If your work involves creativity, you're not doing more than five hours of work a day no matter how many hours you pretend to work. #
Promises, asynch, await were the wrong responses to callback hell, for the same reason you don't fix problems with a format by inventing a new one. You didn't solve the problem, you just made it more complicated. The thing to do, imho, is to factor out the need for the callback, if you can. Pop up a level and ask why other languages don't have the mess, and then find out how they solved the problem. They do async stuff, it's just invivisble to the HLL programmer. They did the callback hell stuff once and buried it. There's a name for this process: factoring. That's the answer. It's like the famous scene from Indiana Jones. If you don't have to fight the battle, don't.#Why isn't there the equivalent of the Trucker's convoy for abortion rights? That is actually consequential, a huge injustice, and something worth striking over imho. We're imposing sanctions on Putin, why aren't we imposing sanctions on the Federalists? Do most people even know who's responsible for this societal shift? Why don't they get more attention in the news? Maybe because they own the news orgs. #
If you want decentralization don't let the VCs anywhere near it.#
Back before the NYT bought Wordle I bought a domain thinking this would be the beginning of some fun open development. A waste of money I expect. #
As I reported yesterday, the iPhone 13 Pro arrived yesterday. So the embarrassing saga is over. Now I want to clean up, by finishing the story.#- Apple sent a total of three iPhones to me. After the first one was lost, the second one got jammed up in the system too, when Apple charged the wrong credit card $1 for an unspecified reason and they had changed my credit card number, so the charge was rejected. The email I got saying this happened had none of this information so I waited, hoping the problem would clear without me having to call them, but no such luck. Turns out that delay doomed the second iPhone because while it was in transit we had a huge ice storm that knocked out power in Ulster County for two days. The iPhone was left in the UPS warehouse, probably in Kingston, and probably was stolen while it was waiting for everything to come back online.#
- After trying to get help from Apple Support on Twitter, I wrote an email to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. Within an hour of sending the email, I got a phone call from someone in "Apple Retail Executive Relations" who was empowered to blow through the problem. A third iPhone was sent, this time via Fedex, which is, in my experience, much more reliable in this area than UPS. But something funny happened before the third phone was delivered at 2PM Eastern yesterday. #
- At 12:45PM or so, I heard a UPS truck park outside my house. It stayed there for about ten minutes. I went out to see what was going on, and could hear the driver in the back sorting through packages. It usually doesn't take that long. I shouted out to him through the open door, but he didn't answer. So I went back in the house to take a picture with my Pixel 4a, in time to see him drive off without making a delivery. My guess is that the UPS computer had told him to come here to make a delivery, and when he got here, the package wasn't on the truck? I have the picture to prove this actually happened. #
- There's not much more to say that isn't spelled out in the email to Tim Cook, so I'll just leave it there, except to say at all levels Apple people knew what the right thing to do was, but their system wouldn't let them do it. That is, until we got to someone who was at most a couple of hops from the CEO, who was empowered to solve the problem. As a long time Apple user, I got my first Apple II in 1979, I'd hate to see Apple be in the toilet bowl of uncaring bigco American rust belt e-commerce, where people are peripheral devices to poorly designed computer systems created by lawyers and accountants and in some cases psychopaths. For evidence of that, see the DMs that the Apple Support people sent. If George Cukor or Alfred Hitchcock were still alive and making movies, they could be characters in one of their psycho dramas. #
- On Monday February 14, after waiting 18 days for a new iPhone to be delivered, I sent an email to Apple CEO Tim Cook and as a result two days later I had the phone. Here's a copy of the email. #
- Dear Mr Cook: #
- I ordered an iPhone 13 Pro from the Apple online store on January 27. I paid $1300 plus tax. I also bought a leather case, which was delivered. #
- I've spent hours on the phone with Apple people, tried using the support address on Twitter, and have gotten conflicting advice from Apple people, and they've lost the case a couple of times. Also at one point I got an email from Apple saying I had to change something about my account, without saying what it was. It turned out Apple wanted to charge my account $1, and my credit card number had been changed on your system to something other than my credit card number. This may be the most alarming thing about this experience. How could that have happened?#
- I bought my first Apple product, an Apple II, in 1979. I was an early Apple II developer, was one of the first Mac developers. I've created a lot of software for your platform and done a lot of business with Apple, and I'm also a longtime shareholder. I have never seen this company so incompetent, uncaring and unprofessional, apparently as a matter of corporate policy. The employees I've had to deal with are not proud of your company. #
- I paid Apple $1300, not UPS. If they screwed up, and it's likely they did, telling me to go to UPS is no answer. I didn't choose to use UPS, you did. And if they screwed up, fine, either give me my money back or get me the phone, now. I really want the product, but more than that I want to be treated as a customer, with the basic respect that requires.#
- I've been writing about this on my blog since I made the purchase. Here's a search query that will get you the full account. If you study this case, you'll see you need to do a lot of work on the customer experience, and empower your employees to solve problems, instead of pointing the finger at other companies and giving assignments to customers about dealing with your vendors. I've heard the story about how Apple people can't solve an obvious repeated failure on the part of your company. That's a system that is going to lose you your reputation for being tops in customer service. #
- I hope you can help. I either want an immediate refund or to have the product delivered soon. And in all this mess, no one has ever apologized. I think that would be the place to start. And not an indirect apology like the one I got from the Twitter support team, which began: "We’re sorry to hear your delivery is stalled..." I've enclosed the full message as an attachment.#
- Thanks in advance,#
- Dave Winer#