This has a side effect that when any human interaction does happen it is succinct, direct, without emotion, and without any outgoing filter. In this case, I blame whomever is Alan's manager for being completely irresponsible in letting a near automaton try to tell me to pay or be exterminated.

Having a NOC / I.T. person interface with humans, is the equivalent of dressing Spock (from the old star-trek just in case you didn't know) to try out for a lead role in a mexican soap opera.

Thank you.

Succinct, Simple, Software making sense

As I reflect back upon my last 3 years at a fortune 50 company performing various marketing oriented tasks, I realize how much time is spent on training people how to use newly introduced software.

If you consider the impact of time loss revenue for derailing your entire staff to learn a piece of software that may or may not become part of the daily regime,  you often have to think - aren't computers supposed to make things easier?

I mean honestly - lets take into consideration project management software.  We've used all sorts of software to accomplish this job of managing projects from JIRA to an excel spreadsheet - All for figuring out deadlines, generating reports, and generally tracking what in the hell it is that people are doing.

Yet year after year, corporations spend [[big money]] dedicating resources to managing projects.

Wait a second, lets 2 steps back here.. Lets think about the history of software in general.  We've gone from DOS prompts to fancy drag/drop gui interfaces which were designed to make our tasks easier while using a computer.  It used to be, I'd type in a command on a screen, and my computer would perform something.  Back then the interfaces were primarily text based, on limited real estate and very rarely had any sort of graphical interfaces.  Now, we have triple-head HD monitors at super high resolutions and commodity computers that were once considered super-computing.  As computers have progressed so has the complexity of software user interfaces.  Gone are the days where I could keep my hands on "home-row" and actually accomplish tasks.

And with that in mind lets talk about "industry standard" project management software.  Why is such a simple thing such as logging your tasks - such a painful endeavor?   Why not just make it accessible, easy and make sense?

If you look at these beautiful yet convoluted interfaces to software like JIRA, AtTASK, and more - we find that in order for us to simply enter a new task in we have to be on a specific screen, with specific rights - Oh, and make sure we click the right buttons to actually get to the right editing mode.  Suddenly we are trying to just update our project with comments, yet we've replied to the entire workforce.  Lost in a world of cumbersome processes we are.

Suddenly massively expensive project management software gets phased out and we all suddenly realize all we needed for our requirements was to use some sort of open source wiki project.

Why does this happen?  Because the software market in general has become so concerned with adding in features that sparkle and glitter that the simplicity of software has died.  For people concerned with project management, this means money is "lost" on training and convincing everybody on the team that it's the "right thing to do" ..   Intentions were good, the idea behind it is dead on yet - it doesn't make sense and after your license is up with these fine folks when you're asking why you didn't just use this wiki to begin with?

I'll take this one step further - Mobile is going to make software companies rethink how their software is used.  We're back again to the days of limited real estate, limited input options.  Suddenly its all about being succinct, and simple again.  Strangely enough - this makes sense.