Filed under: fail

Why I don't trust UPS

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UPS just delivered two packages. To the wrong house. Both are from Amazon, and one is clearly marked "Kindle Fire". No signature was required, and they just left them on the front porch.

I've been on the other end of that scenario a time or two. UPS claims to have delivered something, but I'd been home all day and never heard them. Once, my missing package showed up a few days later, presumably dropped off by the kind folks who actually received the item. Which is how this guy is going to get his Kindle Fire in time for Christmas. Not delivered by UPS, (the job he paid them to do,) but delivered by a neighbor with a similar address.

C'mon, UPS. I know it's a busy time of year, but it doesn't take a lot of time to double-check an address.

AT&T #FAIL

(Previously deleted post was a #fail on my part... Forgot to block out my email address and phone number in the screenshot.)

Logged on to AT&T's website to pay my bill today, and figured I'd throw my name in the hat for a free year. I filled out the information, clicked "submit my entry" and was denied.

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Just an FYI, AT&T… If you're going to promote something like this on your homepage, you should probably make sure it works.

BestBuy App #fail

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I don't think of BestBuy as a component store, but I checked the app today just in case. I'm looking for RAM for my MacBook, and figured if I could avoid the trip down to Fry's, it was worth a shot. I was pleasantly surprised to see that BestBuy had what I was looking for, and that the memory sticks were in stock.

Unfortunately, they were not. At any of the area stores. They were ALL out of stock. I know that there can be a delay in updating stock quantities, but when all the stores claiming to have stock are completely out, there's something else wrong there.

Hope they get it fixed in the next update. Kind of useless otherwise.

Marketing #FAIL

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Can you imagine the brainstorming session that ended in a decision to name this product "HOLD UR LOAD"? I guess it's better than "STRAP ON" or... Well, you get the idea.

The product is a diamond-plate steel thingy that helps secure whatever it is you're carrying in the back of your truck.

You can read all about it at holdurload.com. A word of warning, though--their video starts automatically, so turn your sound down. Otherwise, your co-workers will wonder why you're surfing the web for ways to hold your load.

Facebook #fail tonight

Facebook "accidentally" enabled email notifications for some users today. Oops. I'm hoping they fix it soon. These emails are getting annoying.

(thanks to Darren for showing me this graphic... No idea who made it, but credit goes to them.)

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Hard Drive #FAIL

I love Western Digital hard drives for one reason. They rarely fail on me. Well, they last a long, long time before failing. Except for this one. This one made it about a year before glitching. Granted, it goes everywhere with me, so it gets abused.

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This is the little 500GB I use as an external for my laptop. It's a "working" drive... When I'm on the road, large video files or photo dumps sit here until I get home. Once I'm home, photos and videos get dumped onto my main hard drives where they are properly backed up.

But I've been lazy.

I now have 400GB of video and photos just sitting on it, dating back to October of 2010. Bad geek.

Today I needed some of that data, and as I was organizing photos into folders to copy over to my main drives, the drive glitched. OSX informed me that it could read the drive, but couldn't write to it. Damn. So my laptop is tied up for the next 8 hours or so, copying files from the little 500GB drive to one of my 2TB drives.

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Let that be a lesson to y'all. Don't get lazy on the back ups. Especially on these little drives that you pack around everywhere. They're subject to more abuse than the drives that just sit in your office. I know I beat the crap out of mine.

Just for the record--I still love my Western Digital hard drives. One premature failure out of 100 or so drives is pretty good.

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac 30-day Trial #fail

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So I saw that there was a trial for the new Office 2011 for Mac. I had read that people have been having issues with the new Outlook app connecting to Exchange servers, so I wanted to test it for myself before pushing to buy it at work.

I've tried numerous times now to register and download the trial software, and so far have been S.O.L. Initially, I get the "fragment" error on the website. I eventually got the site to work, and got my download email, but when I entered the order number and password as instructed, I was told there was no order with that number.

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C'mon, Microsoft. If you can't get this part right, what do you expect people to do?

At this point, I'll stick to the old Entourage app for work email, and keep using iWork for everything else. I can't exactly recommend the upgrade to my boss if the trial download doesn't even work.

You #fail, Microsoft.