Too many ways to contact people

When I was in college, I thought it was cool to have multiple email addresses; at a time when most people didn't have 1 address, I had at least two, so I put them in my email signature, along with my website and phone number.

These days, people have Facebook pages, LinkedIn page, Twitter address, blog, Flicker account, Google+, Skype, Email, etc. Up until today, I had never seen anyone list all these "contact" methods. Is it really necessary for anyone to list these? These days, I think if someone wants to contact you, they can find you without you explicitly telling them.

I use a work email address, a personal email address, and this blog. I'm a pretty easy person to find (it doesn't hurt that I have my own domain and my last unique isn't all that common).

Revisiting Rollover Minutes

When I first signed up for AT&T, I wrote that rollover minutes were pretty much a joke. I kept racking up rollover minutes and never used them until last month. I use my cell phone for work and last month I had to be in a ton of conference calls and managed to use up basically all of my rollover minutes! With my anytime minutes, rollover minutes, and then putting the final calls of the month on Ooma, I was on the phone for something like 2200 minutes. That is basically a complete work week on the phone!

The rollover minutes saved me from upgrading my plan for 1 month; as the conference calls are probably going to continue, my 450 minute plan just isn't going to cut it any more. So while I initially thought it was a gimmick, it ended up having some value to me. Now that I'm on a 900 minute plan with A-List (which I found out is being discontinued and if I switch to a family plan, I may lose it), I'm going to start accumulating rollover minutes again! For those that don't know, A-List is 5 (or 10 for family plans) numbers that you call frequently and don't use your minutes. I put the conference call numbers on my A-List, so my usage will drop to virtually nothing again.

Is newer technology better?

With my cordless phones failing, I was on the hunt for a new set of phones. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I got the Panasonic KX-TG7624 4 handset set. The main feature I wanted was the ability to set a different ringtone per caller. The old Uniden set we have (about 8 years old) did this and worked well. We have a bunch of ringers to choose from and we can set them on a per phonebook entry basis. This new Panasonic said Ringer ID was a feature.

After 45 minutes of playing with the set and reading the manual, I figured out that the Ringer ID was not as full featured as what I already had. The ringer tones are limited to 3 groups, each with 1 ringer per group. The groups were named Home, Cell 1 and Cell 2. This was less than helpful. The phone has the ability to link cell phones to it which is something that I not only didn't need, it made the phone far too confusing to figure out.

Once I realized that it didn't really have the 1 feature I wanted, I immediately boxed up the phones and will return them to Costco tomorrow. I felt like a moron trying to set up the phones; I have a degree in engineering and setting up these phones became an exercise in frustration.

Do all these extra features really help? Do people really want more features that they can't figure out how to use?

Doing the right business thing

A few weeks ago, my wife started complaining that our cordless phones started dying. So, I decided to get a new battery and see if that fixed the issue or I'd have to get a new set of phones due to bad charging circuits. I bought a battery from Fry's and it failed to charge, so I suspected that the charging circuit was bad. Since I didn't need the battery, I went back to Fry's to return the battery.

When I presented the battery to the returns clerk, he looked at it and was a bit suspicious as he said that Lenmar batteries usually have a label on them with the Lenmar name. At that point, things began to click. When I brought the battery home, it looked identical to the battery I already had with the exception that the code on it was a little different. The package said 850 mA whereas the battery (and the ones in the phones) said 800 mA. The clerk went back and retrieved another battery and it was yellow (the ones I had including the replacement I bought were white) with a Lenmar label on it.

Now it was Fry's word against mine; I said that I bought the battery I was returning. I couldn't prove I hadn't swapped the batteries and they couldn't prove that the battery I took home was the real Lenmar one. The clerk asked his manager and the manager said to go ahead and accept the return. That was a big relief; I almost had to eat $10 for the battery. So it looks like someone swapped the battery in the store (the packages for the batteries only has a stable at the top and you can easily slip the battery out). Normally this kind of theft just impacts the store (and the consumer indirectly with higher prices), but in this case, I almost got stuck with the bill.

Normally Fry's is an easy target for me to pick on as their staff isn't the most helpful, some of their sales tactics are questionable (I've seen returned items shrink wrapped and resold as new), and I only shop there as a last resort. However, in this case, I was quite pleased with their customer service. Maybe this is way manufacturers put products in the bubble packaging to prevent people from stealing like this.