Updates That No One Will Actually Read, Part 1
There is nothing more futile than the maintainer of a personal blog that no one ever read in the first place suddenly deciding that it's time to post a bunch of catch-up entries.
But anyway...
The last thing I posted here was a furious rant aimed at Google for taking my smartphone for warranty repair (the screen was black and wouldn't turn on, but the phone was otherwise okay) and flat-out losing it.
After three and a half weeks of my loudly complaining and being told dozens of times over that I just had to be patient and that they would have an update in "2-3 days", my repaired phone suddenly showed up on Friday, June 10. I checked the IMEI -- it was the same phone I'd sent out.
By the time the phone finally did return to me, I had adopted a working theory that my original phone, the one sent in for repair, had been flat out lost ... and that Google had sent out a replacement, and then that replacement got lost in shipping, and thus the long delay was due to trying to track down THAT phone before they sent out a third. I guess we'll never know. But regardless of what was really going on after all that time, they finally DID locate my original phone and get it working and got it sent back to me.
I am still bothered by the casual "be patient, dude, be patient, dude" attitude that the support folks endlessly plied me with. At no point did a supervisor or manager or anyone who actually might know what was going on reply. I am also bothered by the irritated go-fuck-yourself responses I got at the beginning of the whole process; they swore the original phone had been returned and delivered and were closing out the case. It took many, MANY calls and emails to even get them to acknowledge that maybe something had gone wrong.
In this day and age, not having the phone that you receive all your business texts and calls on isn't just an inconvenience -- it's an absolute disaster. When I did finally get the phone back and popped the SIM card back in and powered it up, I had a lot of texts and missed calls that all things considered, I really wish I hadn't missed.
Long story short, the phone only showed up when a ) I posted a rather lengthy complaining blog entry and b) a journalist friend of mine contacted Google PR. I don't know if either or both of those affected things, but either way, two days later I had my phone.
I will go to my grave wondering where it was for all those weeks.