Saturday morning 200+ software developers converged on the Decatur campus of DeVry University to learn more about current trends in software development along 8 different tracks and from over 25 different speakers.
I'm really glad I got to be a part of the team this year. We had some great prizes, some great speakers, and a fantastic set of attendees. I want to personally thank all the different event contributors. Avanade, Wildermuth Consulting, Microsoft, and Magenic all helped defray the costs of the event. ComponentArt, Red Gate Software, The Silverlight Tour, Wintellect, Windows IT Pro, Pearson Education, Wrox Press, ASPSoft, Code Magazine, CodeSmith tools, and Telerik all gave software, books and other sundry items to be won as door prizes.
Lunch, grilled hot dogs and burgers was cooked on site in the back courtyard and seemed to run very smoothly thanks in part to a dual ticketing system devised by Dan and Keith.
The sessions all seemed to be fantastic and I really want to thank all the speakers who took time out of their personal lives to prepare so much content. We'll start putting the content online as quickly as possible for the attendees to download.
Thanks so much to everyone who contributed and to everyone who came. This was a great event this year and next year, our Fifth Annual Atlanta Code Camp, will be even better!
At 4pm this afternoon, the Atlanta Code Camp planning committee met at DeVry University's Decatur campus to put the various marketing sheets and raffle tickets into attendee bags. Brendon, Dan, Keith, Steve, Jim, Rik, and I built an assembly line Ford himself would have been proud of. Glen Gordon even showed up and filmed part of the process for his Code Camp behind the scenes documentary. After two grueling hours of stuffing attendee bags with over a dozen different papers and magazines, the planning committee went over to the speaker dinner at Athens Pizza Atlanta. We probably had 35 to 40 people show up, including luminaries such as Shawn, Wally, and Josh. The food was plentiful and really good.
It's now past 10pm and I better get my presentation ready. I'm giving a talk on Workflow In SharePoint. This will be an overview of SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio workflows.
And boy, does he ever. Due to what appears to be an accounting mistake on one of our paychecks, Kim and I owe an astronomical amount to the Federal and State governments this year. Consider our emergency fund completely blown at this point. We're going to follow up with the payroll people to figure out why the amount of money withheld for taxes went down over 2007 when we actually were making more money. Looking at 2006 vs 2007, our net taxable income increased by 22% (yay!). However, the taxes withheld actually went down by 4%. The difference was so impactful that we actually owe a penalty to the IRS for under-withholding. Apparently there is a rule that if you make above a certain amount of money as a family AND you fail to withhold at least 90% of your year end tax bill, there is a extra penalty. Our penalty is all of about $50, but the concept is pretty obnoxious.
Next year we will be looking into ways to minimize our tax exposure. Along those lines, check out these details from No Credit Needed, who points out that a dual income family can put aside $3208.33 into retirement accounts each month. The 401(k) portion of this definitely helps reduce taxable income.
If you are from Linksys give me a call and we can talk, I just might put you on hold for 5 hours and resolve your issue in 2 days!
Where do you start with any customer support call? Well I used to think that Linksys was one of the best brands on the market, but I will look around before buying another one for a while. This all started when the $150 WCG200 combo wireless router and cable modem would not connect to the internet. I purchased the unit in January of 2007, but only started having the problem when I moved in June. I started out by blaming the cable company thinking that they were dropping my connection. So they sent a person out to the house and sure enough there was nothing wrong. The problem wasn't happening everyday so I let it go for a while, until one day it wouldn't reconnect for a long time. At that time I became upset and looked on the web only to find out that other people were having the same trouble. The problem appers to be because of a bad firmware version from Linksys that the cable company pushes down to the modem.
Check out the full problem here: http://forums.linksys.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=Cable&thread.id=11&view=by_date_ascending&page=3
A month or so ago I contact the online support person to see if they could quickly resolve my issue, but with no luck I gave up for the time being. Then the problem got worse and the device wouldn't connect for hours. So just the other day I started down the path of trying to call Linksys to fix the problem. They made me go through common troubleshooting that I had already done like resetting the modem (which obviously removes all of your custom setup so you have to do it again). Keep in mind this is causing major problems on the home front because my wife works at home. She can't get to the internet and since I'm the first line support while at work all day, I can't deal with the issue very well. Anyway this is how the conversation goes.
Start Conversation
6:15 PM - wait 15 minutes someone picks up and then hangs up on me. (not a great start if you ask me)
Call back (6:30 PM) - Talk with first line support who can't help, then talk with second line support who makes me do only the standard troubleshoot just to tell me the modem is not online. Exactly what I have been saying for the last hour.
7:30 PM - Get transferred to manager because the linksys forums suggest replacing my combo with two different devices or else you will continue to have the same problem. This is because there is a bad version of the firmware.
7:45 PM - Manager tells me he needs to look into the issue and he will call me back in 30 minutes.
10:15 PM- I call back, no manager, nobody called back at all and to top it off I get a front line person that says they are too busy and someone will call me back in 30 minutes.
At that point I am pissed because I have already fallen for the 30 minute routine. I argue with him for a minute and he tells me they have 1 or 3 shifts working right now and that is why it will be better in 30 minutes. He also tells me there are 300 front line support and 50 managers that are working at the moment all that have calls waiting for them. He tells me that there are 54 calls in front of me and that it might take some time.
So I give up.
But not for long.
10:25 PM - About 3 minutes and James answers. James was the best person I talked to. James fixed the date of purchase from November 2006 to the correct date of January 2007. He told me I would be on hold for 2 minutes and exactly at 2 minutes he came back and asked if it would be ok for another 2 minutes. Before the end of the second 2 minutes he had someone on the line. Amazing how James works.
10:41 PM - I finish explaining the problem again to the third person I was transferred from and I am now on hold once again. So the real issue is that I need to replace my modem with two different devices to get it to work, but no one can understand that.
10:50 PM - My final tech got the 2 device swap changed out for my original expensive device. But there is a catch, I have to call back tomorrow from 8AM- 5PM EST (maybe) and get customer service to replace the device.
I will let you know tomorrow at 8AM.
Next day
8:50 AM - So I call back and press the right buttons and it tells me they are not open yet. I also get informed that the operating times are from 9-6 and 8-5 with no timezone. Because I am good at waiting I call back and press 0 like 5 times until I get an operator. When I talk to the technician he tells me it is PST so they will be open in a few hours. Just so you know there are some wonderful people on the helpdesk - it is the process that sucks.
11:39 AM - I call back to customer service and talk to a nice person that tells me they can only replace the unit for the same device type, not what I was told last night and now I have to pay shipping to send my unit back. I am starting to question if this is really worth my time for this device. So to get the RMA processed I have to go online, which I can't because the modem is the problem, but she was kind enough to take my information and place me on hold to take it. (I guess they can read your minds at Linksys).
11:55 AM - She came back and told me that they can only replace the unit for the same unit, which makes sense, but that device doesn't work with my service provider based on bad Firmware from Linksys. So I push her enough for her to tell me they do follow policy and that she will respect my request to transfer me to a manager.
12:14 PM - She came back on and wanted to see if I wanted their help to call Best Buy and push this issue onto them.
12:16 PM - Finally I get a manager at customer service who doesn't listen to my problem but starts to tell me that there is nothing I can do and brushes off anything I say and continues to tell me that I need a senior level technican to approve my return. I push back as usual and she tells me a senior technical engineer will have to call me back in 2 days to verify the problem. So I tell her I did that last night and she tells me that those are not senior level technicians and that everything I did last night for 6 hours was not valid. Last night was ONLY for determining that the device is not working correctly. I could have told them that in 2 minutes! grrrrrr. Her name was Janet and her id is (13717) don't use her if you can help it. She was the worst person to deal with out of the entire group, but it is because she is standing by company policy. Which again I understand, but you could be nice doing it. She didn't even care to listen to my problem or understand the actual problem, she just stood behind the policies and told me that is the way it is.
12:28 PM - After I push back and explain that I did speak to people I ask her to go over my phone records. It appears they are going off old calls and my orginal case online where the person was not helpful at all. I can post that entire conversation later. She comes back after reviewing the case again and tells me that they might be able to process the request as stated by the senior technical engineer last night. So we wait. =)
12:40 PM - So somehow she finds the call logs from last night and the fact that a technical engineer did look at the problem. So she tells me that she will be able to do the unit model exchange that is approved. So one last time I check with her to make sure that it is for the two untis and she tells me the units it will be. I ask if I will have to pay shipping and of course she says that I will have to. To make sure I ask if it will be new or refurbished and of course it is refurbished and they are going to put a hold on my credit card for $150 bucks which is more than those units are at the store new. So we have to fill out an RMA form and she has to help because I can't go online. And you guessed it - we wait!
I actually had time to make up a song based on customer service hold song.
"Down in Georgia we call Linksys support,
we call Linksys support,
so angry waiting so long,
sooooooo weeeeeee
wait, we wait for Linksys,
we wait for Linksys,
we wait for Linksys,
With no end in sight,
we wait for Linksys
Boy I wish I had internet to mail the big cheese,
but we wait on hold and try not sneeze,
upset with the time it takes,
soooooooo weeeeeeee,
wait, we wait for Linksys,
we wait for Linksys,
we wait for Linksys,
With no end in sight,
we wait for Linksys"
1:03 PM - She was able to process the RMA request which has free shipping and will take 3-5 days to get here. I asked her if it can come quicker because I don't have internet and she said it will cost 15-25 dollars more to do that but she advises against that because 1. she already processed this RMA and would have to start over 2. she can't promise the time it will go out so I may not really get it quicker and 3. they took so long today that it is past the time today where they do those requests. We would have had to do this by 9AM PST, which I explained to her was what time they opened and took my first call today.
Wrap up
So in the end it worked out, kinda. I am without internet for 3-5 days because the modem has gotten worse for some reason. Probably the 300 restarts a day that they asked me to do. And now I have to pay 30 bucks to ship the old one back. I will get used units that we hope will work and they have 150 bucks on my credit card for now. All this stress and time for a unit that cost $150. $150 bucks is a lot but it is amazing that you start to think of options when you have so much crap to deal with from customer service reps. Remember they are being paid to lower costs and follow policies that don't always apply. In fact this is their full time job and you have other responsibilites. We actually need a company that charges a fee to handle this kind of problem with customer service for people.
Question: do you think that Mr. J. Michael Pocock - Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Linksys would have this problem? I seriously doubt it so why am I having this problem? I think a good challege would be to give top level executives a scripted problem and have them call to resolve the problem. That way they can see what it is like from our point of view. No offense Mr. Pocock, but your award winning support didn't win any awards for me. You might want to look into it and if your team says they will call you back, then they should.
I would also work on your URL's at Linksys - they aren't very easy to use. Might I recommend something like SharePoint 2007? I could even help you put it in place.
J. Michael Pocock - http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Content_C1&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1160628765198&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper
If you wonder if I really did talk to so many people, check this out. Please forgive me if I spell your name wrong. I did write down all of their ID's, but I'll spare those in this list.
- Maricel
- Pete
- Cheryl
- Janit (never called back after they told me they would in 30 minutes)
- James
- Airashee
- John
- Leon
- Kathy
- Janet
Totally off subject, I just got my coupon in the mail from Taco Bell for a free item for one of the resturants charging me 50 cents for water in the drive through. I will say Taco Bell customer support was 100 times better, but they don't have to set up a wireless router on Vista. (That is a poke at that recording on Linksys that says they are having trouble because of the number of Vista users). I think this shows the higher the value of the item you're having a problem with, the more effort you must put in.
Let me know good or bad if you have had a problem like this or if there is a website that maintains these complaints from a third party point of view.
If you are like me and have applications running in paths under Community Server you will need to update your web.config again when you upgrade from 2.x to 2007.
Here are the changes between a 2.0 and 2007 installation.
1. Remove the references to http modules removed.
Before:
<system.web>
<httpModules>
<remove name="CommunityServer" />
<remove name="CSProfile"/>
<remove name="CSRoleManager" />
</httpModules>
After:
<system.web>
<httpModules>
<remove name="CommunityServer" />
</httpModules>
2. Copy the following assemblies to the bin directory of all of your applications along with the assemblies for 2.x.
CommunityServer.ASPNet20MemberRole.dll
CommunityServer.Blogs.dll
CommunityServer.Components.dll
You are off and running again. No problem at all.
Windows IT Pro is putting on a SharePoint User Group event in Atlanta. This is NOT a free event, but I thought it might interest some people that participate in the regular SharePoint events.
Here are the details:
When: March 20, 2008
Where: Atlanta, GA
Who Should Attend: SharePoint Pros, IT Generalists, and IT Directors/Managers responsible for SharePoint deployments
Register http://www.windowsitpro.com/go/spusers
Event Location:
SharePoint Pro Live! Roadshow - Atlanta
Carter Presidential Center, Inc. 453 Freedom Pkwy Atlanta, GA 30307
March 20, 2008
Worldwide - $ 99.00