DigitalHobbit

My wife just received a new Bank of America debit card and managed to persuade me to activate the card by calling the number on the sticker. In the past, this was usually a simple and painless procedure: enter the card number, the expiration date, and the last 4 digits of the SSN, and you were all set. But this time, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. While the activation was supposedly being processed, I had to endure 4 lengthy and annoying advertisements for credit reports and similar services, before I finally got the confirmation that the activation was successfully completed. After each ad, I was given the option to press “1″ to take advantage of the “offer”, but I was never given an option to skip further ads. Overall the call probably took about 5 minutes…

This is an absolutely shameless and rude way to treat your customers. It is one thing to place ads like this on your website or on paper statements, but forcing loyal customers to sit through several minutes worth of this crap is simply unacceptable.

If you’ve ever been annoyed at how difficult it can be to get a customer support representative on the line instead of having to navigate through levels and levels of automated voice systems, this might be for you: gethuman cheats.

The comprehensive list of phone numbers includes many banks, retailers, manufacturers, airlines, phone and other utility companies, and more.

(via BoingBoing)

Once more, Gmail released a bunch of new features. I am particularly excited about the new Gmail Shortcuts. These show up on the right hand side of the page, right above the sponsored links, when Gmail was able to parse a mailing address or a tracking number from the email. I order a lot of items at Amazon and other online stores, and while the shipping confirmations generally contain tracking numbers (at least for UPS and FedEx), they usually don’t link directly to the respective package tracking pages. Gmail remedies this, which should prove to be very convenient. Similarly, Gmail displays Google Maps links for any addresses that it finds in an email, which should come in handy as well.

I should probably order some Christmas presents for myself to test the package tracking feature some more…

When I went to Amazon a few minutes ago, I was presented with a memo from Jeff Bezos, introducing the new Amazon Prime service. This sounds like an excellent idea, and certainly one that I’m bound to benefit from. Amazon Prime requires a yearly membership fee of $79, for which you get free second day shipping on most items. You can also upgrade to overnight shipping for $3.99 per item. We order from Amazon all the time and definitely spend more on shipping than $79, even though we often take advantage of the free (but slow…) super saver shipping.

Almost sounds like the good old dot-com days, when stores like Outpost.com were offering free overnight shipping (and Kozmo.com offered free 30-minute delivery for something as cheap as a box of Altoids, but that’s a different story…).

Sign me up!

Even though the Amazon Plog initially did not show up for me when this feature was first launched, it started to show up a few days ago. The name definitely seems like a poor marketing idea, since this feature has absolutely nothing to do with a blog, other than its blog-like layout and the reverse-chronological order. The entries (at least the ones in my plog) consist of the usual Amazon recommendations as well as quick summaries of recently placed orders. Getting this order summary on the front page is actually a neat feature for Amazon addicts such as myself and my wife. Still, disguising this as a blog seems like a weird idea…