Late to the Party

Editor’s Note: I feel extremely sad that Motorola keeps digging itself into a hole like this. It’s so disheartening that the company from which cell phones originated is failing so miserably in the cell phone market. When I first heard about the rumors that the handset division was going to be spun off into a separate company, it really angered me that they were considering doing so (supposedly). Regardless, read on for the text translation of the ink blog above:

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I don’t want to talk about this too much because it gets me too riled up. I used to work at Motorola, but not in the cell phone division. I was excited by the arrival of the RAZR, but after a while it was clear Mot was all too willing to milk the cash cow for as long as it could, instead of creating an exciting, brand-new product. >:( Anyway, read this letter that Engadget has posted. It’s from a company insider. It echoes my feelings completely.

Aaaahhh… Just jailbroke my iPod touch with ZiPhone. I can breathe again.

I’m not sure if this version of Skitch that I installed after upgrading to Leopard has better drawing capabilities, or if I just had to set up the preferences properly, but it seems a lot more responsive now. I don’t have to write so slowly just to get legible ink! Granted, it still looks a bit messy, but I think this could be a viable ink blogging tool to use on my Mac…

Yay!

Congratulations, Wells Fargo. You’re no better than those annoying “Re: your account” spam e-mails that I unceremoniously delete from my spam folder every so often. A lot of you may already know this about Wells Fargo, but this was the hubby’s and my first personal experience with their sleazeball tactics. A short bit of background: when we first moved into our current home, we bought some new appliances and financed them through the store. This particular store happens to use Wells Fargo to handle the payments. That’s all well and good. We paid off the account and closed it a long while ago.

Well, last week sometime while the hubby was in Germany for business, a representative from Wells Fargo called Olga left 3 or 4 urgent-sounding messages about our account on his voicemail. She gave no specifics about what she was calling for, just a terse message to call back immediately. We thought this was strange since the account has been paid off and inactive for quite a while. Being worried about any fraudulent activity on our account, the hubby called back last Friday. Someone answered and said that Olga was already out for the day and no one else could access our account info, so he’d have to call her back on Monday. This already sounded pretty fishy to us, and we had come to the conclusion that this is likely some kind of scam call that has nothing to do with our account.

Today the hubby got another “urgent” message to call Olga back, so he finally did. When he got through, she started in on some schpiel, asking if he keeps track of his credit report, and how his score was such-and-such, and “what if I told you I could help you improve your credit score?” He interrupted her and asked if there had been any unauthorized activity on our account, or if there were any additional charges, or anything of that nature. She confirmed that everything was paid off and in order with our account. He then politely informed her that he had nothing else to discuss with her, that our credit score is none of their business, and he doesn’t appreciate companies that use this type of deception in order to drum up business (my paraphrasing). Instead of conceding that she would not get any business from him, she pressed on, blathering on about how they’re just trying to help, and asking if there’s a better time for her to call back, blah, blah, blah. The nerve! Yes, she’s just doing her job, whatever. “Stick to the script, make the sale,” to cop a line from an episode of The Office (US). The problem is Wells Fargo, not “Olga”.

I honestly don’t understand how a company expects to get any business from former customers when they prey on people’s fears of identity theft, which is exactly what we were concerned about. It’s more insidious than the spam e-mails with the subject line “Re: your account”, or all of the paper mail that are plastered with “Open immediately. Important information regarding your account ending in 1234″, because these are easy to spot and deal with on your own time. Opening and recognizing a fake letter takes a few seconds. It’s a huge waste of paper, and I would rather not have to sort through them and set them aside to be shredded later, but it’s something easily dealt with.

Phone calls aren’t easily dismissable, especially when the caller is not descriptive in the voicemails. There could very well be a problem with someone trying to use an old account, or billing discrepancies that need to be addressed right away. And because you have to call back the particular person who was assigned to your case (commission, anyone?), you could potentially waste a lot of time playing phone tag. Since we do not use a landline for a home number any more, these calls also count against our minutes, so we’re actually paying to deal with this inconsiderate disruption. Lovely. Luckily the hubby didn’t have much of his time wasted by this BS.

Does Wells Fargo really think that after someone goes through the trouble of calling back, only to find that there was no problem after all, that he’d be happy to sign up for whatever BS service they’re offering? Does this really work enough times to make the damage to their company reputation worth it?

Well, it didn’t work this time, Wells Fargo. And I’m blogging about this to warn anyone who’s searching on Wells Fargo, customer satisfaction, or customer reviews for this company. I’m never going to knowingly sign up for any service that Wells Fargo offers. I’ll refer anyone who asks me about this company to this post. It probably won’t make a dent in their bottom line, but I’m hoping this post helps someone trying to make a decision on whether or not to do business with Wells Fargo. Don’t do it! If they’re this sleazy about deceiving former customers, who knows what other crap you’ll have to deal with as a current customer?

/rant

Testing out a new “ink-enabled” app on the iMac. It’s called Curio, by Zengobi. I actually read about this app on jkOnTheRun (thanks, Guys!). Curio is a notebook-type app that is quite similar to Microsoft OneNote. It has notebook-type organization, ability to clip information from websites, and insert other file types. But they also have mind-mapping functionality built-in, which is pretty impressive. A great combo of OneNote and an app like MindManager. I haven’t played around with the app very much, but I signed up for the extended, 60-day trial, so we’ll see how this works out.