As a geek, I often deal with software updates for myself and others. There’s a certain expectation in software updates that something will usually go wrong, so you plan for it. I present you with a tale of two very different software updates:

Upgrading to OSX Lion: Open App Store, click “Upgrade to Lion” ad. Pay once. Update any computer you own. Seamless update, no issues. Resume using computer.

Total time: less than one hour.

Upgrading to Windows 7: Spend ten minutes trying to find the Windows 7 website. Give up, look on Amazon and take another twenty minutes to figure out which version of Windows you need. Pay once. Update up to three computers, and may god help you if you try to upgrade more – if so, pay again. Insert CD. CD doesn’t load. Find CD in explorer. Initiate the Update. Update fails on all three computers. Have to reformat the harddrives and install from scratch. Told I cannot use my activation key because I didn’t have windows already installed on my computer. Spend twenty minutes Googling for a fix. Must use a REGEDIT hack or reinstall Vista (and forcibly re-activate VISTA too, because they only let you install that a few times – and by the way, you can’t use a NON-OEM disc to install an OEM version of Vista). Twelve hours later, resume using computer. Wait, no, scratch that. Windows Update informs me that I have 15 minutes to make a decision or it will reboot for me and initiate the update sequence. Five hours of updates later, I can resume using the computer.

Total time: 18 hours of update time, 4 hours incomprehensible weeping in a cold shower with my clothes on.

Windows is becoming great for one thing: wasting the family geek’s time. I almost -never- get asked to fix a problem with a Mac. 99% of the time my phone rings for tech help, it’s a Windows issue.

I used to LOVE my XP-based Alienware kick-ass gaming machine. I dominated Quake Arena, MechWarrior 4, you know – in between Windows Updates. I even thought I should go back and revive it one of these days, but the thought of having to buy yet another Windows 7 activation key makes me want to set it on fire.

Lion, while buggy for the moment, just freakin works. Windows seems to do everything it can -not- to work.

Is it any wonder why Microsoft is losing market share? When you violate non-geek expectations, a geek gets a call. When you violate geek expectations (that, you know, I don’t have to spend a day upgrading my fucking software), you create a malicious hacker or an Apple fanboy.

All I’m trying to do is play fucking Star Trek: Online!

(Header photo: Helpdesk by arycorge)

When you tell a bad story, people stop listening to you. Tell enough bad stories, and you’ll earn a reputation for being a time-wasting jerkface. Other than the anti-social ramifications, you won’t have much else to worry about.

When your business tells a bad story, you could end up doing actual harm. I’ve had the worst luck interacting with Big Name businesses this week. Each #FAIL is a story of a store I’m exceedingly reluctant to shop at again.

Gift card in hand, I headed to Big Name Electronics Store to buy a Kindle. I’ve got a map of Big Name Electronics Store tattooed to the inside of my eyelids from my rampant electronics and videogame habit, but for some reason, I couldn’t find the Kindles. I wandered around for 15 minutes before I found someone willing to tell me where they were. The employee pointed me in the direction and that was it; no follow-up even though it’s an item that requires unlocking.

I hung around looking lost for 15 more minutes, the last 5 pretending I was looking for something to steal; I figure it’d get me some attention. Nothing.

Then and there, on the spot, I called up two other stores where I knew I could get a Kindle. I verified they had the one I wanted in stock, and I left. The most interaction I got from that store was the “Have a great night!” on the way out.

All anyone had to do was say something. Anything. A flirty wink from the NerdSquad dudes would have sufficed. I would have happily paid them for that alone. Hell, I would have bought a case, a light, and any number of accessories. Left to my own methods though, and with no help and no way to see if they had the one I wanted, I got so frustrated that I called their competition while in their store to find what I wanted – and promptly left to buy the damn thing at a higher price.

That would have been bad enough to blog about, but yesterday, I was at Big Name Office Supply Store, attempting to purchase a whiteboard. I took the ticket for the whiteboard to the register (the size I wanted was not kept on the floor) and had been waiting only about a minute when an older woman cut in front of me in line.

I figured, with her advanced age, that she was attempting to teach this young buck a lesson about life being short or something.

Silly old people aside, when it was finally my turn to get to the register (there were about 4 people in line and took about 5-10 minutes to help – each), I had to wait another 10 minutes for the sales associate to correctly communicate to the stockroom which whiteboard it was I wanted. He rang me up and told me to wait near the exit for the stockroom gnome to bring my whiteboard out. Fifteen minutes go by before the sales associate came back over and said, “We’re going to have to ship it to your house, there’s none in stock.” I asked him to refund my purchase while he ceremoniously chanted I apologize like he was broken Bing Crosby record.

I would just like to point out that “I Apologize” is perhaps the most infuriating sentences of all time. Apologize is not the same as sorry. Sorry implies feelings, regret, specifically. I Apologize is what a serial killer says on trial to get an easier sentence.

I was there for 45 minutes after shopping for 2 minutes, and then left with nothing – and, this wasn’t the bad news.

While waiting in line, I was treated to the privilege of hearing the best huckster salespitch I’ve ever heard. Two salesmen stood to either side of a woman looking to purchase the Blackberry Playbook. She asked the associate if the Playbook did Flash. He confirmed this, then said, “Also, you know that this has 3G and WiFi. The iPad, you can get either but not both.” (This is, in fact, a complete and utter lie. I was so stunned by the stupidity of the statement that my jaw actually went slack. I had become a damned slackjawed yokel).

“Oh really?” she said.

“Yes, you need a service plan to use the 3G, and if you turn it off, you won’t have WiFi, so no access to the internet,” huckster salesman lied again. “You know, when you look at an iPad, there’s like 16 of them on the shelf, and each of them is different. You never know which one you’re getting. I’ve bought this and there’s always the same one, no matter what.”

“Yeah,” she cooed. She was toast, they’d sold her. Huckster’s younger counterpart added, “And this has much longer battery life than the iPad. The iPad gets about four or five hours.” I watched closely, expecting his pants to burst into flame. If not from his dishonesty, then at least from my psychic transmissions of “You dirty sonofabitch!”

There were other blatant lies uttered by the huckster and his cohort, but I was appalled enough – and sure enough that I couldn’t change the course of events – that I had to stop listening before I started foaming at the mouth or incinerated the store in some psychic storm of outrage for this egregious misuse of geek power.

This takes us to my experiences today; the first, waiting over an hour to *be acknowledged* by the owner at a one-person business for a simple matter that could have and should have been handled in 5 minutes. At their office. While they handled another task in front of me… as I watched. If you want to make someone feel unimportant, that’s how you do it. If I did that to one of my clients, even a potential client, my head would be paraded through the streets.

The second incident today, and this one is particularly infuriating, occurred while cooking up a dinner for my wife only to realize that the food we’d bought less than a week ago had turned moldy. Mold is often a fine-dining accompaniment, but this dinner was nowhere near fancy enough to qualify. Mold non-grata, in essence.

Other stuff in our fridge bought elsewhere: just fine. This particular product was a Big Name Grocery Store name-brand product that I’d once tried to make home-made to disastrous results (read: it was so bad, it was one of the three times I’ve seen my wife facepalm and we ate Taco Bell to remove the tastes from our mouths). It had hidden mold – enough that I missed it entirely while prepping and cooking it.

And it’s not the only product I’ve bought from Big Name Grocery Store that went moldy within a day or two of buying it. In fact, 50% of what I buy there in certain categories goes moldy within days. So I called up the 1-800 number on the back of the package and tried to report the issue, but instead of being greeted by a person, I was greeted by an automated system. The option to report an issue took three menus to get to. I gave up after about 15 minutes of trying to reach someone.

Big businesses are no stranger to disappointing their customers, lest we forget my tale of woe in Brides, Burns, and Bed Bath and Beyond.

It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure out that ignoring your customers, making them wait around, and making them jump through hoops to report a problem… that’s screwed up. Are you running a dog show or a business? If that’s the story you’re telling about your business, whether it’s big or small, you’ll be going the way of Ultimate Electronics, CompUSA, and Linnens ‘N’ Things soon enough.

Contrast this to my friends at Mail ‘n’ Copy on Timberline and Drake. The owner, the staff, everybody – they all know my name. I told it to the owner once. Each time I go in, “Hi Nick, haven’t seen you in a while. How’s WTF Marketing?” When I get a package, they call so I know when to come in. When my bill is due, they call with a reminder a week ahead of time. They ask how Stacy (my wife) is and what she’s doing. When I told them she makes custom greeting cards, they wanted to put them on their counter to sell.

That’s a business I can stand behind.

For the ones I can’t: if your customers are *begging* to pay you money, why are you making it so hard for them?

If you syndicate your Tweets to LinkedIn – without using the #in filter, you’re going to look silly, or worse:

It’s rare that I find something even I wouldn’t want to post on LinkedIn, but this one made me cringe. None of us are immune to rookie errors like this; you can only hope your followers take it in stride because it’s a Tweet – but damn. On LinkedIn, this is like commenting during your interview that the receptionist looks like she had work done.

Here’s the deal: If you indiscriminately post the same content to every network, you get a #FAIL. If you post two sexual terms in a LinkedIn update, you get a #FAIL. I’m all for irreverence, but if your connections aren’t, you might be in for #FAIL number three (which is usually fatal to their business).

(Header image: Picard’s Facepalm thanks to PicardFacepalm.com)

During this time, I’ve discovered some things that you just shouldn’t do and have compiled a list for your convenience.

1. Ask cute girl to dance.
2. Tell said cute girl that you want to have her babies.
3. Tell a knock-knock joke.
4. Speak Klingon.
5. Ask the bank teller for money.
6. Do voiceover work for daycare center.
7. Ask the kids at said daycare center to “keep it down”.

In my haste and sleep-deprived delirium, I completely forgot to write about one of the most surreal moments of the trip – day 2, leaving Utah for Portland.  Having traveled to Promontory, UT for the Spiral Jetty, we were subsequently turned away because:

1. they wouldn’t lend/tour us in a government vehicle,
2. they wouldn’t give us the names of local farmers who might be willing to tour us for a fee, and
3. they suggested our car might explode should we proceed.

As an aside, Promontory, UT is the spot where at 12:47 PM on May 10, 1869, the trans-continental railroad was completed with a golden spike.  Beyond this amazing achievement, we thought, Promontory is smack-dab at the crossroads of Nowhere and Nothingness, having not spurred on any sort of initiative to grow beyond a museum.  As we began on our journey back (the same route) and fully expecting to see the same amount emptiness as before, we were instead greeted by this:

Being from Parker, CO, I’m not new to cows (or cows are not new to me, that is) – but the fact that we somehow missed an entire herd of cows on our way in was somewhat astonishing, considering they weren’t freaking there – there was nothing freaking there. We saw maybe 3 people this entire leg through Utah, and suddenly we were smack-dab in the middle of a herd of cows with a cowboy wrangling us and the herd.

This was a truly humbling experience.  Here we are, four relatively slick city dwellers, going 2 mph through a herd of cows, pretending that we were just another cow – albeit a really fat, really blue cow filled with 24 year olds.

Having cleared the cows and onward to continue our journey, we discovered that “nothing” isn’t always what it seems.  Shortly before entering Idaho, there’s a space and rocket facility called ATK.

What does ATK do? Well, they make freaking rocket boosters.  See?

Right.

The juxtaposition between being herded around with cows to rocket boosters that fly to the moon and put satellites in orbit was incredibly surreal and made for an amazing experience for a town filled with “nothing”.

We came through Promontory to see the Spiral Jetty and thought we’d failed, having not been able to achieve what we’d set out to do that day.  Instead, we left with one of the coolest and most memorable legs of the trip.

Proof that even when things don’t quite go your way, it’s still worthwhile to keep your eyes open and on the horizon for the next best thing.

I’m not sure when it happened, but we’ve transitioned into a culture where we think people are about as unique and valuable as used cars.

Want proof? Check out PlentyOfFish.com. Plenty of Fish is a free online dating website.

Yours truly, being of sound mind and judgement, signed up to find some cool new people to become friends with (and by extension, maybe a spark or two). I started by writing out a thorough profile for myself – a solid four or five paragraph description of me and what I was looking for. Having spent a good hour on it, and uploading some great pictures of myself, I figured I was ready – and I started my search. What I found was not what I expected.

Aside from the 1% of what has to be brain damage-induced CAPS LOCK-ONLY PROFILES or people who can’t discern the difference between its/it’s and they’re/their/there, about 98% of the profiles fall under what I affectionately refer to as, “Used Car Classifieds”.

Almost every girl in this category describes herself with, “I love to dress up and go out, but I also love to hang out at home. I love my friends and my family and I love to laugh.” Great. You’ve just described almost any human. These girls usually also describe themselves with a short paragraph (as short as possible, usually) with the most generic BS you can imagine. How the hell do I start a conversation from, “I like music and cats” ?

That’s not the kind of stuff I want to know. I want to know the crazy shit you don’t tell anyone else… what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? If we’re on a date and you have gas, do you let it loose and blame the waiter? (for the record: awesome) What songs do you sing in the shower? What kinds of flowers will cause you to punch me in the junk? You know, the important things in life.  Holy hell, just tell me the truth, even if it sucks – that’s how I live my life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be a jerk or a snob… but, really – what girl can’t be described with “warm, friendly, loves to laugh, and loves to hang out with friends”? Some of these girls post generic, far-off photos or photos of them and their best friend – so you have no idea whether the girl you’re going to converse with is the cute redhead with eyes greener than the plains of Scotland or the snaggletoothed hunchback who may or may not be her brother.

I’ve never been concerned with looks – first and foremost I’m attracted to a great laugh – but sonofabitch, I’m not a small guy. If our combined weight is going to bottom-out my car, I should at least have some advance warning.

What ends up happening is, with so many “average” listings, you end up looking for the different ones. The ones that don’t smile in their pictures; you know, the ones that talk about stuff like black magic, sacrificing goats, and drinking the blood of their enemies (especially that bitch Sally from 3rd grade!) In essence, you’re now delighted by Edsels and Pintos. “So, is murder just a hobby or your full time profession?”

Worse still, the girls who only love to talk about themselves (and have tricked you into thinking they took a long time to write their profile) – these girls will ask one question to your three, leading you to believe they’re interested in learning about you. Instead, they’ve lured you into their narcissistic chasm of despair that can only be escaped from when you realize they’re about as deep as Deimos’s gravity well (you could literally sneeze yourself into orbit).

When you -do- discover the rare girl who has done a great job writing her profile, you have to contain your excitement so you don’t scare her off. Plenty of Fish shows you if they’ve read your message or not and if they’ve deleted your message. Too excited? Read Deleted. Bad joke in title? Unread Deleted. To girls this skittish, however, the delete button is just a ruse to connect better with more people on their favorite subject: silence.

I love rejection, but that level of skittishness should be reserved for people who talk about raping clowns and hoarding cats, neither of which appear on my profile.

What the hell happened? Why don’t we take pride in who we are and what we love? Why are we so afraid to open up to people? Surely you can think up more than a paragraph about yourself? I guess average works for people who want or settle for the average. You want a car with seatbelts, maybe an airbag. It should go places without much trouble. Maybe it has a few scratches, dings, dents, but the headlights work. You can put junk in the trunk. And that’s how they approach love: they want the average, the safe, the standard. Average is what you want when you don’t know what you want.

I don’t want average. Fuck average - I know exactly what I want and I’ll find it. I want to share a love like the world has never seen before – I deserve that. A girl who lights up like a nuclear bomb just at the thought of me, because I certainly do for her. A girl with fireworks in her eyes and a sense of humor like a Ninja on Redbull. A girl who can swear in Klingon and kick my ass with just one look. I want a love that people will tell stories about for ages.

Now I’ve just got to find her.

I’ve really pushed my own boundaries to see what I could learn about myself.  I love what I’ve found out.

I learned I really like dancing.  I’ve never been very selective about how I make an ass out of myself, and all things being equal, dancing isn’t normally on that list.  I saw knee-bending and shuffle-shoeing as a trivial act – boy was I wrong.  After hosting LaidOffCamp all the major players were over at Kevin Buecher‘s house, hanging out with him, his roommate Si, and our cool new friends Cali and Polly.  Cali is a pro dancer, and an all-around free spirit.  She randomly decided that she wanted to teach us the Cha Cha.

I volunteered to go first. A quick lesson later, I was Cha-Cha-ing. Cali has unwittingly paved the path to my first white vinyl suit and disco ball purchases.

A few nights later, on my own accord, I opted to go country-dancing to a rockabilly band at Lucky Joes with Christina (who not only is a fun dancer, but does hilarious things with saloon peanuts if you give her the chance).  Later, I ended up testing out Polly’s Cha Cha skills, and with huge smiles we added spins to the mix.  Polly, operating under the assumption that I’m somehow skilled at catching spun women (as it turns out, groping non-”sexual harassment worthy” areas is actually a useful social skill), danced and spun with me miraculously without injury.

I learned that I’ve helped the community to help itself.  The Digital Gunslingers reconvened on Tuesday, and the accomplishments of the people in the group are truly noteworthy.  Fred started his own blog.  Carol started her own jewelry business and came within $70 of breaking even for all her initial equipment costs.  Dale created a video to recruit new tallent to his practice.  Vi created a new traditional music group.  To say that I’m proud to be a part of their lives is an understatement, and we’re starting a year of storytelling to make 2010 the year of sharing all the amazing things we do.

I learned that you can make a best friend in less than a week. Kevin and Si have quickly become my new best friends. You will never meet more caring, considerate people who pour everything they are into everyone else and ask for nothing in return.  Bachelors through and through (and fed up with plain white toast), they let me take them on an adventure; I showed them how to grocery shop like Ghandi after the fast (as Alton Brown says, no unitaskers).

I learned that anything you say to a child becomes a binding contractual agreement. I met my new friend Jessy today, who is the mother of two amazing children.  I bought her family dinner, chinese from South China on Harmony – and the kids were naturally most excited for the fortune cookies.  So, I told them about my practice of keeping every fortune I’ve ever pulled from a cookie and how they always come true (yes, this is true).  I showed ‘em my collection from my wallet before it was time to eat and they were all ears.

Then came the magical moment to crack open the cookies to reveal our true destinies.  The boy’s fortune reads, “You look pretty.” His sister starts giggling and says something like, “Some people think he looks like a girl.”  As with any handsome fellow, this is enough to cause his tears to start, probably because I had worked up the whole deal of how they always come true and he’d never given much thought to someday becoming “fabulous”.  Quickly I offered to give him a second chance; he could have my fortune and I would take his, as long as he was okay with the prospect of tempting fate.

He nodded and I warned, “You know, mine probably says that I’m pretty too, what then?”  He shrugged.  I cracked open the cookie to reveal some great tome of Chinese wisdom better than “You look pretty” and he was satisfied enough to declare he wanted me to see his cool videogames.

All these adventures were possible because I took the time to step out of my comfort zone and try something new… and I -love- what I’m learning about myself in the process.  To hell with boundaries, this is fun!

Jake Jabbs was a guest being interviewed, so I asked him about his branding.  No disrespect intended, but American Furniture Warehouse, I said, didn’t have too much American-made furniture last time I was in.

I should preface this by saying that good furniture can come from anywhere – Americans aren’t the end-all-be-all producers of everything amazing.  The question was never about furniture.  It was about branding and values.

Jake responded by informing us that 60% of what he buys is American furniture and he prefers American when he can get it.  

To brand yourself as American when you really mean only 60% is dishonest. So I followed up.

You set the values of your brand yourself - everything is stars and stripes, wouldn’t it make sense to advertise those values?  Isn’t it your responsibility as the leading American furniture spokesperson to educate your marketplace that if you want American, it will cost more than if you import it?

Jake answered by rehashing the old, “That’s a question of politics.  Customers choose the price points of the market…” and “Americans can’t compete on certain things”.  At which point I lost the floor for asking questions.

Jake Jabbs answered honestly and professionally – and I have no quarrel with a guy who’s employed (and retained) so many people over so many years.  I even went and shook his hand afterward and thanked him for answering (and he thanked me for asking). I can’t fault Jake Jabbs for doing what he thought was right – because at the end of the day, he’s true to his values and still buys American when he can – but American and Affordable (the market he’s developed) are sometimes mutually exclusive in his business.  Fair enough.

Afterward, though – after a series of increasingly painful “duh”-level questions from the University of Northern Colorado business student audience, one UNC student in particular came up to me and expressed his embarrassment that I’d asked the question – implying I’d embarrassed everyone with my bigoted “pro-American attitude”.

First of all – this was a question about branding and values.  Being embarrassed is the purview of a brainwashed sheep.  It’s like looking at Star Wars and thinking, “Oh, I don’t support War, so I won’t watch the movie.” Frankly, I expected more out of the UNC students.  What kind of college student are you if you can’t ask -potentially- red flag questions at the risk of looking like a total ass?  That’s what college is for.  That’s how you learn.  Take risks – that’s what entrepreneurship is about.

If you’re an entrepreneur, a business student, and afraid to ask the question, “Hey, uh… when you say American, what exactly do you mean?” then you shouldn’t be at college.  If you’re embarrassed by the implications of a question like that, you’ve become a blind, politically correct sheep.  You do not deserve the privilege of the hard-working professors’ time.

Second – when did patriotism become uncooth?  Remember that we’re talking about a business that shortens its name in advertisements to “American Furniture”.  That implies that you sell American furniture.  American furniture should, by nature of the name, come from America – there’s nothing bigoted about it, that’s the fucking name of the business.  Moreover, what about local artisans – like the chair-makers of Parker or the table-makers of Fort Collins?  Do they have a place at American furniture?

Why did nobody else ask these sorts of questions? What the fuck?

Only three people in that audience could look me in the eye after I’d asked a simple question about branding.  No wonder we don’t praise Entrepreneurs in this country.  If the best entrepreneur candidates in the room have a “don’t ask questions, be a sheep” mentality we don’t deserve praise.

I’ll reserve my thoughts for after the image, but today I received this e-mail from AT&T (click on it to go to the iTunes store listing):

You might know that the Apple developer license outright forbids only recently has allowed iPhone developers to create turn-by-turn GPS applications, provided they bring their own maps.  It seemed like an odd quirk in an otherwise decent contract, like maybe Apple was worried they’d get sued for bad GPS directions or something.  Apple’s rejection policy is usually pretty decent – but there are a few times when something stinks.

For example, you couldn’t get Skype on the iPhone for a while.  Apple has also blocked the Google Voice application, claiming it duplicates functionality available on the iPhone.  My thought (well, and Leo Laportes and Mike Arrington’s and… ) – AT&T is worried about their racket on text messages – which they currently bleed you dry for each month and Google Voice gives away for free.

And now – we finally see that AT&T wants a piece of that GPS money – this turn-by-turn GPS application costs $9.99 a month to use.  This was the reason behind Apple’s mysterious “no turn-by-turn apps” policy.

Apple – it’s time you cut the cord.  I don’t want to play anymore.  I think it’s time that we start writing letters.  Or stop buying iPods or new computers or new software from Apple until they agree to break this unethical contract with AT&T.  We’ve clearly overloaded AT&T’s network, anyway – which likely would never have happened if Apple and AT&T hadn’t made this stupid contract in the first place.

The cost of the iPhone wouldn’t have to change – in fact, the competition would probably give Apple the traction they need to maintain their price points, with the added benefit to the consumer that carriers would compete to offer lower-cost iPhone plans.  The iPhone costs each user about $2,000 a year on AT&T – twice as much as a normal smart phone.  Can we finally agree that we’ve been bent over the table?

With 9 million iPhone users the US, we’ve got to have some say.

That’s right, Mexico.  And here’s the e-mail to prove it: (click on it to go to the page w/ the Simpson’s Trivia Link!)

You just can’t make this sh!t up.