What's Wrong Here?

Recently, I needed to contact the service department of a local car dealer. Knowing that I could instantly put my hand on the previous service invoice from them, I grabbed it and saw a little box that said "BrandA service" with a phone number. I rang the number.

It rang for quite some time and was eventually answered by a receptionist who said, "Good morning, FooBar Motors, how can I help you?" I asked for the BrandA service department. She said, rather impatiently, "Which dealership?" Not expecting that question, having got the number from that dealership's invoice, I hesitated a moment. She then said, "SuburbM, or SuburbN, or SuburbO, or SuburbP?" So I said I wanted SuburbM and went through the wait for the next receptionist to answer.

Again, I heard, "Good morning, FooBar Motors, how can I help you?" I was on top of things now, so I said I wanted the SuburbM service department for BrandA and quietly congratulated myself on having short-circuited at least one step in the process. The next receptionist who answered said, "Good morning, FooBar Motors, how can I help?" I imagined I was talking to the right person now, so started to ask my real question. She interrupted and said, "Are you after the service department?" I admitted I was, and waited once more for the next receptionist in the stack to answer.

FooBar Motors have many signs posted up in the local premises talking about how seriously they take the issue of providing great customer service and, as a matter of fact, the people who you meet face to face there are polite and helpful. But the pain of ringing them is really a bit much.

Tea Parties and Unicorns

Not so long ago, I overheard somebody say that life is not all tea parties and unicorns. That's probably true, but it seems a bleak view. My plan here is to make sure that there will be enough of both to go around.

I started my first blog, on the edge, six years ago as an experiment to see if I wanted to get into the blogging thing. It was built on simple software and was always intended to have a short life. My habitual farting about in search of the perfect blogging software platform once I decided to continue has resulted in the temporary thing living for so long.

I've decided to tackle some of my imperfections head-on and so, rather than find the perfect software (which seems not to exist, surprise!) or (even worse) write my own blogging platform, I decided to just adopt something that's already out there and at least partly functional so that I can go ahead and write rather than do the teenage angst thing.

I also decided to stop fretting about the exact niche for my blog. This will continue to be a place where I write about the things that interest me. That probably means there will be quite a bit about software—the writing of software and the languages and tools associated with that. If I manage to make a few more of the decisions like the one I made to start this new blog, the software articles will probably make up a fair bit of the content. Failing that, there are always the tea parties and unicorns.