Category Archives: Security

LJ – At least 21 killed in Chicago nightclub 'stampede'

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From 2/17/2003

I have said it over and over, humanity is 3 meals and 15 minutes away from complete loss of civilized rational behavior. Case in point, this tragedy that happened in Chicago. All it took for rational civilized people to revert to a herd of frightened animals was “perhaps mace or pepper spray being sprayed in the air”. In this day and age when we are supposed to be educated and I dare even suggest somewhat elightened how can it be that people can undergo such a powerful reversion to primitive behaviors in what amounts to a drop of a hat? I suppose the lesson here lies in how easy people are to aggregate, to form a mob. Folk always surprise me, both in their individual brilliance (sometimes) and in their combined stupidity. Now I know why I’m not a bar person. 🙂

LJ – Shrublet In Hell

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From 3/17/2003

Here we all sit, on the brink of war… and all I can think of is “We are a Nation of Peace” as a flying image, colliding with the notion that we are essentially going to flood the Euphrates and Tigris rivers with blood. We’re going to most likely bomb Iraq into the stone age – so much for being a nation of peace. I see Dubya’s new anti-war stance not as some honorable position but rather it’s the “Get the Hell out of Dodge” policy, that it’s just about Dubya and Saddam. Why don’t they simply just sit down like civilized people and try to bludgeon each other to death with their own hands? I’d go so far as to say that this may very well be Generation Y’s Vietnam. Our proud soldiers go off to fight some foreign battle and what of them when they come back? How many Vietnam Vets came back to a chilly America? How many “Rumble in the Sandbox” troops will come home facing a public that doesn’t believe in them because they fought a war against one single man and an idea? Where is good old fashioned 20th century thinking? Ah yes, right here in the enlightened 21st Century. I suppose it’s better to bomb Iraq into the stone age and create thousands more little Saddams than it would be in pursuing a more peaceful and more lucrative solution, say, flooding the middle east with American goodwill. Hah, fat chance of that happening now. The best way to battle terror is to blindly lash out, that way you can create destroy it with a war.

I sit back and think upon loftier thoughts because all of this depresses me, and I find my mind wandering towards what Jesus Christ said, that the solution was to not kill, but rather to forgive and to love. I find it quite engaging to hear Dubya invoke a God he is currently plotting on rendering moot. What footing does any good Christian have if they in good conscience allow this war to proceed, knowing that they have turned away from the teachings of their God because of laziness? It’s far easier to bomb and kill and murder than it is to forgive. I can just imagine the knot in the pit of the Pope’s stomach when the first bomb falls on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

In brighter news, the Yahoo! main page is a cavalcade of good news items:

  • Bush Says Saddam Has 48 Hours to Leave or It’s War
  • U.S. Raises Terror Alert Level Due to Iraq Crisis
  • U.S. Sees Signs Iraq May Use Chemical, Bio Arms
  • Turkey to Debate Helping U.S. on Tuesday
  • Annan Orders UN Staff Out of Iraq
  • Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts
  • Charges Delayed in Elizabeth Smart Case

The part that particularly drew my attention was this one: * Deadly Pneumonia Defies Global Health Experts. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Flitting Away

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Here I sit at Albany International Airport, Gate A5 waiting for my flight. I went through the TSA security checkpoint. It appears as though Albany has elected to only use the backscatter scanners to secure passengers. After requesting to pass through the magnetometer, a passive scanner that I am comfortable with, and then being denied that, I elected to pursue “Enhanced Patdown” which was a Code 22 in the TSA. I had to wait only a very short while and a man approached me, took me over to a staging area and proceeded with the enhanced patdown.

I don’t really see how that is upsetting to anyone at all unless you are violently touch-sensitive. It was very tame and wholly not-upsetting. I have a longstanding issue with the backscatter scanners, cutting to the chase, I don’t trust that technology. It wasn’t cleared by the FDA, there aren’t thousands of studies that tell me it’s safe, so I assume it’s hazardous to my health. It’s important to understand that I have a special sensitivity to being exposed to ionizing radiation. I have a huge risk factor for prostate cancer and the last thing I want is to expose a prostate cell to any radiation that I don’t actually have to endure. It’s the difference between a cell that lives and dies naturally and a cell that gets damaged, goes on a bloody rampage and kills me with prostate cancer. Would a backscatter scanner do that? Chances are 99 out of 100 that it would not and that I’m simply acting beyond rationality in regards to this. But if I can elect to follow a path that doesn’t require me to walk into a machine I don’t know and don’t trust and do something else, a simple act that allows me to skip the risk altogether, why not? I can sleep at night knowing I didn’t consciously expose myself to something harmful and I don’t have to live with the weaksauce spectre of the headline that might be “Backscatter Scanners Cause Cancer” which may or may not be a New York Times headline. I just skip it altogether.

The enhanced patdown was actually quite a non-event. Perhaps it’s the fact that I have a rather loose sense of propriety, in a way that I’m just a big old slut that means that being touched, all the way to what amounts to a kind of non-sexual petting. It’s really not that thrilling at all. The TSA has stopped exploring all the parts of a mans body, so you don’t actually have to worry anymore about junk-handling. I was half looking forward to some junk-handling personally. The fact that the procedures changed makes a whatever event into a complete non-issue. Oh well. At least the fellow doing the enhanced patdown wasn’t attractive otherwise I’d have lots more to write about. “Do you have anything in a 6’6” blond otter?” If only you could select the TSA rep who gave you the pat-down, that could be a pseudo-non-sexual Top 10 TSA award. 🙂 Yeah yeah yeah, I’m a big old slut. Yeah yeah yeah.

The TSA apparently doesn’t think that my 1L stainless steel Hydroflask is worth commenting on or asking to see the inside of. They missed it in O’Hare, and they missed it in Albany. I think they’ll always miss it. What’s in my Hydroflask? Nothing. I threw out the water before I left for the airport, but what if I didn’t?

This only reinforces my original precepts that the TSA is performing security theater to make us feel better. That there really isn’t any security actually being secured, but actually just people from the federal government who are there to give the impression that we are safe. Either way, they catch some things, and they miss a few others. As for the enhanced pat-down, whatever it was supposed to detect is quite silly. It’s just a procedure to impress upon me how safe my flight is going to be.

Whatever.

Trip to Albany

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We drove from Kalamazoo to O’Hare airport yesterday morning and there was absolutely no traffic to contend with. Parked and got in, got our tickets, passed through security and both legs of our trip went without an issue.

One telling bit was the security at O’Hare. I have to admit that it was mostly security theater. I say this because I had stored my empty HydroFlask 1L bottle in the base of my backpack. The HydroFlask is made of stainless steel and should be very opaque to X-Rays yet the TSA scanners elected to not ask to see it opened up and demonstrated that it was empty. One thing I dodged this time was having to walk through the backscatter scanner. For some unknown reason we were shunted off to the magnetometer instead of the backscatter scanner. I was actively going to request an enhanced pat-down if I had no choice but to go through the backscatter scanner.

This time through the entire meat-grinder of airplane travel and TSA security we didn’t have any delays, nor did we have any hangups anywhere. It was unusually easy and straightforward. I have to be careful lest I harvest any sense of hope that it could be like this in the future. 🙂

Although the lapse in security at O’Hare was a concern. It’s a good thing I’m a good guy and not a bad guy. 🙂

While I was on both legs of my trip out to Albany I figured that my Nook Simple Touch wasn’t really an electronic device because of it’s eInk technology. While the page is being displayed, the device is technically in an off-state. So while we were busy climbing and descending in and out of 10,000 feet of altitude I decided it was meaningless to pussyfoot around with using the device so I went along and just used it while the stewardi was busy walking away from me and closing it down when they wander past. It’s stupid that eInk technology is classed with other devices, like iPads and iPhones. The Nook worked great anyways and I really was happy with how it helped me pass the time aloft.

Senate Bill 1867 Sections 1031 and 1032

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Sometimes cleverness is a valuable trait and sometimes it’s just more bullshit. In this case, I revise my earlier statement about the ACLU claiming that S.1253 could lead to the indefinite incarceration of US Citizens in light that the actual bill has been resubmitted and altered as S.1867. It would have been helpful to know that this bill was what the ACLU was carrying on about and not S.1253.

So what is the problem with S.1867. Section 1031 LACKS the paragraph that S.1253 Section 1031 had. In both bills, 1032 still has it’s prohibition however the difference is quite upsetting.

According to OpenCongress.org the bill is still being considered by the Senate. It is important to clear up the confusion between these two bills. It appears that S.1253 is dead and S.1867 is moving forward.

Now that the confusion has cleared up, the ACLU was correct to raise an alarm for S.1867, but not for S.1253. These bill numbers are important!

Senate Bill 1253 Sections 1031 and 1032

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I caught myself in a mistake that I’m trying to correct. I accidentally shared a link to a web article that states that Senate Bill 1253 (Also apparently Senate Bill 1867) which is called the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 has two sections which have everyone really bent out of shape, including me, erroneously, until I READ THE BILL.

Section 1031 has most peoples attention, the bill text excerpt online lacks a vital section that exists in the raw material of the bill itself. For this I blame THOMAS at the Library of Congress for omitting it.

Section 1031’s Prohibition

20 (d) CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATION ON APPLICA-
21 BILITY TO UNITED STATES PERSONS.—The authority to
22 detain a person under this section does not extend to the
23 detention of citizens or lawful resident aliens of the United
24 States on the basis of conduct taking place within the
1 United States except to the extent permitted by the Con-
2 stitution of the United States.

Last I checked the only exception that I can reason out is the set of laws established by the US Constitution. I have lived quite well under those old laws and I don’t see how this text has ANY wriggle room to do what the ACLU claims it does.

Section 1032’s Prohibition

(b) REQUIREMENT INAPPLICABLE TO UNITED
12 STATES CITIZENS.—The requirement to detain a person
13 in military custody under this section does not extend to
14 citizens of the United States.

This one is utterly inescapable. It’s printed in BLACK AND WHITE. I can’t for the life of me see how either section would enable the government to indefinitely incarcerate any US Citizen at all. Such a thing would be a gross violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, to say nothing of violating the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the United States Constitution!

After reading this blog, which pretty much states what I see as a gross display of fear-mongering by the ACLU and adherence to the bombastic bullshit claims that this bill somehow puts our civil liberties at risk. The text is clear for both sections, if you read the text itself!

I did a cursory search on Google for the phrase S.1253 and there are just too many sites all repeating the same bombastic bullshit. Claiming that the ACLU knows, or that Lindsey Graham said this or that, but nobody can show me in the text where the proof of their argument lies. I have read the bill and those two paragraphs, for both sections seem to me to be perfectly acceptable when it comes to protecting my civil liberties as a US Citizen.

If I am right, that means that the ACLU is guilty of misleading the public and engaging in misinformation. If that is the case, I can’t trust anything else they say because if they lied once, what proof could there possibly be that they are honest about anything else? They put their necks on the line over this bill. Frankly, just the fact that I doubt the ACLU’s veracity on this subject makes me reject everything else they say – but when it comes to the court of public opinion, if they are caught, it could ruin their credibility.

SugarSync Review

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I tried out a new online cloud service called SugarSync this morning. I signed up for their free 5GB account and downloaded their SugarSync Manager for my Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6.8 iMac at work.

Everything went smoothly until I installed the SugarSync Manager. It prompted me to share some basic folders, like my Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders. I didn’t want that. I wanted to create a folder off the root of my Macintosh HD Hard Drive called SugarSync and just sync what I put in that folder. After turning all the other options off, I couldn’t find a way to add a specific folder that I wanted to that part of the installation. I clicked “Add More Folders” thinking that might lead me to something, but then the app seized up, beach-ball-of-death, and about 15 minutes later I “Force Quit” the SugarSync Manager program.

I then tried to restart it, and it would not start. I gave it another 5 minutes and tried again, and that time it took. What I saw was a very friendly, very simple sync manager application and I can appreciate it’s simplicity. I went to “Add a Sync Folder” and couldn’t find a way to add a specific folder, it just wasn’t possible as far as I could see. I clicked on Help and then read about how you can right-click on a folder to add it to SugarSync. I did that, and it worked.

Then I went into the SugarSync website and looked at the “Email-To-Sugarsync” feature. Right along this feature it prompts you to read the Terms Of Service. I went through the TOS, mostly standard stuff except for the section about what kind of files you can store on SugarSync. That they reserve the right to cancel the account if they find the files upsetting in some non-defined way. Not that I would send snuff videos to my SugarSync account, but without knowing what the terms in their TOS actually MEAN, well, I might as well just give up now before I actually do anything with the account.

It was a combination of the TOS, the software failures, and a kind of “suffers from simple” approach that did it in for me. Software that is designed for Ma and Pa Kettle can sometimes lack the sophistication that a user like me expects from a service. It’s perfectly acceptable to me to stuff the “Advanced Stuff” behind a button and I don’t mind going a little further to get access to those settings because I know that the majority of people using this software are very new to computers and too many options can turn them off.

In the end, I can’t recommend SugarSync. The only way I could deal with it would be if I filled the account with a 5GB AES-256 encrypted DMG file and just used that. That would protect me from the TOS and give me the freedom to store what I wanted without having to worry about damaging some faceless persons sense of morality. This design of course doesn’t work when you try the whole email-to-service angle, so it’s all just a big pile of wreckage.

Passports

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LiveJournal 10/14/2003 –

So this is a story of running-out-of-money-me. Didn’t expect that buying a passport required cash only, $172.30 whoosh kaboom. The man did say that it would be ready in 7-10 days and I have to get Scott his passport as well. I don’t have enough money left to do that and I don’t have enough money to buy anything else until 10/20/03, when I get paid. Once that happens then I’ll have enough money again and get scott his passport – and if we do it on 10/20/03, he should get it no later than 10 days past, 10/30/03. Lucky for us our trip doesn’t start until November 13th.

It’s the hidden costs that nibble you to death…

Saying Goodbye to Facebook

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Yesterday, July 19th, 2011 I said my final goodbyes to Facebook and announced my transition over to Google+. I went on Facebook and let everyone who could still see my wall, know that I was leaving that service for good and conducting all my sharing over on Google+. For me it was a matter of who built the better mousetrap. The services provided by Google+ far outweigh the headaches that I’d have to wade through to match on Facebook and I like the cleanliness of Google+ and the lack of baggage that comes with running a service that was at one point built for high school and college age kids to socialize on.

When I made my goodbye status updates on Facebook one of my friends who usually doesn’t say much brought up a valid point. His issue with Google+ is their privacy policy, which he took exception to. The policy is composed of jargon and legalese such as “non-exclusionary rights granted by the … for the perpetual use and non-exclusive publishing rights of the …” and so on and so forth. I am not about to make people who read these policies feel less of themselves by denigrating this legalese as so much meaningless and incomprehensible bibble-babble, but I’m not about to let something like that interfere with the path of my life and the things I want to do. Aren’t I running afoul of a policy that strips me of my rights for what I share and what I post online? Don’t I care about the things I write and the music I share and the photos I share? Doesn’t that bother me?

No. Not in one small bit does it bother me. My life is dull. What I have to share is free for the taking. Why should I license what I photograph, what I record, anything at all, when it comes down to it! What am I protecting? If I were to get all worked up I’d be protecting an endless and mindless stream of inconsequential doggerel and pablum. My social existence is important for me, and the message is important for the people in my life, but ownership of that material? It’s utter dreck. So what if someone comes along and licenses all my photography and lays claim to all that I have written. Someone comes along and asserts ownership over my blog? You are welcome to it! Much like Jazz, the crap that I create comes from an infinite source of unceasing malarkey. Grab as much of it as you want, I’ll just shovel up more. I’ve got a big shovel, boundless energy, and you’re just running garbage detail for me. Knock. Your. Socks. Off.

Really what it comes down to is none of these policies mean anything to people like me because we go ahead and live our lives. These policies exist for people who thrive on the minutiae of life. The only times these policies get dusted off and opened up is when someone tries to be a dick. Society gives us a shorthand when people are being dicks and so, in this social fabric, as long as the howler monkeys aren’t hooting and hollering too loudly the rest of us shrug and graze and go about our plain and dull lives. I haven’t heard anyone get bent about a privacy policy whatever from Google and even when I read the policy bibble-babble, I don’t really care. Non-exclusive, penultimate, pejorative, permissible, persimmons blah blah blah. It’s important to a very small subset of people and if it keeps them happy and shuts them up, why should I care? If the service disappears, so be it. It evaporates with all my writing and all my posted pictures? Uh, fine. I’ll just move on to something else. In the end I don’t care! I don’t care if I win, lose, or whatever. This sort of thing doesn’t interest me and life goes on.

And that brings me to another point, one more general than all the others. If everyone uncorked all these very dull and very blah-blah-blah policies and we all decided to dwell in the house of the righteous and mighty we’d quickly find ourselves so wrapped up in legal jargon and rules that we couldn’t do anything. Liability to perform a bowel movement? Nope. How about walking outside in the sunshine? Nope. Eating? Come on. I bet a legal eagle could find a series of policies that outlaw respiration! When you have this amount of text and only a very small segment of the population with enough interest to maintain consciousness when exposed to it, you end up with people who take others statements on-faith. We can’t process the endless stream of legal mumbo-jumbo, so we hire people who we pay and we trust to do it for us and give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Truth to be told, once we honor them enough to let them have a say, we forget all about what they said and get on with life! People tell us that we really should have lawyers look at things, and so we do. Not because we understand or actively even care about the lawyers but we understand that lawyers must be fed. Nobody told us why, and it doesn’t directly impact our lives to see to their proper feeding, so we write the right things, we post the right things and we look to the special creatures called lawyers and we look for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. That’s as far as it goes, kids! Life goes on! Work has to be done! Those agreements and policies are great, they’re done, yes! They were seen by somebody? Yes! Those somebodies were happy? YES! Well, good… WHATEVER. We move on.

Life has to find a way to trudge forward. These policies are meat for lawyers. The only time when you need a lawyer is when people deviate from the Golden Rule. Society pressures each of us to not stray from the Golden Rule, so for a lot of this, once penned, will never see the light of day again. This brings up another point that has bothered me for a long time, and that is the fine-print monsters. There are agreements everywhere and there is fine-print everywhere, you can’t escape it. There is what is written and there is what is understood and the two aren’t necessarily bound together! When someone decides to be a dick, to play the fine-print game, then the lawyers click their mandibles together and there is a feeding frenzy — for the lawyers! For the people in the drama, there is the victim of the dick, the dick, and the fat happy lawyers moaning in ecstasy and having little orgasms when they hear “billable hours”. So afterwards, the victim of the dick and the dick part ways and the victim has learned a lesson. The victim of the dick never approaches the dick again. This used to be the end of it. The dicks never really had anything else to fear from the victim because they were just one little meaningless nobody in a sea of meaningless nobodies. That is, until social media and social networking came to town. Now the victims of the dick can hop up on a soap-box and write about their experiences to all the other potential victims of the dick and warn them. “Dick is here, he’s after you, avoid him.” and so the dick starves and dies because his prey was alerted that he was in the tall grass and fled. This creates a new series of regulatory controls between the victims of the dicks and the dicks. Now that each one of us can instantly publish and amplify our warning hoots to everyone else, the dicks are on the run, scampering left and right looking for victims and finding nothing but pounded earth from the millions of victims that have fled. This is the natural order of things now, and this is why it’s important to not be a dick. The minute you are branded a dick, you are effectively ostracized from society, you are given a Scarlet D to wear and everywhere you go tales of your dickishness proceed you!

So lets get back to where we started… leaving Facebook for Google+. Do I care about the privacy policy? No. Why am I not concerned? Because I value nothing that I create, I WANT TO SHARE IT and because I’m using these systems, isn’t it obvious that I want to GIVE IT AWAY!?! So someone comes along and takes it, well, that’s part of the point. If there is a dick in the tall grass, it might bring down a bit of the storm but it won’t stop the storm from coming and overwhelming it. Even if the dick starts to rampage, it’s now just a matter of pressing a button and walking away, effectively annihilating the dick.

In the end I don’t care. Life goes on. There are more important things to fret over, like whats for dinner tomorrow, did I see the tight little bubble-butt on that twinkie gym-bunny, what are my plans for labor day? These are the pressing things, not “Oooh, Google came in and asserted ownership of my LOLCATZ pics!” There is an order to things, and frankly, bubble-butts trump rampaging company-legalese-dicks. Life goes on.

Verizon

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My day was poisoned by Verizon and Asurion, one of them is a nationwide wireless carrier, the other is an insurance company. They are the Reese’s Cup to my wasted blown-out day. Thanks guys.

Situation: Coworker breaks iPhone, takes it to a Verizon store, nothing comes of it. Coworker gives me the dead phone and I try to make heads or tails out of the knotwork that is Verizon and Asurion.

Email 1: (me writing to Verizon Rep, upset at being lead on a wild goose chase for most of the day, MIKGOVTEAM is an email to a bunch of people who are supposed to help me, a part of Verizon’s Customer Care … Team.)

Hello,
Thanks for the resolution on this problem. I have contacted Asurion and completed the affidavit. My client indicated that the report that the device was exposed to water is incorrect, it fell face-first onto a concrete surface. Because this is the word of our coworker versus a Verizon store we have issued new policies for our clients to not approach Verizon ever again because of these miscommunications. Instead all of our clients will route their phone issues through my office and we will contact Verizon directly where the conditions of the events can be exchanged clearly and without any of this miscommunication. We are unused to how Verizon conducts it’s business because of our previous relationship with Sprint and Asurion when it came to handling insurance. Sprint acted as our representative to Asurion, which differs fundamentally to how Verizon manages the three-party relationship. This too has changed our policies and procedures when dealing with your company and when dealing with Asurion. It is rather upsetting as a customer to know that Verizon stores cannot be trusted, cannot provide services, and that our only contact is MIKGOVTEAM.
The only thing keeping us as your customers is your network.
Pray for the health of that network.

Response from Verizon:
Andy, I am sorry to hear that you don’t seem to value the service my team and I provide. There are many reasons for VZW Government contracted customers to only be able to work directly through the Government team, the main one being security. The stores are restricted on what they can see, they can’t see government accounts.
I would be happy to meet with you to discuss the many other reason for our decision to not allow retail environments access to your account, I can assure you it is to your benefit.

My final email to Verizon:

The entire reason for us having a mobile infrastructure is first and foremost for our major gift directors and engagement team to have as much of a reliable wireless connection as I can provide for them. Verizon was selected because Verizon’s network is the largest in the United States and therefore won by default. Verizon wasn’t selected initially in the past because of a difference in toolsets provided by Verizon and Sprint. Sprint has proven themselves to be grossly incompetent when it comes to managing a network and right before I migrated everyone to Verizon, Sprint was “Circling the Toilet Drain”. I have yet to be actually pleased by any wireless carrier as they all try to be more than what they really are. Verizon fought against this tooth and nail, doing everything in their power to refute being a “commodity carrier” but in the end, that’s all the customers really want. The value-added components I’m sure gratify other wireless customers and they’ve expressed their thanks to you. I do admit that it comes in handy, when it works as designed. Verizon provides the network and Apple provides the devices. It was 8/10ths the iPhone and 2/10ths the Network. I informed Sprint of this and they sent a fool to me and actually dared to argue with me about Droid. It was that meeting in which my Sprint contract died, because they sent a fool to actually pick a fight with their customer. I was paying a three-grand-a-month contract and they lost it because they sent a fool.

My attitude about mobile carriers in the United States is pretty much identical. Every company is pretty much all the same. Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The networks are different, the frequencies are different and the rest is a dart board of bullshit that the customers have to put up with in order to get work done. I’d like to say that any one company is better than their competitors, but they aren’t. Verizon has the network but the stores are chock full of slime-balls trying to sell as much accessory junk as possible. Sprint is incompetent but the stores are reliable. I don’t regard AT&T as even a mobile carrier as they are just Cingular wearing the Death Star’s face. It’s macabre and it fools nobody. Cingular was incompetent on their own and their only singular saving grace was the iPhone, as AT&T. So in the end it doesn’t really matter how much I like any one company. Sprint screwed me with a $6000 billing error and I had to go through at least four wireless field reps and even still not getting anywhere as they continuously screw up billing.

So now we’re predominantly with your company and we just have to face some rather grim realities. It’s a compromise that we make. We trade a really quite excellent network for pretty much everything else. I have yet to visit a single Verizon store here in Kalamazoo (and man, are there a lot!) where I’m not either a used-car-shopper or in one case mistakenly thrown out of a store because looking for an iPhone bumper case is something AT&T can help me with… :~|

This entire interaction with Trish’s iPhone really had to come about eventually. It exposed a situation that we were not expecting to happen. One of my clients broke her phone, this was eventually going to happen. It’s why we bought the TEP Insurance because I know my clients have butterfingers and these devices would eventually start getting damaged. I made a mistake, so did Andy M, my assistant. We wrongly assumed that if Trish walked into any Verizon store that she could lay her dearly departed phone on the counter, that the Verizon store representatives would look up her phone number, see that it was a Verizon account, and then offer to replace her iPhone. What I was really hoping for was that the Verizon rep could then help her program the Exchange information on her iPhone and she could limp along with her device until she came back to WMU to get it polished off. If there was any costs associated with this entire hypothetical event, that they would be simply posted to the account. At best I was hoping for Verizon to offer her a warranty replacement free of charge and at worst replace the phone and ding us our insurance deductible. All of this so that I could tell all my clients that they could, if out in the big wide world, spy a Verizon store and know that they were covered, because a helpful person from Verizon was in any one of the multitude of Verizon stores and that they, in a manner of speaking, had my back.

What turned out to be was not that. Trish went to a Verizon store, they erroneously noted water damage (for which I know both Apple and Verizon have it in their best interests to push as hard as possible, since water damage isn’t covered by warranties) and they indeed proved the device was shot. They told Trish that they couldn’t do anything at all. And then Trish had to bring her dead device to me. I started with MIKGOVTEAM and was told that I had to go to Asurion. What really got me was the vicious circle that the both of you created. Verizon pointing to Asurion, Asurion pointing to Verizon and I’m in the middle, with a broken phone, and no way to resolve the circle. The advice from MIKGOVTEAM was useless. Being told to “Call Asurion” when I have a page from Asurion that says “Call Verizon” is just stupid. That’s when I reached out for you and Kim, since I was obviously getting nowhere in a big hurry. The process with Asurion wasn’t pleasant either, when I got to that. I had to cover everything all over again with them, get yet another claim number, and fill out an affidavit proving I am who I say I am and then faxing it to them.

So where we stand now is we can’t really trust any Verizon store. They run the gamut from used-car-salesmen to barely verbal thugs. They “note” water damage when there really isn’t any just to weasel out of having to put up with a warranty issue and then all of this that happened. If we invalidate all the Verizon stores and all I get from MIKGOVTEAM is “Call Asurion, 888-888-8888. Talk to them.” messages, then where exactly is the customer care, because I certainly don’t see it. So… to cope with all of this I’ve told my iPhone-using coworkers to just avoid Verizon stores altogether and bring their phone issues to me directly so I can corral all our dealings with your company through my office. It’s just another compromise. I am trading all that I wanted, the idea that even if my clients are in Houston, Texas, with a dead iPhone, that they will be able to get it fixed quickly for Verizon’s nationwide network. In the end, that’s what Verizon is to me. It’s the network. What I was really after isn’t possible and really all I need to know is that is how it’s going to be. I lower my expectations to match and we’re back to being happy customers.

When my clients get to Houston, Texas and realize their phones are dead they’ll have to find a Kinko’s and ship their phones to me so I can initiate an insurance claim, wait the days for Asurion to get to whatever they have to do, get the phone back to me and then FedEx it overnight to my clients. It’s messy and inconvenient and painfully expensive, but this is what we have to do in order to compromise.

If Verizon decides to make any of this better, I’ll be first in line with a smile and ready gratitude. I will admit that the website, when it works, works well. But Steve, you have to also know that it took Verizon nearly a month before I could reliably purchase iPhones through my website portal. The first half dozen iPhones I had to order manually through Kim. I’m sure there are other things that you and your team can do for us, but how much of it will be actually needed beyond ordering new devices, dealing with damaged devices, and the assumed-it’s-coming billing fiascos? Most of which I can already do through the website, and the billing fiascos, well, those will certainly be treasured moments yet to come. I don’t expect much and really all I’m after is the network, so don’t feel bad. It’s the best we can do with this compromise.

After my numerous experiences with Verizon stores, I certainly understand why you’ve established a walled garden around us all. I certainly don’t expect Verizon to change, but it will help you to understand that what we’ve lost stings quite badly. I can hope that we’ll never have another broken iPhone to deal with, but we both know it’s just a matter of time. At least now I know not to expect anything from the stores and I can skip MIKGOVTEAM and just contact Asurion directly. The only other reason I would need to contact you would be to help resolve problems with Verizon. The only eventuality I can think of is when Verizon screws up billing, and that might never happen, so if the world works out for the best, I won’t need to contact you or your team at all. If that isn’t the definition of a happy customer, I don’t know what is.

Now all we have to wait for is the other shoe to drop and witness the three-ring-circus that is Asurion. I fully expect that they’ll screw up and send us an empty box full of shredded newspaper and a $9000 bill, 60 days late with a collection notice rubber-banded to the box. My professional expectations start out at raging incompetence and there is nowhere to go but up!