I hear a lot of people gripe about companies and how lousy customer service is when something goes wrong. I have some personal experience with that myself. Just search my blog for the word “fail”. It seems that calling or emailing customer support nowadays isn’t getting you anywhere. So what is a person to do about it? Well, I have found that for whatever reason the whole “social media” thing is apparently more important now to companies than good old complaints by email. So lately I have been tweeting my gripes. And it has proven to be more effective than emailing. […]
Stop the Google spam!
Ok guys & girls. This post is a full-blown rant aimed against Google and the annoying way they do their offline advertising! Why is it that I can’t open up *any* magazine here in Holland without this annoying piece of paper falling out of it? WTF! It’s 2011 and Google uses PAPER to spam us! I am talking about the 50 Euro credit advertising for Google Ads. Literally for months and months now I am getting annoyed with this! It is just as bad as back in the 90’s when both CompuServe ad AOL where spamming us to death by […]
A heroes welcome
Holland may have lost the World Cup Soccer, but that’s not how the 800.000 people perceived it when they gave our National Soccer Team a heroes welcome this Tuesday. As I wrote before, the national team that won the European Soccer Cup back in 1988 received the same kind of welcome. To be honest: it gave me – and many of my fellow countrymen some closure. It also showed that we backed up our team, no matter what. And like in 1988 it also gave us some unique footage of literally hundred thousands of crazy Orange fans celebrating 🙂 As […]
National trauma number three
Normally three times is a charm, but for Holland it has become more like a curse: again we failed to win the Holy Grail of Soccer, the World Cup. After ’74, ’78, now 2010 goes into the Dutch history books as the third national soccer trauma. We all knew it was going to be a tough match against Spain – the ruling European Soccer Champions – but nothing in this world could have prepared us for this match. Until the final, the tournament went very well for Holland: our National team won 14 straight games, counting the qualifying matches and […]
Home improvement Amazon.com style
If you ever ordered something from Amazon.com, or you have an account there, you know that Amazon likes to spam mail you with a lot “special deals” and such. Usually you receive them after you searched Amazon for something or just looked up a product or two. Anyway: the recommendations are usually spot on and do trigger users to buy more stuff (which is the whole idea off course). I think I heard somewhere it works automatically and somewhat along the lines of Google ads, that are triggered by your searches or – in Gmail – by keywords in your mail. This […]
Car vs (car) trailer
It’s amazing how stupid some people are when handling certain situations. These guys where loading two cars onto a car trailer and obviously didn’t care how they would do it. Essentially they just rear ended one car an pushed it up the trailer. I could not zoom with my crappy phone camera, but what happened was that the last car got stuck on the hitch of the car in front of it. I’m sure it was damaged after that. This happened next door to where I work. My colleagues all wondered what the heck those guys where doing too. Shows you how […]