DocMurdock - Technology Tidbits

Normally when you ask me about OfficeMax I cannot possibly laud them enough, but today the experience was far from stellar, in fact it was pretty sad. Which did allow me to connect with some feelings around being of service, being heard, and feelings of abandonment.

To share, I walked into the store, right to the section I wanted to get to, to purchase an internal drive for a laptop. I was approached by a gal (and yes she'll remain nameless, but when her manager reads this, she will be spoken with, and should be).

The experience started off great, I found what I needed and was then offered an extended warranty plan which I declined as OfficeMax does have a nice return policy if something does not work and since I have installed more than 100 of these drives myself, the chance of anything going wrong on that side...slim to none.

It was after that refusal of the warranty that things went south. As she walked off to get my drive, she saw another customer, approached them and instead of saying "I'll be right back, let me finish with this gentleman", she began to get into a lengthy discussion with this other customer and walk them around the store showing them things as if I did not exist. I had to double check that I was there and in fact I was.
I finally had to grab another sales person to get the drive from the back of the store which he promptly did and it was waiting at the front for me when I arrived.

Prior to that the woman who'd first approached me came back and gave me a casual "oh, I'm sorry, if you want I can have someone go in the back and get your drive for you" as she has her arms filled with goods for this woman who is looking at her and shaking her head.

I laughed and said "Nope, already handled by another salesperson, but I'll be more than happy to write about this experience on the web"

a 5 minute trip turned into 20 minutes.

Now there is a lesson to this as when I was coming out of the parking lot there was some evidence of multiple speeders and an opportunity for an accident. I will thank the universe for the delay imposed by this person, but she did not appear to be in her body when she was with either me or the other customer so one can only presume that she'd had a rough evening, or some difficult news at home.

For the record this happened at store #427 in Scottsdale, and it's a store that I frequent as I love the service there. Today was a sad exception to another otherwise pristine set of experiences. I hope this assists in a remedy for such things. Other customers might not be as polite as me in their responses.

Blessings.

Michael

This is an example of a rank amateur sending out one of these things. However, do note that some people will actually click the link thinking they'll get a quick $99 in their account. They won't. Instead they'll end up with an infected computer and a world of problems. The highlighted sections are for your attention to be drawn to.

Things to note:

FROM: this is not from a legit paypal email server

TO: Never will paypal send you an email to Undisclosed anything. Always they will use your full name

Received: this is a domain in france

Received: the 4th received line indicates a user NAMED AMarseille with a specific address using a server in france (real braniac there)

XMAILER: Microsoft Outlook Express - Never used in a business the size of PayPal. What do they use? It's not this.

And then there's the clue of the link to click on. Not even a PayPal link. No graphics included in the email, PayPal always sends out an html based email with its graphics embedded (included) within the emails they send out.

Now this email could easily have been faked through this server, but that's not your concern. If you received something like this, the best thing to do is to forward it to spoof@paypal.com and let them know you received it. They will send it to their fraud division for investigation.

Have an amazing day.

Michael

Okay, so now the account stealing crooks are targeting your craigslist accounts with crap like you see below. Same drill as when you see one of those fake paypal emails: DELETE IT!!

Craigslist has been alerted.

Mike

So the question today is one that I feel needs answering on a number of
levels. Companies who operate within the US should hold themselves in
today's age of twitter substantially more accountable and responsive to the
needs of the public. This includes those who operate small businesses from
their home and share resources with clients and friends alike.

Stop outsourcing support overseas and start taking time to work WITH customers. Talk WITH them.
Don't talk DOWN to them. They pay your paychecks by purchasing your products.
Stop focusing so much on the new Ferrari and focus more on giving back and helping
others achieve the results you promise in your advertisements. If you can't then admit it
and get back to the drawing board. Some software changes lives. Filing is important.
Doing it digitally does things to help our planet as well.

Now, granted this past weekend was a holiday weekend. However, when support
calls are responded to on a holiday weekend that means someone is there
taking responsibility for things. Bravo. But, it does not mean that the
solution to your software product not functioning with a specific printer
model is for the client to bag their current printer (for any reason) and go
get a new one which is less capable than what your QA department decided to
test with.

Yes I am serious.

Let's take the company who has grabbed my attention antennae today:

http://www.neatco.com/

They make a scanner akin to the Paperport Vx scanner of many years ago
although Paperport really kicked their butt in the performance and
compatibility section these folks wish to make a play in the document filing
space. Their software allows people to scan things such as receipts and
such, but when using their scanner apparently they're able to glean much
more information from the receipts or papers, get OCR done on them and have
some magical filing system created from this. I am all for ridding the
planet of paper.

However, they also wish to play in the Macintosh space and that's where I
come in. They make a product called Neatworks for Mac. It's NOT a Macintosh
product. It has some potential, but generally when developers take a PC
product and make it a Mac product it's counter-intuitive and it's never
really made fully compatible with the BIBLE of UI books (now on the web)-
Apple Human Interface Guidelines

People never seem to read these things now and that's perplexing for me.
When you design a program to work on a computer system should you not at
least read the guidelines and allow all of the keystrokes to work? Allow the
right dialogs to pop when there's a problem, support printers that use
Preview (the application under OSX that scans) correctly within your
application?

One would think so, but they'd be wrong where Neatco is concerned.

Folks you have much to learn about program design, but you have MUCH MORE to
learn when it comes to support.
If I'd ever told a user to go and buy a new computer because they could not
run Pixar's software on it when I worked for Steve Jobs, he'd have had me
drawn and quartered and then he'd have gotten angry.

To tell a customer that their printer does not work, they need to downgrade
to a lousier one because you did not test or even try to support the
higher-end Office Jet printers from HP...You're HIGH. HP would be more than
happy to help you with this problem if someone in your organization would
pick up a phone call them and say "Hi, this is Neatworks Support, we'd like
to borrow an OfficeJet 6500 printer so we can make sure our software works
with it so we can sell our software to people who use your products and make
them happy".

That's what you do. You don't tell the customer that things don't work,
here's the instructions for configuring a lower end product and we're not
supporting the higher end printers. OUCH. When that happens you publicly get
smacked by someone like me who has been on the front lines of support and
would never stand for that. I'd be knocking on doors at development asking
why we don't support the higher end. I'd take my own paycheck go to Costco,
buy the printer for $150 take it to work and give it to development to make
sure it worked. Anything to help my company make a customer happy.

I am more than happy to rave about a product that has a team that at least
is trying, but to push back like this one did...not something I can sit
silently by and not speak up about.

So, here's what I did. I called my Apple Store, I told them the story and
they said: "Mr. Murdock, we'll help you out, bring the software back and
we'll give you a refund, we appreciate your business".

I returned, logged into Mail, went to the message from Nuance offering a
Paperport 12 offering at an unheard of $29.99 and I bought that! Thanks Nuance & Digital River
for a flawless transaction.

If Neatco wants to set things right, they can package up one of their lovely
little NeatReceipts for Mac Printer & Software packages and ship it to me at
my POBox. I'll then think about saying something nice about that product once I've
seen whether or not it actually does what's advertised. Because the
Neatworks for Mac product alone gets -

0 out of 5 DMs ( a DM is a DocMurdock Approved Rating. 5 is great, 0 is
"don't touch this with a 10 foot pole".

Thanks for taking time to read this long drawn out explanation, but some
things have to be addressed. Hopefully this saves a lot of Mac users a lot
of hassle.

Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock
7904 E Chaparral, Rd.,
Ste A110., PMB 148,
Scottsdale, AZ 85250-7273
ceo@docmurdock.com

This weekend I was asked if I was going to do something special for CyberMonday. I did some thinking and then came up with an idea.

Just to share with you this one, I just received. Am highlighting the issues inside of if so you can see where the fakeness is:

So all the info in yellow is the fake things. PayPal did not send this. They don't use Outlook Express to send emails out. They always use your proper information and they never ask you to click a link in an email to verify anything.

The link below in the email will drop all sorts of things on your computer when you click it, so never do that in these emails, simply forward them to spoof@paypal.com and then delete the original email.

Thanks,

Michael

Okay, here's two. The first is from BOFA (or supposedly from them), What the person sending it does not know is that I closed my BOFA account over 4 years ago and have never looked back at BOFA. So they send this email asking me to click a link. Not happening. What you can see in the header information of the email is that it's sent by some place in MEXICO it appears. OUCH.

This next one is from Sharebuilder. What's funny about this is that I have an account with them, but with a classified email address that they'll never figure out. The funny part about this message is that it's sent from OUTLOOK EXPRESS. I guess these guys could not afford a new netbook with Windows 7 yet!!!

The sad part about it is that someone else receiving this message may react quickly and click the link. Not a good thing. Just delete these messages when you see them, they are NOT from the place that they appear to have been sent from.

This email originates somewhere around Norway according to the tracking numbers in it. Best thing you can do is delete these. I dig into the header information in them just for kicks and to see what things people are doing.

Am not sure if a webinar would be helpful for some to cover this, but if so, let me know and we can put on one.
Remember to just delete these emails. Don't click on anything in them, and do not forward them to me, simply delete them.

Michael

Talking about posterous.

Sent from my iPhone