Entertainment For Lively Minds
Human Touch
Posted by Iainso on 22 February 2010 - 2:41pm.
We all get automated responses when e mails are trying to access mailboxes which are full, or if there is an error, but today in the course of my work, I got the following:
"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at eircom.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses "xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx"
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out."
To my mind, the person who wrote this has really tried, and is genuinely rather upset at the outcome.
Which is nice.
Any other examples of customer service above and beyond?
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heh - i've seen those too and i always think
that the 'Sorry it didn't work out' should be prefaced with 'It's not you, it's me....'
Reminds me
I followed a dead link to part of this site once and was greeted by a photograph of Sunday Bloody Sunday Hitmaker Paul 'Bono' Hewson consulting an A-Z with the line "Bono still hasn't found what he's looking for, and neither have you".
For your safety and comfort
....always translates as "to suit, us whether it inconveniences you or not". I was once ordered to open my window blind on a flight "for my safety and comfort" when for the life of me I cannot see why it matters whether it is up or down, other than that whilst down it was keeping the sun out of my eyes.
I asked a flight attendant
friend of mine about that, and she said it's to get your eyes accustomed to the conditions outside before landing, it's why they switch the cabin lights off before night landings too.
It still doesn't have anything to do with your comfort though.
I don't doubt your friend
But that makes no sense to me at all.
They switch the cabin lights off before landing - then turn them back on whilst taxi-ing and waiting on the stand for the airbridge/steps to arrive.
Which means any benefit gained by turning the lights off is negated by the half hour or so they will have been back on before you de-plane. Into an artificially-lit airport...?
But it just might be me. For years I have been convinced that the 'brace position' you have to adopt in case of impending crash is designed to break your neck as quickly and painlessly as possible so as to avoid unnecessary suffering and distress.
Mythbusters
disproved that
Lights off
I've read or heard somewhere that the reason you have to put your blinds up in planes during take off and landing is so that they can look in through the windows should the plane crash.
I also vaguely recall hearing that the same reason is behind the lights being off from night take-offs and landings, as when it's dark it's easier to look in through the windows with searchlights if the interior lights are off.
Both of these could well be complete cods of course...
Aircraft safety
A pilot mate tells me that pretty much everything which goes on in an aircraft is linked to safety following post-accident research. As the research improves and aircraft change, so procedures alter. One little gem he told me was that female cabin staff have to wear vast amounts of slap for safety purposes. If their eyes are emphasised, it makes it easier for them to pass on instructions to passengers in the event of an emergency. It's not just about making them look like harlots. Not sure if the same applies to male cabin crew, though.
Thats nice
I think it must be a message, programmed long ago, from the pre-web era, before Chatroulette,Facebook and the Daily Mail's message boards, a kinder, more fraternal internet populated by friendly geeks in California.
Bounce
What you have there is a "bounce message" generated by the Qmail computer program and came nowhere near a Real Person. The text was written 15 years ago and the email is sent when ... (Sorry. I'm boring myself now)
for further information:
The qmail-send Bounce Message Format
http://cr.yp.to/proto/qsbmf.txt
As for customer service: Apple sent me an Airport Express to replace one that had failed during a recent postal strike and when it did not turn up they sent me, by next-day courier, another one. Even better when the one stuck somewhere turned up - 2 new Express' for 1 dud.
CD Baby
I think I might have posted this here before, but my favourite auto-responses are the ones customers at CD Baby receive after they buy something. Like this one:
You should
sue the post office - someone nicked your gold-lined box.
I've had one of those too
(I bought "The Blanks" album from me)
It actually made my day. Bit sad but hey!
When Firefox crashes
... the program states in a shy voice 'well, this is embarassing' and apologises for the problem. Makes a change from microsoft, whose error messages have an all too accusatory tone, wondering what you've done to its program.
Almost makes me wish Firefox would crash more often
A long time ago, in a Steelworks far away
When I started work as a computer programmer, one of my tasks was to support some systems which were in the autumn of their years. These had been maintained by a variety of people over time, few of whom had considered in any depth how the error messages would look on the console printer, or how it could be used to help track faults. Traditionally, helpful error reporting should give Who / Where / What / When / Why so that someone can identify what has gone wrong and try to make it better.
One of my favourites was from a control system at Ravenscraig. In some circumstances it would cough out "Bad Message : BAD" to the printer. All the other error messages were numbers to look up, like "1377 - Startup Error COM3". It took 2 weeks of digging through source listings to find where the "Bad Message : BAD" message was coming from, and another 4 weeks to make it helpful enough to track down the source of the problem.
As part of the development environment in the Sheffield office, the company had a central disk server system : this was named "SNOW WHITE". As the 7 small remote systems which accessed the disk server were called Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy, etc this gave a short time where the system startup log would say :
"HAPPY is now mounting SNOW WHITE"
This was changed the day after the Chief Programmer visited - he was not amused.