Zero / Love

I'm starting a new part to this blog. I have the whole family part, and the technical part, now its time for the bitch part. This is going to be an on going bitch about Customer Service in Birmingham Alabama. So why this part? It is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when someone is employed in a customer service position and they SUCK at it. Why do people work in these positions when they should be doing something like I don't know picking up trash along the highway! I understand people have bad days, I understand life is not always fair but if you work in Customer Service "GET OVER IT".  For the Corporate People and Business owners around, watch your people.  CS Rating will * start for SUCK customer server, horrible period, up to ***** for Awesome Customer Service. If no * then the customer service is dead! The staff should be fired and the store closed.

 

To Start:
Walgreen's Store Number 6033 at 1815 9th Ave. N., Bessemer, Al 35023

CS Rating: *

We had our daughter call in our normal prescriptions, and we spend $300 easy a month on, being my wife and myself are both on monthly medications. Normally we go to Hueytown Walgreens, but knowing we where going to be late, we decided to call them into this store. They where called in at 3:30 PM with a pick up of 7:00 PM. When we arrived there was a small line of 3 people. We arrived at 8:00 P.M and the girl says "Oh these where called in for 7:00 P.M, give me a minute to get them filled." This minute turned into us leaving after 9:00! This is crazy at any one point they had three people working the back, one at the drive thru, and one up front at register. With a max of 5 people picking up prescriptions. This is in efficient and ridicules. The pharmacist was in the back literally throwing prescriptions and slamming things. He almost reminded me of a 3 or 4 your old, I was waiting on him to drop and just start crying.

What is the point of them putting drive thru's in? This is about one of the stupidist ideas someone at Walgreen's ever cam up with? Or it is an idea that needs to be fixed. I thought the idea of the drive thru was to have a place to drop off or pick up? Tonight there was a pick up at the drive thru and it was there when we arrived. It continued to sit there and was still threre when we left. I seriously believe they where dead in the pick up if it wasn't for the obnoxious ringing of the bell! I almost can't fault them since they where sitting so long, even though the two people working the front and drive through where arguing over who was handling the customer?!?! Yes they where arguing at one point over who was getting this customers prescriptions. 

One lady that was waiting very patiently for her prescriptions finally says "I'll just come back after 10pm and pick them up". So what does the pharmacist do... Fills her prescription keeping my wife and myself sitting waiting even longer.

Want to know where the manager was during this hell time? He was in the pharmacy filling prescriptions! He should have been at the front calming people down, but then I saw some of them women up front and I can't blame him I wouldn't want to be up there either.

 

So I am not going to keep saying, oh I should have posted. I'm going to write about this and that. I keep doing it and I keep having issues come up. Two weeks ago I worked 80+ hours at work. Then last week I was home sick with pneumonia with the doctor threatening to put me in the hospital. I slept alot and when I wasn't sleeping I just didn't feel like doing anything. Much less look at a computer. 

This week i'm programing. Let me just state "I am NOT a programmer". We have programmers we just don't have enough. Now don't get me wrong I'm not a moron. I know enough about PHP/Perl/Shell Scripting. I just don't claim it as my job. So I am writing some PHP stuff to pull from a database, give logins, and give some users the ability to edit the database. I am having fun with it, writing the main page to display the table in a nice straight table. Then all the things you can do from searching, editing, to just viewing in a modalbox. So you have a single page with a table and modalboxes popping up all over the place when you click to do a function. 

Last week I installed a ProFTPD Server. I know I said I was sick, but that don't stop work. So this server is run over SSL and has a web interface to control it. So I found a ProFTP Admin and modified it a ton to get the function out of it I need for a client. I added the ability to create the home dir and directories under it automatic. I made the group settings more of "group" setting by making it actually give the groups something, a shared directory.

Well thats it for now, I will try to post aga... never mind.

PC World - Linux Communications Suite Enters Beta

I can speak from experience here. We tried an alternative to Exchange. We searched and searched, we tried several and finally we found the one we thought would be it. We deployed it to several clients and all hell broke loose. First every couple of days there was an update. This required us to go on site and install and addon to outlook. Then the server would not work or would randomly disconnect. We purchased support from this company only to get the run around, another patch, or no answer at all. At one time Adobe wouldn't work inside of outlook for a client that had the "addon" installed. No response, for 9 months. Then they got sold...

We are now selling hosted exchange, and I can say it works exactly how I would have expected. More important there is support and the clients are familiar with it.

Vista, and Mac support still not available in the other.

Ok so your developing software, and you have a great base to start with. Your going to add some GUI stuff to it. Your going to give users a way to control it without using several hundred command lines. This software will run on Linux, and it will be direct competition with a Microsoft Product. So you get together a team of programmers, and a support staff. You release a start product, and sell the hell out of it. Then it happens.

The next release you put out, is half finished. It has hundreds of bugs. Crashes randomly. Sometimes will not even load. Why? It makes no sense. Whats worse is you don't even tell people of the bugs till they find one or two themselves and contact you freaking out. Then you tell them...

Oh wait don't install that. Wait till Service Pack 1. Omg I can't believe you installed that.

It almost sounds like a Cheech & Chong movie Up In Smoke.

But I digress. Why could you not have waited to release it. Don't claim to be different. Then release the same garbage. At least if you do; have a support staff that knows what they are doing. Your only hurting yourself. I can always run the Microsoft Product. At least their support is dependable. Hell if nothing else I can step outside and find a MCSE somewhere, down at Jiffy Lube. Well thats what he said as he was putting oil in my car.