Some things are designed well, and others aren’t. Posts in this category are meant to call out both, and in the case of bad designs, provide comparison or contrast to the same function designed properly.
We see competition shows all the time, such as “Top Chef”, “Next Iron Chef”, “Chopped”, all of the baking competition shows, and even shows such as “Forged in Fire” and “Next Mythbuster”, where the loser of each round gets eliminated.
The goal of the show is to find “the best” out of a group of competitors, but this is not the likely outcome.
Let’s look at why, and how to fix it.
Or, why floating point operations are slow, and how to avoid them.
We’ve all done this 1,000 times…
You purchase a piece of wood, or worse, a piece of fruit, peel the sticker, and it completely self-destructs, leaving bits of sticker, and a sticky residue.
They COULD protect your data… they CHOOSE not to…
It’s not the driver’s fault, obviously, but to show up at someone’s door an hour and a half late, and over 3 hours after I placed my order, with no call back, and no confirmation is completely unprofessional.
The driver alluded to the fact that the manager completely botched things up, but at this point, after multiple calls to the store, and multiple calls to their call center, I really don’t care.
Bad things happen.
Things can go from “OK” to underwater very quickly, but as the manager, you have to think about what outcome you want, and what swift action you must take to achieve that outcome.
Aside from being frustrated, I just wanted to get the food that I ordered.
After waiting 3 hours, which was an hour and a half PAST the delivery time, I had no idea if it was still on the way or if the order was cancelled, or if the store was on fire.
This is the point where some kind of escalation should have occurred, but there was no one to whom I could escalate.
After being hung up on, multiple times, and being told that the ONLY way to cancel my order is to call the store (and be hung up on), is extremely frustrating. There is no valid situation, save for life-and-death, that it’s acceptable to hang up on a customer.
I turned off my lights, locked my door, and the delivery driver STILL knocked on my door, over an hour later! How about a phone call?
The offer of getting the pizza for free was the right thing to do, but if things are going so poorly that you’re OVER AN HOUR AND A HALF LATE, how do I even know what’s in that box? I don’t want some half-cooked crap with the wrong toppings.
At this point, as a customer, this seems like a breach of trust.
From my perspective, I can’t trust your service, which means that I also can’t trust your product.
All it would have taken is someone in authority who was empowered to fix the problem, to change that perception.
Kudos to the driver, who at least tried to take care of the situation, but it’s the manager who miserably failed, and with a fairly severe technology deficit, there was no way that anyone could help me, except the manager, who was too busy hanging up on people.
I’m happy to have you hire me to fix these problems for you. I have a long track record of taking a complete train wreck like yours, and building a success story.
Short of that, I will no longer be a Pizza Hut customer.
Dear Pizza Hut:
WHEN IS IT OK TO LIE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS?
WHEN IS IT OK TO ISSUE A HALF-HEARTED APOLOGY ONLY AFTER I INITIATE A COMPLAINT WITH THE BBB???
I can fix this for you…. you need to hire me in an executive position, so that I can fire everyone in customer service, and everyone in technology, and rebuild both departments.
Oh, and ONE MORE THING. Let’s look at the tail end of that e-mail…
Disclaimer: This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual
and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message. Any disclosure,
copying, or distribution of this message, or taking any action based on it is strictly prohibited.
This is tacked on for the sole purpose of allowing Pizza Hut to bully me in to taking down any copy of this e-mail I may choose to post.
Well…. LET ME EDUCATE YOU.
Using Android and Google Maps as a trip planner for an 1,100-mile (2,200 round-trip) road trip left a bit to be desired.
Read on, to find out why…
There is a special place in hell for whomever designs the packaging for children’s toys.
From time to time, I run across a vendor who says:
We have over 40 years of combined experience…
What does that really mean?
The intended meaning is that, if there are 4 people in the room, they each have about 10 years of experience.
But, it could also mean that one of them has 39 years of experience, and the other three have been in the business for only 4 months!
Further, let’s say that this particular vendor is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) consultant – why would I want 40-year-old advice from the mid 1970’s, when the largest computers of that era didn’t have as much computing power as my smart phone?
Essentially, we have a set of scalars that are supposed to represent the respective sizes of each individual’s experience base within the group.
Let’s say we have 4 people:
This gives us a set of 4 scalars: {12, 15, 8, 10}
Although there are many valid ways to compare and combine these numbers, there are also very many ways to combine them, that don’t make sense.
At the end of the meeting, Stacy proudly proclaims, “we have 45 years of combined experience“, because she added all of these scalars, but what does that really mean?
It’s not like the team are simply ONE person who becomes eminently more qualified with combined magnitude. Take the case of our most junior member – in theory, if we give Johnny another year of experience, he still sits within the footprints of all three of his other team members. The team’s range of experience is really based on it’s most senior member (Stacy).
It’s not like there is some kind of historical significance, as if getting to some magic number of combined experience qualifies the team for an historical marker. If they make it to 100 years of combined experience, they can’t proclaim “experience since 1917!”.
Talking about a set of numbers that each represents a constant value is just like combining height: Unless you plan to have them stand on each others’ shoulders, or make them lay on the ground end-to-end, the “combined height” would be completely pointless. The statement, “we have 22 feet of consultants visiting us today…” just doesn’t make any sense. Nor would it make sense to say, “it took 600 pounds of consultants to fix this problem”.
Instead, if we understand that we have a set of 4 people, and each scalar in the set represents ONE of the four people, we can come up with some meaningful metrics by comparing rather than combining:
Likewise, if we’re talking about numbers that reflect a rate, such as salary or billable rate, it might make sense to say, we had four consultants come in for a meeting. Their combined billable rate was $800/hr, and the meeting lasted two hours, so the cost of the meeting was $1,600.
When you use math to compare or combine a set of numbers, ultimately, you have to maintain perspective about what those numbers really mean.
If you combine numbers in ways that don’t make sense, you might create a meaningless metric.
Problem: You’ve got some 10-year-old code running on a 12-year-old platform that only supports TLS 1.0, and other “insecure” protocols that are deprecated or soon will be.
Solution: Reverse Proxy