Planet Sillicon

And another phone system

By blog on May. 9, 2010.

I’m looking again… at least this time it’s not for me!

I’ve no problem helping people, no problem at all. Helping people who aren’t particularly nice to me and are somewhat demanding about my help is another matter, though. I’ve helped out my SO’s parents before and it’s not a fun experience. I helped them get set up with a proper internet connection and a website for their travel agency business and that in itself was quite a challenge!

Their old phone system has become unreliable, so they want a new one. No problem there at all. Now, they want my help in finding a business phone system that’s right for them. Apparently they’ve gotten quite a bit more clientèle since I set their website up for them and now I’m their official go-to guy for all things tech related.

It’s actually helping to bridge the gap between my SO’s parents and I: We’ve got common ground now and I think they’re getting a better chance to know me. I’ve found them a pretty good deal and they’re happy enough with it that we’ll be going ahead with the install next week.

It’s nice to be able to help my SO’s parents, but I do look forward to not talking to them so much. Don’t get me wrong, by and large they’re nice people, but they’re not my sort of people. Not really my SO’s kind, actually, so she doesn’t spend much time around them or talk to them all that often either. It seems to work for them: there doesn’t seem to be any animosity or hurt feelings about how rarely she calls, which is nice. I hate seeing my SO upset by her parents, there’s not much I can actually do and yet I want to do something to help her.

By the way, I can’t have any contact without my mother in law without checking out the Mother in law hell website, it puts you in the frame of mind that you’re observing an event in nature when you’re in laws say something rude, rather than feeling it’s directed at you. Good to get a slightly detached perspective with them. Helps sometimes.

Customer care lines…

By blog on Apr. 11, 2010.

Had a terrible experience with one today. Was just great!

A while back I bought a whole set of Panasonic digital cordless phones for my house. I don’t recommend them. They’re almost as quiet as the phones I bought them to replace, and they’ve got a pretty bad battery life on them, too.

One of the phones we’ve been having trouble with. The battery casing isn’t tight enough, allowing the battery pack to become loose, and then the bloody thing doesn’t charge properly. Because they’re still under warranty I found the customer service number and gave them a call to see about having the defective phone replaced or repaired.

I was treated like a moron over the phone. I’m extremely familiar with technology in many forms, as well as being tech support for other people, and I’ve never spoken to, nor been spoken to, in this fashion before in my life. The snotty little chavette on the phone asked me a few questions about my provider, found out it wasn’t the common BT and was about to blame my provider for the issue as she’d never before heard of them. She was very confused when I said the phone lines go through my broadband modem, and insisted for a while that I was talking about mobile broadband in which case I wasn’t in the right area. I told her it wasn’t a problem with the lines and it wasn’t mobile broadband, so she asked a few other questions and then the really fantastic question of whether I’d plugged it in, and without even waiting for me to answer said she’d wait for me to try that and put me on hold for eight minutes. Wow. That’s appalling.

She got back on the phone and asked if it was working now. I was actually quite patient with her as my SO was sitting with me and laughing as each minute ticked by and I was still on hold, still listening to crappy hold music which fazed in and out. I told her that I’d had it plugged in, but the battery case was loose so the battery didn’t connect properly, leading it to randomly go flat and take a full 24 hours of recharging to work again, but that only worked when we took the battery case off and used an elastic band to hold the battery pack in place. She told me that that wasn’t using the phone in the correct manner and that this voided the warranty.

At this point I told her to put her manager on the phone. She asked why, so I told her I was going to talk to the manager about her level of incompetence and rudeness, at which point she because a very angry chavette and spluttered for a few seconds then hung up. I rang back and got a different consultant, who did put me through to the manager when I explained what had happened. I wonder what will happen to that girl…

It was hard not to just jump online and start looking for new business and office telephone systems, but the Panasonic people were alright in the end and are actually going to replace the phone in question, as apparently it’s a known fault with that particular model. So that’s nice.

VoIP; switch now or wait?

By blog on Jun. 7, 2009.

I currently run my home phone through my cable modem, and it works pretty well, in most cases. There is of course the issue that if we have a power blackout, we have no home phone, so it can’t be relied upon in emergencies. That’s something that the company makes you acknowledge before installing the line.

I recently saw this article about the conversion to VoIP phones being around 50% in the next ten years, which made me take into account what I have just mentioned, and the fact that call rates are vastly cheaper, all culminating in my consideration of swapping over now to a VoIP phone.

When considering swapping over to a VoIP phone system, one does have to take into account the fact that as this system runs through your modem, it cannot be relied upon in emergencies; but I understand that and have a mobile phone around at all times. There is also the issue of latency and jitter, which is essentially time delay due to distance that your data has to travel to reach the person you are talking to, and the sort of bouncing, frame skipping effect that can illicit. This is being combated though, through various data transfer coding techniques. It seems to me that the challenges being presented by this new type of communication are quickly being dealt with. I think the name puts people off, too. It sounds very complicated, but really it isn’t. Voice over Internet Protocol is too much of a mouthful, so VoIP works for me!

I also ponder the price issue. This service is much cheaper than your average home phone, but along with that reduction in cost is the reduction in quality of service assurances. But honestly, VoIP is very close to what I am currently using, except VoIP would probably get me better connections and would definitely cost me less… I think I just made up my mind!