If you tell it to, Friendster helpfully reminds you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up. This is handy for calling them, writing them, or leaving them happy birthday comments on their wall Friendster profile. Look at the email itself: What’s missing? The birthday itself. Instead of building trust with its members by providing them …
Category Archives: broken
Welcome, Wachovia. Seriously.
A while back, Wachovia bought World Savings, a bank I use for CDs. I received a few letters in the mail describing the process and telling me what I had to do. The first thing I had to do was register for an account with Wachovia’s online banking. I do. Mistake #1: Only three of …
PC Financial’s MasterCard runaround
I had a bit of an odd experience with PC Financial this year. Frustrated by this, I wrote them to describe my experience.
Dear Mr. Kalen,
I have been a customer of President’s Choice Financial and President’s Choice Financial MasterCard for many years. In fact, I believe I was one of the earliest customers of President’s Choice Financial MasterCard.
I was highly satisfied with my PC MasterCard—until this year.
Avis, please try harder
This July, I rented a car from Avis in San Diego. It was a pretty poor experience. So, I wrote them a complaint letter. Besides writing the letter itself, I thought I’d have fun. In the spirit of Yours is a Very Bad Hotel, I proudly present “How NOT to rent a car”: Here’s the …
Learn how to spell résumé
Attention people of the world. Please learn how to spell résumé. It has two accent aigus — one on each “e.” The HTML for this is résumé. If your computer/email program cannot handle accented characters reliably, “resume” is acceptable. However, “résume” and “resumé” are never correct. Thank you.
State Farm Agent David Stewart sent me junk mail
Update: after this posting appeared, Mr. Stewart’s office contacted me. They tell me they have now removed my address from their mailing list. …but he is a spammer. We keep getting cards in the mail from him, despite repeated requests to be removed from his mailing list.
Your tax dollars at work
Sen. Barbara Boxer is having email problems:
Screens around town: Yahoo, Fuzz
[title blatently stolen from 37signals.] Over at Yahoo, it seems some people just don’t know where they are: Fuzz, on the other hand, has a sense of humour, gently prods its users to fill out their profiles:
Bad Wired, no cookie
I got some junk mail recently advertising the Web 2.0 Expo. I called O’Reilly. They removed me from their list. I wanted to find out how they got my name. Customer service put me through to the conference publicist. The conference publicist put me through to conference marketing. Conference marketing sent me to CMP database …
MoveOn’s mail merge could use a little help
On March 23, 2007, I received an email from MoveOn titled “Rep. Pelosi does the right thing on Iraq.” It began like this: Dear MoveOn member, We’re one step closer in the fight to end the war. Today the Iraq Accountability Act passed Congress. For the first time, Congress passed a real deadline to end …
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