It’s currently an ugly text block, but it’s just an experimental page for now. See it at my FB Geekmum page.

Cheers!

His formal is tomorrow week. We’ve already paid for the ticket.

Sunday afternoon at 5pm we receive a rude SMS with no warning. It’s too long for one message, so it arrives in reverse order, so the first thing we see is:
‘package. Everyone must bring in thr $40 tmrw and hand it in to the office. Or your event may be cancelled. no refund givn’

Assuming it’s a spam SMS, I Google the phone number in case it’s a high-charge number gambling on people calling it for an explanation. Two minutes later the first part of the SMS arrives, and we discover it’s from yourformal.com. Apparently the number of attendees is low and they are unable to confirm a venue.

How rude is it to contact people this way? What kind of business plan don’t they have?

It’s almost blackmail. Do this or else we keep your money.

My initial reaction is to spread the word about the poor customer service. And the second is to contact the school and recommend that they not use the company in the future. And the third is, what an opportunity for a company with manners to take advantage of.

I check with my son, and others are already dis(cus)sing it on Facebook. Good on them.

Needing to multi-process, but I can’t decide which device to use whilst watching tv avec doona: the android tablet or the laptop. So I bring both into the living room, grab a couch, and a glass of red wine.

Pose the question to the youngest feral: which device?

His answer: you’re asking me? you made the right choice. (I brought both)

The next one was a US/Canadian company that had an interesting affiliate program attached. I thought I was joining under an active business builder, but alas, cookies got the better of me, and I got no spillover at all. It was a very nice company, but overseas hosting wasn’t the best solution from an SEO perspective back then, especially if you had a .com domain you wanted to rank in Australia. So I looked for an Aussie PHP hosting company.

Started with Jumba first. They were ok at first. Then the support problems started. Some Chinese spam caused one of my sites to keep crashing, so they turned off ALL 12 sites without telling me. Um, I was quite annoyed. I put a placeholder page up for my broken site (while I waited for a new laptop to be able to debug the problem) and somehow Jumba managed to delete the .htaccess files for all 12 sites. Luckily I had my own backup, but that was the end of them.

Moved to Chombo, and again at first things were ok. Then a series of calamities seemed to strike them. Connections to data centres that caused everyones sites to go down. For days. Actually four days in September – and that was the last straw with them, especially as they didn’t update their clients, Twitter page, Whirlpool or their official status page during that time. And there was also the time when the infamous Turkish hacker got in and replaced all the index files. And somehow my single generation backup was in progress during the hack, so Chombo said they had absolutely no backups for me. Can a hosting company really run like that?

So now I’ve moved to rackservers.com.au. In the past I have manually moved all my sites over, one by one, although I know you should be able to backup everything through cpanel. But of course Chombo’s cpanel backup function failed. So Rackservers doggedly copied everything across for me.

I’ll still create my own backups. I had even bought a new external hard drive and new laptop in preparation for that, just before Chombo had gone down for four days.

Cross fingers, this will be the one!

The first time was a Friday night at dinner time, when he was coming between me and a pizza with red wine. He wasn’t welcome.

He launched into a script saying how he was from Facebook Australia and was contacting the best Facebook pages in Australia. Given that I only have 1 Like, that was unlikely (pun), but I let him talk. He asked if I’d seen all the advertising at Neutral Bay for Facebook. (No, I hadn’t). He mentioned how great Facebook was for advertising (ha) and made small talk about the health products I mention. Then, still talking at a scripted snails pace, launched into some stats on how many million people were available for health and weight loss advertising through Facebook. (I don’t talk about weight loss). There was so much noise in the background it sounded like he was at a wild party and was taking me for a ride.

That’s when I lost my patience and launched into a mild tirade about not trying to quote search statistics to an SEO, not reading from a script at a snail’s pace, not ringing a mum at dinner time, and how unlikely it was that he was really from Facebook. He blustered about how he couldn’t believe I would say something like that. So I hung up.

End of story, I thought.

Today, same time (although it’s only Thursday) he rang up again – I recognised his voice. He said he was James from Manchester, and how was my Google Maps page doing (for the same health site). And had I seen the advertising in Neutral Bay recently? Obviously they’d given him a new opening paragraph for his script, but that was all. He said he’d even been to a conference for my health products in Manchester just last week – such a coincidence. And when I asked if he was from Facebook, he said, why yes, he was.

Again, I said that sadly it was dinnertime and I really had to study for a (Google) exam. The salesman in him fired up, and he asked what could possibly be as important as the fantastic offer he had from Facebook, and that there was no way he would let me miss out on this life-changing offer.

With the sound of call-centre conversations clamouring in the background, I hung up again.

So Facebook, or Facebook reseller, or whoever you are.
James is a terrible salesman.
And please stop ringing!