Local Insanity

Zach didn’t call me back. WTF Helio?! I called them back, talked to Jerry (48627) and was told that they received the unit on March 17th!! Okay, now really WTF?! I sent it in December. As usual, they sent me an email asking if I’d like to fill out a survey afterwards. I did, and left this in the freeform comment section:

I’m almost at the point of deciding that Helio won’t voluntarily refund my money - I don’t want to pursue legal action, but I will if I don’t get a refund soon. I’ve been waiting for almost four months and been getting the runaround from customer service.

Oh, and to add insult to injury:

The internet is all about linking, but I think most people think of links in the wrong way — they think they are the same as URIs. A link is actually what it is in real life: link n. a relationship between two things or situations, esp. where one thing affects the other. Thus, what we’re bookmarking in our browsers, recording on del.icio.us, and sending to each other over IM are not links, but URIs. Since links are two-way, the URI we end up with is just one of the two endpoints of the link. This is usually what we want, but I wonder how useful it’d be if the recording mechanisms I mentioned above allowed you to work with the link as a whole. Would the extra context allow us to stop tagging our del.icio.us entries? Or would it merely complicate things? What if you could view your browsing history not as a time-sorted list, but as a directed graph? Might that be more interesting, if not more useful?

This isn’t all pie in the sky either. How do you think Google does its PageRank stuff? ¹ It’s useful for businesses, and it just might be useful for consumers too.

Speaking of context, maybe you’d like to know what prompted this line of thought. It all started, of course, with a link — this one was from someone² in #caboose, asking about a guy named Giles Bowkett, wondering why he wasn’t a #caboose member. It’s a pretty cool blog with some interesting ideas — and a few good links. One of which was to another blog by another developer who, like me, has an interest in Ruby and Haskell, among other things. So suddenly I’ve got two more RSS feeds in NewsFire, a bunch of backlog to read, and two more books in my wish list.

¹ You see, I’ve already lost some of the context. I think it was technoweenie, but I’m not sure. What if I could track the link from the IRC conversation where it originated (from my point of view) to its destination?

Helio has this policy they call the “30 Day Happiness Guarantee”, which is basically that if you’re not satisfied for whatever reason, you can cancel your service within the first 30 days, paying only the pro-rated service you’ve used. Sounded good, and the Drift had the potential to be a pretty good phone, so I tried it.

After about 11 days I decided that the service wasn’t for me, so I bid them a fond farewell — or so I thought. That was December 12th that I cancelled my account, and in a few days it’ll be 100 days that they were supposed to have sent me a refund. For reference, their official policy is that refunds should take a few weeks, not to exceed 59 days. Well, we’re way past 59 days here, and we’ve also reached the end of my patience.

After calling about five times they created an escalation for my problem and assigned a guy, Zach, to the case — this was about two weeks ago. Zach was friendly and seemed intelligent. He called me back within the 72 hours he said he would, and promised to keep me updated as to the status, and manner, of the refund. I haven’t heard from him since. I called back this morning to figure out what was going on only to be told that they were waiting on the finance department to do its thing and that Zach would call me back within 24-72 hours. Where have I heard that befo… oh yeah! It’s the same fucking thing they told me a few weeks ago!

So if you’re considering trying out a Helio, be sure you do your homework first — it’s a long commitment whether you keep the service or drop it. Does anyone know if there’s some sort of legal requirement for a company to give a refund within a particular timeframe?

Ze, it’s been a fun year. I found you a couple months in to my previous job and brought some necessary good humor to that time in my life. Since then you’ve provided many an inside joke, a song to hum, and a memory to laugh at as I walk down the street and realize I’m going the wrong way.

Now you leave as I’m getting into the swing of my new place, leaving it to us to educate those around us who glare when we talk about Giant Babies, Earth Sandwiches, and Sports Racers. I wish you well in whatever you choose to do, and if you ever feel like doing an encore, you know where to find me.

I’ve been meaning to write some about what’s going on recently, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. The guys who stole my laptop have been caught! I had to go in to the police station to identify my stuff and the suspects. Unfortunately I didn’t get a good enough look at the guy to id him in the lineup, so I didn’t mark any particular person as the one. I don’t know what’s going on with the case, as I haven’t heard from the inspector since then — and they still have my stuff.

Next up is Attendio, which is going pretty well — always a lot of work to do. I’ve started working on a replacement parser for the search stuff using Ragel, which I’ll blog more about later. There were some extra tickets for the Cake concert at Bimbo’s last weekend, so I got to go. It was pretty cool, and it was interesting to actually see Cake live — the lead singer doesn’t look quite like I expected, though I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting.

The apartment hunt has been sort of stalled, with Jen’s place still looking like the best bet. I’ll probably be deciding pretty soon.

I rented six movies the other day:

• The Departed: Great movie, keeps you on your toes
• The Science of Sleep: Makes you feel very dreamy
• A Scanner Darkly: Trippy, goes a long way without much plot
• Stranger than Fiction: Funny, yet somewhat serious
• Babel: Very serious, very heavy — interesting points made and good cinematography
• Lady in the Water: Takes a while to get to the point, kinda dull

It’s too bad the movies weren’t better, but oh well. I got my bike back up a few weeks ago, and have been using it to get around a little bit, though BART is still my primary mode of transportation.