To India and back for a TV

This isn't really an IT-specific story, but it says so much about the way our global economy works (and doesn't work), I just had to share it. 

I've been looking at TVs for a while now, and late last night, I decided to pull the trigger and buy one.  I had seen the model I wanted in a local store, so I bought it online at Circuit City.   My customer experience on the web site was good, and home delivery was free for my purchase.  So far, so good.  I got an e-mail immediately following my purchase asking me to call a number and schedule delivery.  No problem so far, though it would have been nice to be able to schedule the delivery online.  I had no idea what I was about to go through, having had no problems with Circuit City deliveries in the past.

I called the 800 number early this morning and pressed 3 to schedule delivery of the TV.   The agent asked for my order number, my address, when I wanted delivery, etc.  At the end of the process, the agent told me they were having computer problems and asked me to call back in half an hour.  The accent suggested that I might have been talking to someone in India (and I was right -- see bottom of this post).

I called back later, and went through the whole process again before being asked to call back in an hour.

So I did, and went thought the whole process again before being asked to call back in another hour.

So I did.  You guessed it -- same song and dance.  This time I asked for a supervisor.  After waiting on hold for quite a while, the original agent came back (no supervisor), thanked me for my patience, and gave me the number for the home delivery center here in Livermore, California.  At this point, he explained that they had reached the limits of what they could do in their offshore location (yes, he actually used the word "offshore"!) Still, he told me someone would call me back in 10 minutes.  Four calls to India and no progress on delivery of a TV that was probably sitting in store a 10-minute bike ride from my house.

I called the California number he gave me while waiting for the callback, followed the instructions, and ended up on hold for several minutes.  Then a sudden busy signal, which must have been a weird fluke, because I called back and got someone else quickly.  While I was on hold with the Circuit City person in California (who was helpful and apologetic), my cell phone rang with a number I didn't recognize on the caller ID -- this was the callback I was promised in ten minutes. Sensing possible resolution, I took a risk and hung up while on hold with the California number and answered my cell phone. The caller ID indicated that this call originated from Newark, NJ.

The guy on the other end said: "Hello, I just got a call from someone and I didn't understand a word he said except your phone number.  What can I help you with?"   It's impossible to make this kind of thing up.  (If you're keeping track, I've been on the phone with people in India, Livermore, CA, and now Newark, NJ).  He found my order, but said that the record was locked and he couldn't change it until the lock expired.  As of now, he has my cell phone number and has promised he will call to give me an update when he can.  I'm waiting.

I've talked to people all over the world today, and I still don't have a delivery time for my TV.  These guys obviously don't understand how important televised ACC basketball is to me (glad someone in California does).

A little Googling while on hold unearthed a story about Circuit City's recent deal with TeleTech, a company that handles this sort of thing with facilities in India and the Phillipines.  TeleTech also recently announced a deal with BestBuy, though its unclear from the announcement whether or not that deal has an offshore component. 

I won't mark this up to offshore outsourcing specifically and maybe my experience is unusual, but something is definitely wrong with this particular picture.

InfoWorld moves to RSS 2.0

We upgraded our RSS feeds at InfoWorld to 2.0 overnight (thanks to the consistently incredible Chris Lin on InfoWorld's development team), for a couple of reasons:

1. It's better.  I don't want to go into the nuances of RSS 1.0 (such discussions put me to sleep), but it's way too verbose for one thing.  We stuck with RSS 1.0 for a while because we weren't really paying attention to all the political stuff in the beginning.  Our first feeds were 1.0 so we left them that way until we were compelled to change them (see #2 for why we were compelled).

2. An overall better experience for the users.  We've been quiet about it, but we've been paying attention to the useful comments from folks like Tim Bray.  As Tim noted, our advertising tended to show up more frequently than it should have.  This wasn't a sinister plot to overwhelm our users with ads, it was just one of the perils of our experiments with advertising in this medium.  We think the reason is that with pre-RSS 2.0 feeds, most newsreaders have to rely on the last-modified HTTP headers to determine whether or not content has changed because there is no unique identifier within each item that the client can parse.  When we republished our RSS 1.0 feeds at regular intervals to change the ad, the clients pulled all the news items in again since the last-modified time had changed on the file.  Because our Apache config is already somewhat complex, we didn't want to jump through hoops on the server side to resolve this issue, so we moved to RSS 2.0, where the guid should let the client figure out what is new (although we know the guid is optional, so this won't work in all cases).

A final note:  all of our old feeds had .rdf extensions and we didn't think it made sense anymore since we're using RSS 2.0, so we've redirected everyone to the new feeds with .xml extensions (mod_rewrite rocks once again).  Hopefully this won't create any breakage, but let me know if it does.  If you want to manually resubscribe to the new feeds, simply change .rdf to .xml in the URL to which you are subscribed. 

(On an unrelated note, I still haven't made my move from Radio to Movable Type.  Too busy.)

Who's on first

In my recent column about the inevitable "the system is down" phone call, I made a really dumb mistake that I have been making since childhood -- I was referring to Abbott and Costello's famous "Who's on First" bit and attributed it to Laurel and Hardy.  If you showed me photos of Abbott, Costello, Laurel, and/or Hardy, I could identify each one without pause.  One of the nice things about a weblog is that it gives you the opportunity to correct yourself -- thanks to the many of you who called me on my gaffe.