James's Weblog

Two weeks of arguing with Verizon over their early termination fee hasn’t gotten me anywhere. They refuse to waive it.

“It follows the terms of your contract, so it’s a valid charge,” they say.

“I’m not saying it’s not valid; I’m saying it’s not right. So you’d rather have $175 from me now than have me ever do business with you again? You are aware I’ve paid Verizon over $800 during the past two years and used barely any of my minutes, right?”

“It’s a valid charge.”

It seems that more and more people these days are drones who can’t think for themselves and who are unwilling to stick their necks out.

Verizon did indicate, however, that I could get the fee waived if I reactivated my old account for the remaining duration of my contract with no additional commitment. The catch? To reactivate my old account, they’d need to use my original cell phone number, which I already had ported to Sprint. Of course, it’d be too easy if they just let me pay them directly for my remaining two weeks, as I had offered originally. No, their highly advanced computer system required an active account with the original number.

I relented and decided to play their stupid game. Not wanting to get an early termination fee on my Sprint account too, I figured I could change my Sprint number, free up my original, and then reactivate my Verizon account.

After I changed my Sprint number, Verizon informed me that although my original number was now available, it was Sprint’s property and that Verizon couldn’t touch it. To transfer it back to Verizon, they said, I’d need to have a Sprint account using it. Unyielding computer systems win again over common sense.

To add insult to injury, Sprint won’t even let me have my original number back. (Another victory for the computers.) So now I have Verizon’s $175 charge, and I’ve lost my original, four-year old number for nothing. (Not that anyone calls me anyway.) Had I not ported my number in the first place, I probably could have reactivated my Verizon account and had that fee waived. Who knew number portability would bite me in the ass like this?

And did I mention that the Sprint phone was a gift?

I give up. I suppose I’ll pay the stupid fee.

I’ve been at VMware for a month now. I like it there, and I think I’m settling in, though everything still feels a little surreal (virtual?) sometimes. I’m a bit stressed out worrying that I’m not going to live up to their expectations.

On one hand, I learned more at Sony than I thought I did. (All that free time I spent reading things like the comp.lang.c newsgroup probably helped.) On the other hand, I learned much less than I would have elsewhere, so I’m still way behind the curve.

New VMware hires get a license plate holder that says “Virtualized by VMware”. Someone asked me if I put it on my car. “No,” I said, “I don’t want to besmirch the company’s good name with my bad driving.”

I really don’t understand the practice of adorning cars with bumper stickers, custom license plate holders, or other knick-knacks. What good can come of it? The only time anyone is going to read them, care, and remember is if you screw up. No one’s going to credit you, “Wow, that guy works at VMware, and he uses a turn signal!”

Plus, If I accidentally pissed someone off, I think I’d prefer that they not be able to track me down easily.

A few weeks ago, I got a new cell phone and switched from Verizon Wireless to Sprint.

I didn’t remember when I purchased my old phone or what the terms of my service agreement were, so I went to Verizon’s website to look up my account information first.

Current calling plan:
America’s Choice 300 General .00 Long Distance $35.00 1y 0502

I interpreted this information to mean that I had a one-year commitment starting in May 2002. I assumed I was free and clear, so I switched carriers.

I then got slapped with a $175 early termination fee.

I called Verizon. It turns out that I had a two-year commitment and that the “1y” is an internal code not meant to be decipherable by users. To add insult to injury, I missed my end date by only two weeks.

There are a couple of things wrong here:

• Verizon’s website provides no clear information about what the contract duration is.
• Verizon’s website provides external access to internal information. If something is for internal use only, keep it internal. Otherwise people will assume that information is supposed to be relevant to them and is meant to be decipherable.

Had Verizon not generously provided useless but misleading information, I would have called them to find out my service agreement details. At best, Verizon is totally clueless and is too lazy to make their website usable. At worst, Verizon’s committing fraud. “1y” is readable enough to be misinterpreted but vague enough for Verizon to avoid accountability and to claim that they didn’t lie outright.

Of course, it’s not in Verizon’s best interests to let people know when their agreements expire, so what do I really expect?

One of the main reasons I switched away from Verizon at all was because I was throwing money away; each month I paid $35 for less than 10 minutes of actual usage. Sigh.

I thought I was out of stupid Sony stories, but my former coworker Kevin was surprised that I hadn’t mentioned anything about the spiders.

What Japanese company wouldn’t have a special and conveniently accessible smoking area? The Sony building in San José has a fairly large atrium for such a purpose, complete with benches, trees, hedges, and a weird modern art sculpture. It also was infested with grasshoppers.

For some reason, birds within the atrium were rather rare. Maybe they didn’t want to be boxed in; maybe they were afraid of the humans who were constantly loitering around there; maybe they just didn’t want to get lung cancer. For whatever reason, birds ignored this plentiful food source, and the grasshoppers thrived.

The atrium also had a population of garden spiders. (A western spotted orb weaver, I think.) They were fairly large (not including their legs, they were about the size of a quarter), and they constructed gorgeous and expansive webs.

Every summer, these spiders emerged, fully mature, seemingly from nowhere. Every day of every summer, I tried to capture grasshoppers to place into the spiders’ webs.

Feeding the spiders was one of the few things that made my days at Sony enjoyable. Every fall I was sad when the spiders disappeared.

I guess I’m a sadist.

Miscellaneous happenings:

• Sony had a very restrictive Internet proxy server; it didn’t allow ssh, newsgroup access, or instant messagers (AIM worked eventually, though). I had the “bright” idea of resorting to a dial-up ISP with my second phone line. (I split a cubicle with someone else. There was a telephone line for each of us, but we shared one instead, giving us one extra.) Of course, businesses don’t have flat-rate local calling plans like residences do, which isn’t something I realized until after I had racked up many hundreds of dollars’ worth of telephone charges. Oops.

• One day, on my way to the bathroom, I overheard part of a telephone conversation: “Sony. S-O-N-Y. Like the televisions.” I could only wonder what planet the other person was from; who hasn’t heard of Sony?

• Sony provides an emulator for the CLIÉ handheld. It’s based off of PalmSource’s standard Palm OS Emulator, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For anyone not familiar with the GPL, the gist is that any derived work must have its source code available. (This is a gross oversimplification for a number of reasons, but it’s close enough.) Sony sometimes was delinquent at providing the source code. (Developers want tools available yesterday; GPL zealots say nothing should be provided without source. There’s no pleasing everyone.)

  Eventually, one of my worst fears came true and someone submitted a story to Slashdot about the lack of code. We were used to receiving hate mail, but were we prepared to deal with a gajillion emails from angry, GPL-crazed Slashdot readers?

  We received only one email about it. The complainant didn’t even understand the GPL all that well.

• After too many incidents of rolling into work at around noon-time, my manager instituted a policy: If you can’t make it in by 10:30 AM, don’t bother coming in at all. Uh, so rather than showing up late and putting in 8+ hours of work, I should take the entire day off from a job I hate? Okay.

• I wasn’t there for this, so this is second-hand information: apparently, after I left Sony, they almost hired another person named “James Lin” to replace me. Bizarre. Some cheap Chinese knockoff, no doubt. I wonder if they would have tried to pass him off as me in emails. (Not that Sony didn’t have enough James Lins working for them already; Sony’s silly Microsoft Exchange mail server regularly got confused and sent me mail intended for other James Lins.)

Incidentally, for anyone who ever wanted to know about the meaning and design of Sony’s “VAIO” name: The Origin and Philosophy of VAIO(R) PCs. The “VAIO-let” color scheme is a clever touch.

Somehow, though, I don’t think that kind of thought or ingenuity went into the oft-mispronounced “CLIÉ” name.

My official job title at Sony was “Developer Technical Support Engineer”. I answered programming questions from third-party software developers.

For some reason, I expected programmers to be smarter than the average bear. At the very least, I expected them to know how to ask reasonably intelligent questions, since programmers are on the other side of the fence when their own users submit questions and bug reports.

Boy, was I wrong.

We received a number of emails that looked like:

FunctionFoo() doesn’t work.

to which I’d have to reply with:

Thank you for reporting this issue to us. However, we are unable to reproduce your problem; to speed up our investigation, please provide more information about:

• what specific model you’re using (Sony has a lot of models)
• whether you’re using a physical device or an emulator
• exactly why you think FunctionFoo() doesn’t work (what do you expect to happen, and what actually happens?)
• exactly what arguments you pass to FunctionFoo()

Please provide a snippet of code to reproduce this problem if possible.

(Actually, I usually was a little less polite.)

Even when people did submit code snippets, for inexplicable reasons they too often thought it was easier to retype their code rather than to copy-and-paste it, hence introducing new errors into their code or sometimes removing the actual ones.

In retrospect, it’s not too surprising we received the sorts of questions we did. The smart people usually were able to solve their problems on their own. They also knew that Sony’s technical support services had an abysmal reputation and to avoid them at all costs.

In the aftermath of the theft problem, Sony forced all of its contractors to take an ethics test. We had a choice between taking an hour-long online test or spending two hours in an ethics training class. I chose the test.

It turned out that the “online test” wasn’t online at all; it was a program that ran off of a CD. One of my coworkers explained it to me:

“How will the company know that I took the test?” I asked.

“Your boss will sign you off on it.”

“How will he know that I took the test?”

“You’ll tell him so. If you want, you can save an hour by just saying that you took it.”

Well, being the ethical person that I am, I wasted an hour of company time taking the test anyway. The whole concept of an ethics test seems pretty stupid to me. Wouldn’t unethical people just cheat? Sony’s test was particularly dumb; the questions it asked were all black-and-white, it was always obvious what answers the company wanted, and the questions were mostly about legal issues, not ethical ones.

There was an incident at Sony last summer where someone was fired for stealing equipment from work and selling it on eBay. Apparently he sold:

• complete systems built with parts from testing machines
• device accessories (PDA cradles, notebook docking stations) that had been lying around in quantity
• pirated DVDs that he copied with company equipment

I don’t know the exact details to how he was caught, but the rumor was that he sold a pre-production unit of an old model, that the buyer took it to a service center for repair, and that the service center identified it and discovered the shenanigans.

Sony’s security department monitored him (and probably everyone else) for a while and uncovered his other auctions. After security collected enough evidence, management finally clued the rest of us in on what was going down and on his imminent termination. That night, an eBay user named “sonysecurity” was the high bidder on one of his auctions.

The next day, he was curiously absent from work. (They did find him eventually.)

Several other people involved with him also were fired shortly afterward.

Some CLIÉ handhelds have a feature that lets them behave as universal remote controls. One day, one of my coworkers and I went to Fry’s Electronics to test them with various brands and models of televisions, VCRs, and DVD players. (For obvious reasons, the only A/V devices we had at work were made by Sony.)

Whenever we found some device we couldn’t control, we’d write down the manufacturer and the model number. After a short while, a plain-clothes Fry’s security guard approached us.

“Do you work for us?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do you work here at Fry’s?”

“No, we’re from Sony. We’re testing these devices.”

“Do you have approval from the store manager?”

“No.” (Note: if someone asks if you have prior approval, always say yes.)

“You can’t write down prices without approval from the store manager.”

“We’re not writing down prices. We’re writing down model numbers. See?” We showed her our notes.

She consulted with someone else with her walkie-talkie. “You can’t do that either.”

“So if we were consumers, and we wanted to compare prices, what are we supposed to do?”

“Memorize them if you want, but you can’t write them down.”

“Uh-huh.”

Fascists.

(Someone later explained to me that manufacturers and retailers have agreements that prohibit retailers from selling below a certain price, and everyone knows that Fry’s is no stranger to shady business practices. (Telling the guard that we were from Sony didn’t help.) This also explains Fry’s newspaper ads for items from “name-brand manufacturers”.)

Now that I have a new job, I no longer need to worry about bad-mouthing my Sony references. (Ha, just kidding.) Regardless, it’s an out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new kind of time, so over the next few days I’ll try to recount some stupid Sony stories:

One of my coworkers wanted to buy a “game enhancer” for his PlayStation so he could play imported games. (Such devices also have less legitimate uses.) Another coworker told him about a store nearby that sold them, so we stopped by there after lunch one day.

“Hi, I’m looking for a ‘game enhancer,'” my coworker asked.

“Sorry, we don’t have any,” the clerk nervously replied.

“You don’t? Well, are you expecting to get any more soon?”

“Uhh… no… They didn’t seem very… reliable, so we stopped carrying them.”

“Oh-kay….”

As we left, my coworker asked me, “Did that guy seem to be acting a little weird to you?”

Then we realized that his Sony ID badge was hanging prominently around his neck.