Brief return to JS-Kit comment thing - and A Tale of Two Help Desks.

JS-Kit support staff has evidently returned from vacation, so I have turned their system back on in hopes that they can do whatever it is they need to do so that will allow me to turn their system off without losing five years of comments.

Somebody referred to my "optimism" recently! :D



Afternoon update - or - It was the best of help desks, it was the worst of help desks.

Funny thing is, I got to deal with both on the same day!
******************************

The Worst of Help Desks:

I'm turning the Echo comment system back off & returning to Blogger's. That silly idea I had that somehow they could transfer the old Haloscan stuff into Blogger? The customer "support" rep straightened me out (and about as gently as Cesar straightens out a really obstreporous dog, too). Customer support? More like customer suppress. I guess I shouldn't be too upset, Haloscan was available as a free service and I never gave them any money, but it is a bit of a bummer to basically lose almost 5 years worth of comments (there's a way to export so I can store them on my hard drive at home, but you can't import them to Blogger - there are a few ways to import the file to other comment systems but from what I've read, they take a good bit more technical know-how & time than I possess).

My favorite part of the exchange? Well, I found out on I think it was Monday of Christmas week that I had 14 days to "upgrade". I was forced into a middle-of-the-holidays system switch. I didn't have time to deal with it during the week of Christmas. I finally started messing around with it on Monday of the following week, discovered I had issues pretty quickly, emailed the help desk on Monday night. Got an answer Tuesday which didn't really answer the question I'd asked. Well, I'd worded my question badly. I tried to clarify what I was asking but got no answer. Figured out the thing about old Blogger vs. new Blogger, emailed again, still no answer.

Customer support had basically hung up on me after the morning of the 29th.

This morning's email included this helpful advice:

"Please make sure you are contacting us not in a weekend or on holidays if you need an immediate assistance."

I absolutely can't understand why JS-Kit decided to do this switch over a period of time when they must have KNOWN they were going to be short-staffed (like every single company in this country during the last 2 weeks of the year). Seems like if a company is providing a service that a lot of people use, and decides to suddenly spring a profound change to that service on those people, the absolute first thing they'd want to do is make sure that all hands will be on deck to help their users through the transition.

Oh well.

On the plus side, hey, that did finally inspire me to update my blogrolls, which were hopelessly out of date!
*********************************

The Best of Help Desks:

To close on a positive note, here's a similar topic, only different! I have just got to say that folks at the B&H Photo Live Chat support center ROCK. I finally broke my old WP20 over Thanksgiving. Might have been fixable, but I'd been thinking about getting a new one anyways, the WP80 had some appealing features & I'd apparently also managed to somehow abrade the surface of the 20's lens just enough that once a blob of water got on it, it wouldn't come off without being wiped off with a dry piece of cotton. Fine as long as I could get into my dayhatch, but that didn't work in rough stuff like, oh, f'r'instance, heavy chop off Montauk:

From 5 Years Around Long Island, Year 3

(that's a new album, btw, finally got to uploading those over the holidays but didn't quite manage captions yet, so it's 140 pictures, 0 explanations, give me another weekend or two & there'll be a storyline there!)

So when I finally dropped the WP20 for the last time (the shortest little fall, in a padded bag even, but enough to jar something in just the wrong way), instead of sending the old one back to Pentax for repair, I just decided to go for the WP80. I went to B&H on 11/29/2009 & came home with a pretty blue one.

On 1/1/2010, without one bit of abuse, the new one simply stopped working. It was past the 15 day return date. I wasn't expecting an exchange when I contacted their chatline, I was just trying to figure out whether I should send it to Pentax or bring it back to the store (I'd bought the B&H extended warranty service so I wasn't sure which was right). I described the problem. "What's your email?" typed Nathan. I provided that. "Do you still have the packaging?" he asked. "Yes", I typed. "OK, I just emailed you a return authorization. We'll exchange that for you."

Faaaaantastic!!!