In January, the New York Times had a story on some of the data-mining that credit card companies are doing to “manage risk.” American Express was accused of, admitted to, then later denied using people that shop at particular merchants as the basis to cut someone’s credit down to size. Citibank is looking at mortgage data. CompuCredit got in trouble for slashing the credit of anyone that had the nerve to see a marriage counselor recently got a flat tire repaired. That latter part I guess is because if you’re too cheap to get the tire replaced, you must be hard up and a bad credit risk. I guess I’m lucky that last time I had a tire problem, it was beyond repair. Or I’m lucky not to be a CompuCredit customer.

I have no doubt that when it comes to a lot of these things do make you statistically more likely to be a problem in the aggregate. Marriage counseling, after all, is a step on the road to divorce sometimes. A part of me is sympathetic to the idea that lenders should be able to use whatever criteria they want because they should be free to lend however much they want to whomever they want. Free country and all that.

But that doesn’t do a thing to get me any less pissed off at this sort of thing.

It’s one thing to discriminate against people that have done something to suggest that they personally are a risk. Even there I have some problem with it insofar as it can misrepresent the service that they provide. When my ex-roommate Hubert got into a jam because his wife unwisely needed medical attention at a time when money was tight, despite their good record with their credit card companies they saw their interest rates skyrocket and credit lines dissipate because they were suddenly racking up a lot of expenses and weren’t able to pay everything off right away. Suggesting that you offer a certain amount of credit at a certain rate provided that you never actually need it and then pulling the rug out from under when they do is dishonest.

But some of the above is even worse because it largely involves things that you have absolutely no power over. Theoretically, Hubert and his wife could have had more money saved up, could have borrowed from friends and family, or something like that. But to have a house in a neighborhood where your neighbors are falling on tough times? Do we need to start asking for the credit ratings of our neighbors before we buy a house? Or cases where somebody is doing the prudent thing. Penalizing people for shopping at places where you can get things cheap? Should I really need to be concerned that the money I save by getting a tire repaired rather than replaced could come at the cost of my credit? Then the other thing is that we don’t even know what they’re looking. We have no way of knowing what we’re doing wrong. We don’t even know that we need to choose between going to a thrift store and keeping our credit lines. We’re expected to play by certain rules without being told what these rules are.

Worse yet, these things don’t just affect how much credit you have at any given time. They are materially important. From what I understand, if you have a creditor that closes your line, it hurts your credit rating. If you carry any sort of balance, your credit rating definitely gets hurt because you’re suddenly using more of your credit line than you were before your wings got clipped. A hurt credit rating means that you will pay more for the next house you buy than you otherwise would. It means that your car insurance rates might go up. There are places that run credit checks before they will hire you. There comes a point when it stops being about their right to define the terms of the money that they lend or how they evaluate your creditworthiness and it starts being about your right to not pay a price for the life choices you make that don’t adversely affect others.

I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. Or if there is one. Disclosure is important, but vague disclosures like “We can cut your rating for any reason or no reason at all” don’t cut it. Even vague proclamations like “We can cut your rating if we don’t like your haircut” don’t do it if you don’t have any idea of what sort of haircut they would prefer you have. And I still object to “You have our services until you need them.”

But I would start with disclosures of greater specificity than we currently have. And more notice that they’re going to do whatever it is that they’re going to do so that they can plan more ahead of time for what’s coming.

I have a chick-like appreciation for a sale and a good deal. I can’t bypass a 25c coke machine to save my life. I don’t care if it’s a crappy house-brand, it’s 25 cents! Who can pass that up? Even now, as I get all the free coke I want at work with most of my favorite brands in stock, I can’t help myself when it comes to a 25c Dr Cheapo or Mountain Moisture or whatever. It got pretty ridiculous when I used to go to thrift-shops and it’s one of the reasons I try to stay away from places like Woot or 1saleaday.com.

If you’ve ever wanted a Smartphone but didn’t want to shell out a few hundred dollars for one (or otherwise get involved in an odious contract or contract extension), there are a couple of phones that you might be interested in. Because of the cheap price, I’m mighty tempted to myself. Except for the fact that (a) I already have something better and (b) they have some hardware limitation that doesn’t suit my purpose. But they might suit yours!

Since I’m unlikely to get one of these myself, I hope to satiate my need to take advantage of a good deal by spreading the word.

The i-Mate JAMA 101 is a little like what I currently have and sells for $137. It has a 2.4″ screen, Windows Mobile 6, and Bluetooth support. Like most keypadless devices, It’s more Pocket PC than phone. It’s supposed to be pretty slick and hand-friendly, which is nice. i-Mate also has a solid brand-name and they make my Dream Device, which unfortunately costs a lot more than $122 and I can’t justify getting it. On the downside, Bluetooth support is limited to 1.2 rather than 2.x. For a lot of people this isn’t a problem, but for me it is. Older Bluetooth’s sometimes have difficulty transmitting non-phone audio over Bluetooth (though they’re perfectly fine when using a Bluetooth headset to make calls and whatnot). There’s also no Wi-Fi, which I don’t care about because any time I’ve ever tried to use Wi-Fi it blows the battery to smitherines. It also lacks 3G capability, which is a little problematic if you want to transmit data. But, if you want a starter smartphone, it’s a pretty good deal. Here is a more complete review and a video (with a cameo appearance by my current model):

If you don’t presently own a smartphone, the BenQ E72 will probably be a little more familiar and comfortable. Cost: $128. With the i-Mate is more Pocket PC, this is more phone-like. It’s got the keypad and feels and looks a lot like non-flip dumbphones. The downside is that since it’s shaped more like an ordinary phone the screen is only 2″, which is kind of small. But I’ve considered getting this because of my frustration with how irritating it is to use the phone functionality of my curent phone and this would be an improvement in that area. The processor is a bit slow, but unlike the JAMA it does have Bluetooth 2.0 capability. And it comes with some UI improvements over the standard WM interface. The processor is slow, though, and the battery life means that it needs to be charged on a nightly basis. On the upshot, it uses MiniUSB for charging so you can get extra chargers relatively inexpensively. BenQ doesn’t have the brandname that i-Mate does, but this model generally has moderate-to-good reviews. So much so that I haven’t completely counted out getting one for myself or a loved one. If you get it, though, let me know how it goes. Here is a more complete review.

Both of these phones share some common drawbacks. They’re somewhat slow if you’re wanting to multitask and use it heavily. They also have 2 Mega-Pixel cameras, which is quite adequate for a lot of uses but if you want to take nice pictures you’ll still need to lug a phone around (the same is true for my 3mp device). No 3G capability, which means that data will be slow if that’s your thing. But you really can’t beat the price and the phones are unlocked so you aren’t stuck with a specific carrier or contract. If I’d known of these devices and weren’t so risk-averse (my current phone was risk-free cause I get to play with a variant of it at work to test interoperability with our product), there’s a pretty good chance I would have gone with one or the other. Really, the only thing that prevents me from getting the first is that it has all of the drawbacks of my (more expensive) current device with fewer of the benefits and the only thing that prevents me from getting the latter is my general satisfaction with what I have and the sense that if I ever need a backup or another one, I’ll probably get another of the same. Unless I can afford The Dream Device, that is.

One of the lessons that keeps getting reinforced lately is “Don’t try to save money with discount products even with name brand stuff. Historically I’ve done well by buying the cheaper end of good brand names, but that’s been biting me in the rear lately. Maybe I’ll post more thoroughly on this. But right now I want to talk about the opposite, where the more I seem to spend for the better product, the worse the product seems to be.

Plantronics Bluetooth Headsets.

I bought my first Plantronics on a quick test at best Buy. I took my Pocket PC there, turned the Bluetooth search function on, and picked up the first product that responded, which was a Plantronics 330. I purchased it, brought it home with me, and it worked beautifully. The time came that I needed a new device. I accidentally dropped the 330 into a (thankfully unsoiled) toilet. Much to my surprise, the 330 never stopped working. The downshot, though, was that the volume was not as good. Since I listened to it frequently in a computer lab, this was not a minor thing. It worked, but it was time to get another one. I figured having two would mean that I could have one charging while listening to the other.

This time, knowing that I wouldn’t need to return the product because Plantronics headsets were perfectly compatible with my Pocket PC, I went to Newegg. This time I brought the next model up: Plantronics 340. The Pocket PC was running some old software, which did not have automatic Bluetooth detection. So having to direct the specific devices, I wanted to be able to tell them apart so I wouldn’t try to sync the wrong one.

The products are mostly identical in function. The first complaint is a superficial one, which is that the 340 doesn’t look as nice. Though both are made of plastic, the 340 has a gray color that makes it look more plasticky. Further, it has a slightly boxier shape that looks less sleek. Since I had the thing plastered to my head while working at Monmark/Soyokaze, I wanted it to look as ungoofy as possible. The upshot was that the sound was better. Most, though not all, of that can be attributed to the waterlog of the 330. The second downside, after appearance, was that the 340 was less comfortable on the ear. After about four hours or so my ear would start hurting a bit. That never happened with the 330. The third strike is that while I could listen to the 330 while it was charging, the 340 would drop the connection the second I plugged in it. Since in the old OS it is a bit of a pain to re-sync after a dropped connection (it requires a restart of the device as often as not), this is no small affair.

So having lost a couple of my headsets in the move and having purchased a Smartphone, I figured that it was time for me to get a better headset. This was originally the case because I thought that volume was going to be a problem, but even after I resolved that I thought that it might be better to have a headset that was specifically designed for both telephone and media capability. So I plunked down more money and bought a Plantronics Voyager 855.

It is the worst yet.

Since I started with superficiality before, I’ll do so again. Though this one has a neater design on the photo compared to the other two, it looks even goofier than the other two when put on my head. It’s the Will Smith’s Ears of bluetooth devices, extending outward and drawing attention to it. It also has a sliding panel that it says is for better microphone capability, though (a) the mic is fine on the cheaper devices and (b) it doesn’t fasten or anything meaning that it slides out half the time that I touch it. It also has a rubber ear thingie that’s supposed to make it more comfortable and reduce outside noise, but the result is that it seems to apply suction to my ear. Thirdly, it has all sorts of buttons that make using it rather complicated. I thought this would be a feature (as did they, I’m sure), but it’s turned out to be a bug. Fourthly, the device used to switch ears is detachable which means that getting it getting lost is an inevitability (though to their credit, they gave me two). Fifthly, though it comes with a neat thing “second ear” to provide stereo sound, it replaces the ear-hinge and it can’t be changed without taking the earpiece out (I’m not sure how I thought it would work, but I figured that I’d be able to managed it). Sixthly, nearly every Plantronics device (not just that I own, but in the lab at work) has uses the same power cord for charging… except this one… making it incompatible with the umpteen chargers I have. Seventhly, and this is almost as much my fault as Plantronics, the volume-setting device, the volume buttons don’t work. That last one is at least partially my fault because of how I accidentally rigged up the phone, but the 330 and 340 don’t seem to have that problem.

The 855 costs roughly twice as much as the 330. I wish I had bought two of the latter.

Web recently wrote a piece outlining his recent customer service experiences with various companies in the context of whether their service is outsourced to a foreign country. I figure I’ll do the same. You can see it below the fold, if you wish, but I’ll put the summary of my thoughts on the matter up top.

It is, generally speaking, my experience that Indian call center employees (with one major exception) are largely more pleasant and eager to help than American call center employees are. This is contrary to Web’s experience. Even with the below-mentioned problems with Western Digital, it was never that they didn’t care or weren’t interested in helping, it was that they genuinely couldn’t. This makes some sense to me since a call center job in India is probably a good one that you want to keep but call centers in the US are often somewhere between a professional job and a fast food job in pay and esteem. Even within the US it makes a difference. Call centers in Deseret are sometimes destination careers, but call centers in Colosse are for those that can’t find anything better.

I think that the Indian call centers are substantively hobbled by two things, though. First is language. They are difficult to understand and they have difficulty understanding us. Their language is very different from our own which makes accents unusually thick. This is very problematic when it comes to situations where you’re reading off serial numbers and the like or when you’re trying to explain a rather complex problem. This is one of the main reasons why Indian tech support will almost always be inferior to stateside.

The other thing touches on one of the big reasons I think that Web (and to a lesser extent I) have had so much more success getting our issues resolved with Americans at the other end than Indians. When a company outsources to India, they’re doing more than just saving a buck. They are purposefully declaring that customer service is not a priority for them. They have decided that if they’re going to cut corners, that’s where they are going to cut it. I suspect it is often the case that poor customer service and offshore call centers so frequently overlap not because offshore call centers cause poor customer service but because companies that are not interested in good customer service are most likely to offshore. I don’t know whether the ThinkPad person I talked to was in Atlanta or Africa, but IBM and Lenovo have historically placed such an emphasis on customer support with ThinkPads that even if it’s outsourced to Africa I am unusually confident that I will get good customer service. Linksys, it would seem, has different priorities. As does Dell, whether they outsource or not.

So what does “poor customer service” mean beyond the accent of the person that you’re talking to? Well, for one thing it means that they’re more interested in call-handling than issue-resolving. They want to take the easy calls and then let people with more difficult problems figure things out for themselves. It’s not just that the employees are Indian, but that they know little about the product itself and their job primarily consists of reading off a guide. Companies that care will make the guide very good. Companies that don’t, won’t. When I was working for a satellite TV company, our guide was so good that it wouldn’t have hurt so badly if they outsourced (which they apparently now do). On the other hand, if LinkSys didn’t care to put in the information about how I could bypass installing their software, it’s unlikely that the American call-handler would have been able to help me, either.

Some of this brings me back to something I believe when I hear people complain about poor customer service, offshored customer service, or both: Frequently, you get what you pay for. I have little sympathy for those people that decide to save money by buying a Dell and then are upset when their customer support call is answered by someone in India. That’s not to say that I don’t sometimes buy from companies with bad customer service (even when I have a choice, which sometimes I really don’t) and that’s not to say that I don’t get frustrated when it happens. I do, however, avoid getting indignant (except when I don’t have a choice but to deal with this particular company). One question that a lot of people are reticent to answer is “How much is good customer service worth to you?” If it’s not worth paying extra for, it’s not something that you should get too irate about.

My recent experiences below: (more…)

I was all excited when I got a newsletter thing from Amazon that said:

BIG BOOT SALE!

Cause I have big feet and need big boots and it’s so rare that big boots are on sale.

You’ve probably figured out the error in my thinking. They meant that the boot sale was big, not that it was a sale for big boots. That reminded me that the English language really needs to become more mathematical. In math, you can group things together easily so that you know what’s referring to what. So for instance, you could make it:

(BIG BOOT) SALE!

or

BIG (BOOT SALE)!

This is actually one case where Pointless Quotation Marks, which usually drive me nuts, could be helpful. That way it could be:

“BIG BOOT” SALE!

or

BIG “BOOT SALE”!

That way I won’t get my hopes up about getting a good deal on something to take care of my large feet.

Newsome is blogging again! Actually, as near as I can tell he started blogging almost immediately after I put his blog in the “Dead Blogs” category. Interesting, in November he touched on an issue familiar to HC readers while trying to procure a Blackberry Storm*:

Much to my surprise, my quoted price was not $200, as widely advertised, but $500. I called customer service and was told that my contract was too recent to permit an upgrade and that I would, in fact, have to pay $500 if I wanted a Storm. I didn’t like this, but contracts are contracts, so I asked how much it would cost to terminate my contract early (by about a year and a half). $125 was the answer. So, I asked, “you’ll sell this phone to a stranger for $200, but an existing customer has to pay $500?” I was told that was the case. Again, not good news, but I understand the math so far. I had one more question: “But if I wanted to, I could pay $125 to terminate my contract today, come back tomorrow and pay $200, thereby achieving an actual price of $325?” I could tell the phone rep was uncomfortable, but ultimately she agreed that I could do that. “But you won’t sell me the phone for $325 without having to go through all of that?” She said she couldn’t. The cost was understandable, even if a little frustrating, but the unnecessary hoops were more than I could handle. So a wonderful thing happened.

I canceled my Verizon account, drove to the local ATT store, bought a 16G 3G iPhone and had my number ported over. At the end of the day, I have a much better phone at a lower cost. $125 is a lot of money, but amortized over the remaining 18 or so months of my Verizon contract, I’m more than happy to pay an extra $7 a month for the iPhone experience.

This is a much better example than the $60 I was talking about saving with AT&T and the Fuze! While I can’t… ahem… endorse getting an iPhone… I’m glad that Newsome is happy with his and I think Verizon got their just deserts.

On the other hand, AT&T apparently has a trick up their sleeve and now I can even better see why they are so excited about selling the phone as part of a plan! If you read the fine print, the offer is good only if you make every payment in full and on time. In other words, if you’re a day late or a dollar short, you’ll get billed for the balance of your savings on the phone (minus the initial rebate). In this case, $310. Further, I wouldn’t be at all surprised that if you were late or short and they pulled the trigger on this that you wouldn’t be let out of the two year commitment. If it’s legal for them to hold you up to your end of the bargain even when they’ve abrogated theirs, I have no doubt in my mind that’s exactly what they would do. My faith in AT&T (and its competitors) is such that my heart skipped a beat when I logged on to the account manager and discovered that they knew exactly what kind of phone I had even though I never told them. I mean, I guess abstractly I knew that they could figure such things out, but it’s still a bit disconcerting. Fortunately, there’s not much they can actually do with this information other than try to sell me unlimited data transfer.

A great reminder of why I purchased my phone independent of my provider. They’re not the boss of me, no.

* – Not to be confused with my employer’s product, the Stormphone.

Will makes an interesting point on the economics of buying a new cell phone, but there’s also the ever-popular question of joining up in the first place.

A few months back, I finally got a cell phone. It wasn’t the first cell phone I’d had (my first involved an incredibly bad foray into certain “all-in-one” devicedness by my former boss and Nextel’s perfect example of how service should NOT be conducted), but it was the first one I’d arranged for my own.

I’m okay with the idea of a contract term. I got my phone free, and it does what I want it to do. However, I did find my own brand of silliness.

Southern Tech University offers an employee discount on cell phones, to encourage worker connectedness. To do this initially, you need to sign up through a special “SoTech Employees” website rather than the standard one. First problem: the phone I wanted isn’t available through that web site.

So I call up… get all the info… get it processed, get the phone, pay a tidbit more for the “signup” which they promise will be refunded once the employee discount goes through. And it does go through, and I get my discount. Props to them there.

Second up… I test out how many minutes I need. The difference between “No Texting” and “500 texts/month” is $10. The difference between “500 texts/month” and “unlimited texts” is… $10. I opt for the “unlimited texts” setup. Too many friends like to text. I start out with the initial 600 minutes/month plan, to see how much I use. Through judicious measurement (and honest self-limiting) I come in 20 minutes under 600. Given that I’m using this thing at work, I opt to bump up to the 900 minute plan, to have plenty of overhead.

This is where all falls apart. I was specifically told by the monkey working their sales department that, as I requested, I was being upgraded to the 900-minute version of my calling plan. To wit: Free long distance, Free call ID, Free calls to all users in the same phone network, etc.

What they put on my account, meanwhile, was the “business” version of the plan. Costs precisely the same amount, but mysteriously omits the “Free calls to all users in the same network” portion.

So, the next month, I discovered that I had gone about 90 minutes over my new 900-minute plan. And the month after, I came in a mere 15 minutes under. The first month had involved a lot of emergency calls, so I figured the overage was legit. It was only after the second month that I went back into my bills, call by call, and realized that all the calls I had been making to a certain very beautiful woman were not being properly billed as “in-network.”.

Two very clear and informative discussions later, their customer service made a serious concession: twice as much recompense for what I was overbilled, 2000 “rollover” minutes for me to have to compensate for the lost minutes, and immediate fixing of their sales agent’s mistake to get me into the proper plan.

I haven’t had a problem since, either.

The company in question? AT&T.

I have lost eleven straight auctions on eBay. That’s over twice as many as I’ve lost in my life, though as an irregular eBay user that’s not too remarkable. What is remarkable is that of those eleven auctions, in nine I was the runner-up. I bid $75.01 and the item went for $77.51. It doesn’t matter if I bid the item up from $25 or $69. The item had gone for as low as $54 dollars before, though I have to wonder if I had bid on that one if it, too, would have sold for $77.51. I can’t help but think that my one bid is putting me outside my own price range. I would, in all honestly, gladly pay $77.51, though I suspect that if I bid that much, it would sell for $80.01 (there’s no way of knowing what their cap was). And on and on.

There isn’t a whole lot of backstory here. Basically, there is an item I want and there are a whopping three outlets selling said item. Auctions have been streaming for three days now with this particular product. I want the product though I don’t need it. Shipping is $24.99 and I refuse to pay more than $100. Really, it’s worth more than that. Two weeks ago, if asked, I would have probably expressed a willingness to pay $150 or maybe even $200. Hypothetically, anyway. But as I watch one after another go for a little over or a little under $100, I don’t want to pay any more than I have to. The curse of capitalism is the fear of getting ripped off. Pay no more than you have to.

That got me wondering… is there some guy out there collecting as many of this thing as he can, wondering why it is that this guy – every time! – keeps pushing units up to $77.51 when he could otherwise get it for less. The answer is no. All eleven were, it turned out, purchased by different people. Each outbidding me by the cost of a hamburger. Sometimes at the last second sometimes a couple minutes before the last second.

I kept wondering each time if this was the unit that was going to be different. In one case, it was the first order of the morning. Would that one go for more or for less? It could go for more because it’s the first (of the day, at any rate). Or it could go for less because they figure “Why bid on this one when that next one down is so much cheaper?” Then I’ll run across two items that expire minutes from one another. Should I bid on the first because there might be a last minute rush on the second by everyone that didn’t win on the first? Or should I bid on the second because there isn’t enough time for everybody to scramble? How does that equation change if it’s half an hour between them? If they’re the exact same time, should I go for the one that’s priced a bit higher because the last minute rush is going to gravitate towards the lower one… or is the lower one better because there’s less a chance that whoever bid on that one has a max bid higher than my bid?

Turns out that all of this gaming does not matter in this ruthless market.

$77.51.

Every time.

AT&T apparently really does not want to sell you a cell phone without a contact. (See this image if you want to try to figure out what I’m talking about)

The price with a 24-month contract for an HTC Fuze Black phone is $175 after rebates. If you want to buy the phone for your existing account, it’s $510. Activation fee is $36. Early termination fee of a contract is $175. The contact that you have to get with the phone is $60.

So if you go out, purchase a cell phone with a new contract ($175), activate it (175+36=$211), pay for the first month ($212+60=271), then cancel service ($271+175=$447), you still come out ahead of where you would if you just bought the phone without a contact extension. Of course, there are some sales taxes involved, but not $60 I don’t think. Plus you’d get an extra 900 minutes and an extra phone for a month!

I figured that AT&T was just jacking up the retail price to pressure you into signing a contract, but their $510 is actually less than the cost of the same phone on Newegg (except the Newegg phone you can take to another cell phone company). The main reason for that likely being that Newegg’s is unlocked but with AT&Ts you can only use it with AT&T unless you unlock it yourself. Even so, though, it suggests that the AT&T full no-contract price is not wholly unreasonable but that they’re willing to cut it that much if you’re some combination of (a) willing to stick around for two years, (b) don’t know how to unlock a phone, and/or (c) are unable to perform the arithmetic

I’m perfectly happy with my Smartphone, but since B and C don’t apply to me, I know what I’m going to do when I want a Fuze (unless I go with eBay again).

I got my first advance drive from Western Digital… and it is not in approved packaging! It’s not even in the same ballpark as what they were requiring. For one thing, it uses plastic instead of foam.

Don’t get me wrong. It was pretty safely sealed. I have no doubt it arrived completely undamaged. And I do have the ability to send in my drive using this packaging. I’m not worried that they will reject my drive. So no real harm done.

Except that I’m kind of pissed off. I was actually sort of looking forward to seeing what the hell they had in mind. But even they can’t live up to standards that were only one step away from requiring a talisman from the Archangel Uriel. And that if this hadn’t been their specific packaging, and I had sent it in using this packaging, they reserved the right to void my warranty for it.