I ruminated previously about the oddities of E-Z Pass and their conceptions of customer service as expressed in their computer systems.
Recently I had to make changes in my E-Z Pass account, and once again I was struck by their strange view of the world as revealed in their technology.
I had a simply need. Having recently changed jobs, I no longer needed the "commuter special" for crossing a Hudson River bridge every day, but now I needed to sign up for a discount program for daily travel on the New York State Thruway. All I had to do was cancel the bridge discount and sign up for the Thruway discount. Should be simple, right? Should be able to do both online, right?
Nope, wrong on both counts.
E-Z Pass comes close to offering an efficient and user-friendly means for canceling a bridge commuter plan, but they couldn't bring themselves to go all the way. There is nothing on the website, but on the phone system, you can "suspend" a bridge discount. Not cancel, mind you, but suspend until a specified date. OK, I thought, I can deal with that. I'll just pick a date after I'm dead -- say, January 1, 2082. The system, fussy enough to reject a Start date of yesterday, had no problem committing to resume service 75 years in the future. OK, I thought, if that's the way around it, fine -- at least I accomplished my goal. But as I was thinking this, I suddenly heard the E-Z Pass voice system explaining that my plan would suspended until the date requested OR until the next time I went across the bridge, at which time it would start up again! So, even if you suspend it for 75 years, the system knows better and will undo your instructions if you ever set foot on the bridge again!
On the phone finally with a real person, the E-Z Pass customer service associate found my 75-year suspension amusing but admitted that it was rather odd that you couldn't simply cancel it in the automated system. That required a personal conversation, and she agreed to take care of it.
When it comes to a Thruway discount, however, a mere phone call is not enough. It turns out the only way to sign up for that program is by sending them a letter in the U.S. Mail! E-Z Pass needs no additional information -- they already have my credit card number for replenishing the account whenever their comfort demands it. I can only imagine their rationale: "It's just that, we don't know, with a Thruway, it's so big and everything, somehow a letter seems better." If anyone has a more coherent theory, let me know!
Friday, October 26, 2007
Monday, September 3, 2007
These ARE the Good Old Days
People often fret about how information technology is changing our lives, and it's easy to fret about the negative aspects, but really, there are always gains and losses. Yes, hardly anyone writes proper letters any more, but people can communicate more quickly and more often! The advent of Federal Express meant that the "grace period" between sending an important package and its receipt his disappeared - and now everybody wants everything yesterday!
Personally, I miss the old impact printers, which took an hour to print out a 20-page document; before background printing, there was nothing else to do while printing was in progress. The great thing was that it forced you to take a break and relax a little - and yet you were actually working, making progress, during this time. Sort of like playing shuffleboard while making your way across the Atlantic on a ship!
Some day, our grandchildren will listen with amazement as we explain that, in our lifetime, the world was such a freewheeling, innocent, Wild West sort of the place that it was perfectly normal for people to:
Personally, I miss the old impact printers, which took an hour to print out a 20-page document; before background printing, there was nothing else to do while printing was in progress. The great thing was that it forced you to take a break and relax a little - and yet you were actually working, making progress, during this time. Sort of like playing shuffleboard while making your way across the Atlantic on a ship!
Some day, our grandchildren will listen with amazement as we explain that, in our lifetime, the world was such a freewheeling, innocent, Wild West sort of the place that it was perfectly normal for people to:
- Hop into a car and drive where ever they wanted - and if they changed their minds, just go off in some other direction!
- Enjoy a complete absence of advertising in so many places, like our cars, refrigerators, golf clubs, security alarms - you name it.
- Actually fill out paper applications for drivers' licenses, passports, and voter registration. All kinds of people had fake document created, and it sometimes took years to track them down.
- Pay bills after you got the money into your account.
- Tell people "the check is in the mail." People actually believed this! (Well, the first time, anyway.)
- Not answer the phone! Really! If someone didn't want to talk, they could just not answer!
- Lie about location! Back in the day, you could fly off to Vegas or wherever, then call in to the office with a groggy voice and say, "I'm not feeling well - I won't be in today." Back in those days, the boss had no way of knowing where you actually were when you called in sick - how cool was that!
- If you passed a pretty girl, you couldn't just query her ID and send her a signal of interest. Nobody had implants back then! If you didn't know her, you had to accost her directly (pretty scary), or follow her around and see who else knew her, and ask them what her name was, and where she lived, and was she married or not. Romance involved a lot of pure legwork back in the day!
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Death and PDFs
In a word: you can scan multipage documents directly into PDF format with Adobe Acrobat Professional, thereby saving lots of time and space.
What is so interesting about this, you ask? Well, for me, it's all tied up with intimations of mortality.
My mother, who died at 92 this year, had many excellent qualities, but it often seemed that her most passionate ambition was never, ever to be a bother to anyone. It this she succeeded at many levels, but one aspect became very clear only after her death. This was not a complete surprise, but as my siblings and I went over her effects, it was obvious that she had already disposed of virtually all her possession in advance. We quickly dealt with the shelf of books, box of photos, and few clothes -- all quite harmoniously, we are all proud to say.
Her example on this particular issue has inspired me. As I think of my own shuffling off and then regard the small mountains of stuff still filling my closets and file cabinets, I can't help wondering what I can do now to simplify the settling of my own pathetic table scraps by their designated heir and assign, whose name is Colin.
In particular, I look at paperwork. Certain personal papers of sentimental interest are understandable, though quantity can be a problem. Where I feel ridiculous, though, is that I have had trouble parting with certain artifacts from my professional life. Clearly, no one on this planet will ever need to review my proposal for a game about the U.S. Presidents that never went anywhere. And yet, it amuses me to recall the optimism that went into preparing it, not to mention the propoal's charming use of the latest technology -- photocopies! Much as I know I should dump the lot, I can't quite part with this documented evidence of personal creativity, however modest.
Enter Adobe Acrobat Professional, the software that lets you create compressed read-only PDF (Portable Document Format) documents that occupy little storage space and can be read on all computer platforms. It's probably done this for years, but I only just discovered that Acrobat lets you scan multiple pages from a scanner straight into a multipage PDF.
This means you can capture that entire proposal electronically, and then throw the original away! You can do the same with correspondence, treasured ticket stubs, wacky birthday cards, even those warm and fuzzy letters from the IRS they told you never to discard. You can zap it all right into the computer, and then haul all those files to the dumpster. Your physical environment becomes freer, larger and cleaner from the absence of all that documentation.
Arguably, none of your heirs and assigns may have the slightest interest in any of your stuff, but at least now they no longer have to make the minimum commitment of hauling boxes home and storing them in a garage or basement. Even if they never look at them, the only imposition is to take home a CD-ROM or two. Everyone has room for those.
Of couse, another advantage of digitizing your personal records that you can hand them over to multiple people. If none of your kids has any interest, maybe one of their kids will stumble upon your detritus and find it interesting. Maybe so, maybe not -- but either way, digitizing records opens a potential door in the future while removing the burden of you or anyone else having to cart around your "stuff" in the physical sense. I highly recommend it!
What is so interesting about this, you ask? Well, for me, it's all tied up with intimations of mortality.
My mother, who died at 92 this year, had many excellent qualities, but it often seemed that her most passionate ambition was never, ever to be a bother to anyone. It this she succeeded at many levels, but one aspect became very clear only after her death. This was not a complete surprise, but as my siblings and I went over her effects, it was obvious that she had already disposed of virtually all her possession in advance. We quickly dealt with the shelf of books, box of photos, and few clothes -- all quite harmoniously, we are all proud to say.
Her example on this particular issue has inspired me. As I think of my own shuffling off and then regard the small mountains of stuff still filling my closets and file cabinets, I can't help wondering what I can do now to simplify the settling of my own pathetic table scraps by their designated heir and assign, whose name is Colin.
In particular, I look at paperwork. Certain personal papers of sentimental interest are understandable, though quantity can be a problem. Where I feel ridiculous, though, is that I have had trouble parting with certain artifacts from my professional life. Clearly, no one on this planet will ever need to review my proposal for a game about the U.S. Presidents that never went anywhere. And yet, it amuses me to recall the optimism that went into preparing it, not to mention the propoal's charming use of the latest technology -- photocopies! Much as I know I should dump the lot, I can't quite part with this documented evidence of personal creativity, however modest.
Enter Adobe Acrobat Professional, the software that lets you create compressed read-only PDF (Portable Document Format) documents that occupy little storage space and can be read on all computer platforms. It's probably done this for years, but I only just discovered that Acrobat lets you scan multiple pages from a scanner straight into a multipage PDF.
This means you can capture that entire proposal electronically, and then throw the original away! You can do the same with correspondence, treasured ticket stubs, wacky birthday cards, even those warm and fuzzy letters from the IRS they told you never to discard. You can zap it all right into the computer, and then haul all those files to the dumpster. Your physical environment becomes freer, larger and cleaner from the absence of all that documentation.
Arguably, none of your heirs and assigns may have the slightest interest in any of your stuff, but at least now they no longer have to make the minimum commitment of hauling boxes home and storing them in a garage or basement. Even if they never look at them, the only imposition is to take home a CD-ROM or two. Everyone has room for those.
Of couse, another advantage of digitizing your personal records that you can hand them over to multiple people. If none of your kids has any interest, maybe one of their kids will stumble upon your detritus and find it interesting. Maybe so, maybe not -- but either way, digitizing records opens a potential door in the future while removing the burden of you or anyone else having to cart around your "stuff" in the physical sense. I highly recommend it!
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