The City of Seattle uses a service request system from Motorola Solutions.
The form more often than not is more frustrating than it is worth.
When I called the Customer Service Bureau to learn who in the City is in charge of configuring this software as a service they did not know. Someone in the office would need to research it.
This video illustrates one example of frustration.
I spent nearly an hour in a Lowe’s store and more hours on the phone in an attempt to get Lowe’s to honor the Replacement Plan we purchased for the dehumidifier we purchased at the same time. The device has malfunctioned. No one in Lowe’s could find record of the replacement plan purchase even though I presented the original paperwork provided by Lowe’s at time of purchase/pickup. See image with this post. This led to the staff calling someone and yet more inability to find the replacement plan purchase in the Lowe’s system.
Lowe’s claims it needs the reference number for the replacement plan. If that is true, then why didn’t Lowe’s put the replacement plan number on the paperwork? On the line item for the replacement plan is this word: “Reference #:”. Why didn’t Lowe’s put the number on their own paperwork? Demand it, but not provide it, is a scam recipe.
As far as I’m concerned at this moment, Lowe’s is refusing to honor the plan even though Lowe’s was provided its own original paperwork by throwing up some mysterious roadblock of not being able to find a record of the purchase even though the store’s original paperwork was presented.
Bottom line: We did not buy the replacement plan to:
a) be swindled
b) waste a huge amount of time over some mysterious inability to find a purchase in the store’s own system.
One would think a store manager would err on the side of customer service and make things happen — when presented with actual, original evidence from the store itself. Instead, Lowe’s has created a system to constructively refuse to honor a purchase by creating a huge hassle for the customer, in part withholding at time of purchase information later required.
On May 17, 2017 between 2:00am and 2:40am I was driving to the store. Lucky for me that I was awake, because a drunk driver going the opposite direction came into my lane. I had to make an abrupt swerve to the right to avoid a head-on collision.
Not appreciating this potential bodily harm, I did a U turn and followed the person onto Interstate 5. Next, I dialed 911 on my Google Fi phone.
The connection was made and south eight miles later Washington State Patrol pulled the driver over and arrested the person.
xxx was the driver’s name. Because this person had a previous conviction for DUI, he was booked into jail. And he stayed there for about five days until he bailed out.
Wanting to get more precise timing of this incident, I looked at the call history on my Google Fi phone. The 911 call was not there. Later that day (May 17, 2017) I called Google Fi asking for the time of the 911 call. I provided the date and the approximate time.
As I type it is nearly two months later and Google has yet to provide the time of the 911 call. About a month later a Google representative asked via email for the approximate dates of the calls. Plural? Somehow Google morphed the request for a single time on a single date on a single call into multiple calls.
Then, on about July 10, 2017, a supervisor asked for the approximate date and time of the call.
If Google had it’s act together, they would not be morphing the request into something beyond what I requested and they would not be asking for the information I provided on the very first support phone call.
The bottom line here:
You can’t trust Google to log a 911 call into the call history where it should be
You cannot depend on Google support to adequately keep track of simple details (date and approximate time) in a request.
Upon the belief that ordering food for delivery is a convenience, I did so from Mae Ploy Thai in Seattle, via Seamless.com.
The Seamless ordering experience was fine.
The Seamless experience with May Ploy Thai was not.
Food (including soup with big chunks of vegetables) arrived without eating utensils. The Thai tea, however, came with a straw.
After several phone calls to Seamless and May Ploy Thai, I finally got utensils one hour after the food — even though the restaurant is only three blocks away. By then the food was nearly cold.
The whole point of ordering food for delivery is convenience. This experience was not convenient, ate into my work time, and essentially was a waste of time and money.
I think packing one’s own lunch is fundamentally a good concept all around.