I hate Lion so bad that I wish it were still shipped in a box so I could punch it right in its grinning, cardboardy box. And I’m not the only one.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

When I said on Twitter that I thought Lion was Apple’s version of Windows Vista (a much-maligned OS by Microsoft), I got tweets and DMs back that bordered on hate mail. “How could you possibly hate Lion?!?!” one said.

So, I’ll tell you.

1. Versions never worked. Ever. There was never a pull-down menu in the title bar like all those pretty screenshots.
2. They took away Save As… as a menu item. They took away Save As! This meant you either had to guess where
3. Resume: I thought I’d liked being able to just quit an application without any prompts and have launch next time with the documents you had on the screen, it actually turned out to be a pain in the ass. Preview, especially. If you had a number of PDFs, you’d need to manually close each file or else it would show up as an open document.
4. Elastics: Like Apple’s iOS for iPhones and iPads, when you scroll beyond the boundary of a page, Lion would give you an elastic “snap.” It’s a minor point, but when I get to the end of a document, I want it to end. Not jump around.
5. Scrollbars: They took scrollbars away! Yes, I know you can turn them back on, but sometimes that just didn’t work — depending on the application, your scrollbars were gone forever. I like being able to see where, relatively, my position in a document without having to jiggle my mouse.
6. UI Bugs Changed: For no real reason at all, they removed the “chicklet” — the long oval button in the top-right which collapsed the toolbar and sidebar on demand. They buried the functionality under a right-click, then a second click. Why? No real reason. Just to change things. On the other side of the window, those Red/Orange/Green buttons on the top-left shrunk, making them a little harder to click. Again, for no real good reason. I predict they’ll be entirely gone in the next OS.
7. Multitouch was too multi-touchy! If my little finger so much as barely touched my magic mouse, my entire desktop would get swept off the screen, revealing the Dashboard. Then, just a quickly, it would come back. <sigh>
8. Full-Screen: The new full-screen mode of apps is pointless. You were always able to make an an app full-screen if you wanted. In fact, going full screen with Quicktime took twice as long because it, too, swept your desktop out of the way. A little overboard on the UI.
9. Launchpad. Why would you bring a menuing system that was designed for a finger-operated, small-screened device to a full desktop OS? It was harder to use and any apps you picked up from the App Store would tantalizingly drop there then disappear just as quickly. Why not just drop them in the Dock like before?
10. Sluggishness. Things are just slower. Try opening TextEdit, then trying to save it. It’ll take a few seconds for Lion to even drag its sorry ass together to show you the Save dialog box. On Snow Leopard, it’s nearly instantaneous. The overall sluggishness means that Lion also gets caught up on itself. There were so many times I would type before a window was ready and it would empty that buffer with characters completely out of order. On Snow Leopard when you were typing into the buffer, it least it emptied out properly.

Related articles

• What do you think? Should I dump MacOS Lion? (zdnet.com)
• How Apple’s Lion won’t let you trash documents (go.theregister.com)
• Report: One in six Macs run OS X Lion (macworld.com)

Here’s my current workspace and past workspaces. Once you get to the photo page, just hover the mouse over the photo to reveal notes about everything (and hyperlinks to things, where appropriate).

What does your workspace look like?

We don’t like lengthy Terms of Service, so here is our version in short :

• We will not use any of the data you give us access for anything else than giving you access to it.
• We store logs for few days (actually Google App Engine does).
• We cache some of your data for few hours maximum on our sever to serve you as fast as we can.
• We store your email, Highrise domain and secret key on Google’s server.
• We will never give or sell any of your information.
• We don’t like spam either, so we might send you email, but no more than once a week, probably once a month. You can opt-out anytime.

Ok.. So even though we have the fan base now, I still need a stinkin phone number so Facebook can verify I am a human and then I can set the various url’s for both the account and the page.

Any clever ideas of who has an unused number? I already used everyone including _____’s… so.. yeah.. I’m at a loss here.. any suggestions?

Facebook seems to insist on having a unique phone number attached to every page. Or at least it seems that way.

Problem is, we’ve used all the phone numbers we have!

Does anyone know a way around this?

I thought it’d be fun to type each letter of the alphabet in there to see what it suggests (i.e., which site starting with that letter I frequent the most).

aircanada.com

• Looking up flights, adjusting plans, etc.

bit.ly

• I use their custom domain service to give my short links the todmaff.in domain, so I visit here to create the links.

calendar.tMediaStrategies.com

• Google Apps calendar for my company

delicious.com

• I’m actually surprised this came up, because I don’t manually visit delicious that often. I guess I just don’t visit that many “d” sites!

elegantthemes.com/gallery/

• I just recently found this gold mine — it’s a great membership site of premium WordPress themes. The themes are gorgeous, great back-ends, and you get full download access (including PSDs!) to about 50 themes for $39! Compare that to twice the price for three themes at WooThemes.

facebook.com/thecbc

• I started this unofficial fan page about the CBC and it’s grown to be the largest CBC page on Facebook by far (nearly 45,000 people). I check it several times a day to moderate the page and add content.

google.com/analytics/

• Checking site analytics for our clients a couple of times a day, tweaking conversion markers, etc.

highrisehq.com

• This is the CRM system we use at tMedia. I’m not thrilled with it, to be honest, and we may end up moving to BatchBook or something a little more adaptable, but for now this works.

istockphoto.com

• This site used to be $1 per web-sized stock image. Images cost about $2.70 now, depending on how many credits you buy, but it’s still a great bargain.

jfklancer.com/dallas10/

• I know, this is a weird one. One of my hobbies (alongside amateur magic and photography) is studying the JFK assassination. This link is to the annual conference of conspiracy buffs, which I’d been considering going to.

knowyourmeme.com

• This is just such a great site that investigates the source of most Internet memes like Double Rainbow and ICanHaz, then does a pretty good job explaining the meme’s viral trajectory.

linkedin.com

• Obvious.

maps.google.com

• Also obvious.

netflix.ca

• I have a subscription to this video streaming service. Even though it’s only $8/month and has a pretty big back catalog of movies and TV shows, it seems the shows I really want to watch aren’t in their Canadian catalog. Considering cancelling.

O

• Client’s URL (confidential)

pinboard.in

• A great alternative to Delicious. Cleaner, quicker, more attached to external APIs, and ability to make saved links private. Costs a bit of money, but worth it. This is what we use at tMedia.com

qik.com

• Again, not sure why this would rank, since I’m barely there. There just aren’t that many sites that start with Q.

rememberthemilk.com

• I keep trying to use this, but it’s just not that adaptable. I’ve tried todoist and todoledoo (or however it’s spelled) but still can’t find a to-do app that I like.

soulistry.com

• My mom’s blog.

twitter.com/todmaffin

• For some reason, I never trust that Hootsuite (or any of the Twitter clients) actually posted my updates on the sites, so I manually go to check each time. <sigh>

us1.admin.mailchimp.com

• This is the admin page of Mailchimp, the email marketing platform I use. It’s worth checking out — you can email 1,000 people a month for free. Sign up free here [affiliate link].

video.tmediastrategies.com

• Our private video library of training videos.

wufoo.com

• I love Wufoo.  It’s a web form maker. Speeds up development time on forms by a huge amount. And it’s actually fun to make forms there.

xmradio.ca/online/

• A subscription music site — basically, a scaled-down offering of XM Radio’s satellite line-up. I usually hang out on BPM (dance hits), Electric Area (progressive/trance), On Broadway (showtunes), and 1st Wave (classic 80s alternative). There are free alternatives, like Accuradio, but I just don’t find the music lineup to be as good.

youtube.com

• Obvious.

zoho.com

• This is where I’ve created a database to keep track of my speaking engagements. I’d tried to customize a CRM tool, but none of them have the level of customization I need (basic things, like removing certain fields and adding custom fields) so I built my own CRM. Of course, it lacks tasks and email integration, but it’s free.

So… what does your browser say about you?

How it works: You segment groups of Facebook friends into lists — Close Friends, Work Colleagues, Family, or however you want. Facebook then lets you publish status updates specifically to those groups. Until now, I had been routinely publishing personal information using this method.

For instance, if you were on my Close Friends list, this is what you’d see on my wall (I always put the “Visible to Family and Friends” note in there manually, to prevent people from replying with “Are you sure you want to post this on your wall?!”):

But if you are NOT on the list I published to, you would see the Canucks note on the top.

But there is a bug which will reveal your private posts — something the Facebook privacy policy doesn’t address.

The bug comes from the API (application programming interface) which other web sites use to tap into your wall posts. The API appears to reveal ALL your posts, regardless of any restrictions you’ve set up.

For instance, as you can see below, I set this status update to only be visible to people on my “Close Friends” and Family” lists:

When you’re in Facebook, this works as it should. If you’re not on either of those two friend lists, you won’t be able to see the post.

However, if you use another site which taps into Facebook’s wall, those posts will be revealed, regardless of any restriction you used!

I use Mailchimp for my email newsletters. One of the codes you can use in Mailchimp will pull information from your Facebook profile. It will reveal your private posts! See arrow below:

While I’m not a programmer, I’m fairly certain that this is not specific to Mailchimp (which, for the record, is an awesome service) but rather common to all services which use Facebook’s APIs.

What does this mean for you? If you don’t permit any web sites or services to access your Facebook wall, you’re probably fine. But if you’ve given any other site permission to view your wall, it is almost certainly exposing this private information of yours.

Auto-Tune the News is a series of music videos which are mostly taken from real news coverage and set to music. But the real genius behind these incredibly popular viral videos is that the voice of the main person in the video is manipulated using Auto-Tune software to sound like they’re singing.

Here’s an example of how this works.

I’m Not a Witch

First, watch this video — it’s the real 30 second ad for Christine O’Donnell, the candidate running for the U.S. Senate (and infamously known for having once said on a 90s talk show that she dabbled in witchcraft):

Actually, I thought it was a pretty good ad. Then, enter The Gregory Brothers, a quartet folk/rock group who are behind the Auto-Tune the News videos. Here’s what they did, using the above ad as the main content:

Amazing, eh? And catchy as hell. The Gregory Brothers have a knack for coming up with very catchy tunes.

Enter the Swedish “powerpop” band Roomie, who did a cover of The Gregory Brothers’ video:

Pretty amazing work. I hope Christine O’Donnell has seen these!

A couple of other Auto-Tune the News songs:

The Rent Is Too Damn High

This candidate for New York Governor drew a lot of media attention because of his over-the-top platform. Here’s are the original clips:

And here’s what The Gregory Brothers did with it:

Backin’ Up

Unfortunately, YouTube has pulled down the original newscast that was the source of this next song. Basically, it’s from an interview of a quirky woman who witnessed a convenience store robbery. The song pulls from the portion where she tells the interviewer how she managed to get out without being spotted (She backed up, because her daddy taught her good.)

Bed Intruder

By far the best Auto-Tune the News video, in my opinion, is the Bed Intruder song. It’s from a newscast covering an attempted assault on a woman in “the projects.” But it’s her flamboyant vigilante brother who captured The Gregory Brothers’ interest. Watch the original video — her brother comes in at about the one-minute mark:

And here’s what they did with his interview:

Genius! And Antoine became a genuine star! Here’s the newscast’s follow-up story:

Eventually, he was invited on BET’s awards show. Watch how many people in the audience are even singing along:

And of course, the money started coming in. This local radio station hired him to make a commercial for a local mortgage company (skip to 2:10 to see him tape the ads):

I hit the Submit button, and the site barfed out this:

<sigh> Oh, governments. Why do your Interwebs haz so much of teh fail?

But, as usual with many federal government web sites, the layers of redundant clicks and processes is mind-boggling.

Check out what happens when you try to apply for the program.

Step One

• Click the “Application Form” link.
• Gives you the choice of downloading a PDF form, another PDF that’s a “guide” to the form, and seeing an HTML page with locations of where to send the form. (Okay, first… PDF forms?! Still?! You know, web pages can handle forms on their own. And how about putting all that info in a single document?)

Step Two

• I select the “Form” link, and you get a page with a single link on it: “Request this document.” Well, that’s what I was doing when I clicked on the link!! It’s like every time you click a result link in Google, it gives you an intermediate page with just a link on it that says “Go to this site.” Well, duh!
• I clicked the link and did I get the form? There’s no way to download the form — you have to give them your email address.

Step Three

• This is where it gets absolutely stupid. The feds then send this email: “Confirmation of receipt. Thank you for submitting a document request.  We would like to confirm that we have received your request. The document you have requested will be sent in a separate message to this e-mail address shortly.”
• Then, literally one second later, they send the document in a separate email.

I tried to link to these pages directly, but the site prevented me from doing that¹.

Honestly, are the programmers there trained at some other school? Only on government web sites do I see this kind of nonsensical user-interface insanity.

Am I missing something?

1. it uses a unique URL for each site visitor; if I gave you the one I used, it would have timed out by the time you got there and barfed on you

I gave a lecture today at BCIT about digital marketing and the law and noticed a lot of glowing white Apple logos staring back at me. Struck by how many Macs were in the room, I asked the students to hold up their computers.

Here are the number of Macs in the classroom:

Here are the number of… er, is the only PC in the room.

‘Nuff said?

Related articles:

• Microsoft Losing Big To Apple On Campus (apple.slashdot.org)
• Macs Reign At College, Microsoft is In Trouble! (lockergnome.com)
• Apple overtakes Dell, HP as student laptop choice (zdnet.com)

Back in 2006, I had one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet — the How To Do Stuff podcast. I always tried to make it a quirky, entertaining, and informative how-to series on all sorts of random things. Things you wouldn’t hear or read about on any of the many how-to sites out there.

The podcast came to an abrupt halt in September 2006 when I became ill. Well, I figured, now is the time to re-start it! And so HowToDoStuffPodcast.com is back up and running! New episodes will come every few days. So far, here’s what’s on the site:

• How to Wax Your Ass (by far, the most popular episode)
• How to Train Your Voice
• How to Hammer a Nail Properly
• How to Do a Sit-Up Properly
• How to Draw the Perfect Relaxing Bath
• How to Make Great Beer at Home
• How to Tip a Doorman
• How to Plant a Tree

I hope you’ll visit, listen to a few, and share the word about it. If you have a Twitter account, you can use something like this:

Tod Maffin’s quirky, entertaining, informative podcast is back! http://HowToDoStuffPodcast.com

If you’d like to receive an email each time a new episode/post is published, you can sign up here.

Shaw — like many cable providers, to be fair — bundle their most popular channels, forcing you to pay arbitrarily high prices for the single channel you want.

• If you want HBO — just HBO — you’ll have to pay for four movie channels.¹
• If you want just TSN2, you’ll be forced to pay for channels 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, and 87² even if you never plan to watch them.

This bundling is pitched to consumers as offering “better value.” In reality, it’s a way of obfuscating the price.

My Dream Ad Campaign

Just once, I’d love to see an ad from a cable provider in which the CEO, straight to camera, says

“We know our bundling makes ordering services from us confusing. That’s why from now on, each individual channel costs $3. Order as many or as few as you want. And take only the channels you want.”

The Sound of Shaw’s Silence

But we won’t hear this from Shaw. Actually, we never hear much of anything from the company. Shaw is a notoriously tight-lipped, family organization. It’s privately held and only the CEO-Owner, Jim Shaw, speaks on behalf of the company. Or, I should say, doesn’t speak. When covering technology for the CBC, I occasionally had to call Shaw for comment on related stories — not a single call for comment was returned.

Photo J McIntosh/CP

And good luck finding any social media channels — I couldn’t find a single Facebook page or group for the company, and the variants of Shaw’s name I guessed on Twitter clearly aren’t owned by the company.

Ordering Is Broken

Let’s say you opt to take your chances with the bundling game and add channels anyway — you’ll be doing it by phone since there’s no way to activate channels online. Shaw’s online customer care centre, at the time of this writing, actually returns a web server error. Classic.

Shaw would do well to get some basics underway — a monitored Twitter account and a Facebook page at the very least — and start listening to customers. It wouldn’t take much. For the time being, I’m holding http://twitter.com/shawcablevision. Jim, when you’re ready…

UPDATE: Apparently, Shaw has just hired someone to handle social media stuff. (Hat tip to Colleen.)

1. Three separate Movie Channel channels, plus a high-def version of one of the channels.
2. Canadian time-shifted channels

But there’s one big flaw in Apple’s design of the iPhone and iPad that still hasn’t been fixed — the onboard speakers.

On both the iPhone and iPad, the speaker is located on the rim of the product — which means that when you’re looking at the screen and listening to audio, the audio is shooting out away from you. This isn’t a problem for audio that’s recorded at decent levels, but so many videos out there (especially those on YouTube) are recorded with levels that are way too low. Cranking up the volume doesn’t help.

I often end up having to hold my iPhone in this position:

Although silly looking, this actually increases the volume significantly. On my audio test, cupping your hand in front of the speaker increased the decibel level from a peak of 70db to a peak of 78db. Since dB levels are logarithmic, this is quite an increase in the volume.

All Apple would have to do is locate the speakers on the front to provide better quality audio. (Misdirected audio also tends to drop a lot of the high-end frequency ranges, making the audio also sound muddier and duller.)

I’ve MacGyver’ed a solution for my iPad — tin foil (folded over several times to make it thicker) taped to the back and shaped in the same hand-cup form. It’s goofy looking, but works like a charm and makes listening a much better experience.

Griffin, which makes excellent ‘iProduct’ accessories, has an acoustic amplifier that looks great, but isn’t quite portable. ThinkGeek has come up with a simple but awesome solution — the iPhone Audio Booster is a simple piece of plastic that clips onto the bottom of your iPhone and essentially forms a plastic cup that does the same thing. Genius. And only $8.

Still, the right solution is for Apple to simply locate speakers on the front. Steve? Please?

N.B. On the iPad, speakers on both ends would also be good to provide stereo listening. But I’ll take what I can get.

The basics of the presentation focused on what “it” was — you know, that little something, that thing on the end of your tongue, that makes you know if you like a radio piece or personality or if you don’t. We all know if a host has It, but I tried to outline exactly what It was so one could duplicate it. Here is how I defined It:

• It is intimate. You are speaking directly into someone’s ears — even more so when they’re using earbuds… you can whisper to them. Radio listening is almost always done today by one person at a time; families don’t gather around the radio any more. And yet so many podcast hosts talk as if they’re speaking to a room — they use a hyped voice, or they call their audience “everyone.” Remember, you are only speaking to one person. There may be thousands of these one-person audiences, but aim to speak to just one.
• It breathes. One big mistake that many beginning podcasters, radio reporters, or audio editors make is they edit out the um’s and ah’s, and the long reflective breaths that sometimes inteview guests make. Unless they are completely distracting, you should aim to leave breath in. Breath is emotional punctuation. It gives richness to the words being spoken. One long, thoughtful breath taken before answering a tough question can say so much more than just the answer.
• It seeks the Universal Truth. The great radio shows, like This American Life, are always seeking a Universal Truth in their stories. It’s not enough to report the flow of what happened — try to find out why it happened and what your characters learned from it. In short, great stories give us pause for reflection. Great storytellers draw out those moments of reflection and give us the space to reflect.
• It takes time. It’s said that the best portrait photographers throw away the first few rolls of film they’ve shot with the subject. Why? Because in those first minutes, the subject isn’t as relaxed or comfortable with the photographer, so they appear stiff and uneasy. The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is famous for interviewing people for hours at length, even if he’s only going to use a short clip, because he knows the longer one stays with a person, the more comfortable they’ll feel, the more they’ll tell you, and so on.
• It is everywhere. Always take your digital recorder with you, because amazing audio will happen when you least expect it. Even if you’ve got a podcast coming up but no ideas on what to talk about, just look around, take in your surroundings, examine the patterns you do each day. Content is everywhere if you know how to find it.
• It does not abuse music. Great music under a podcast should sound like the scoring of a film — like harmony to the melody of the words. Avoid recognizable songs because your listeners’ mind will be transported from your narrative directly into whatever memories those lyrics evoke. Avoid songs with words that “comment on” what you just said — for instance, don’t play “Life Is a Highway” just because you finished talking about hitchhiking. It’s predictable and a cliché.
• It is phony. Realize that the best storytelling employs a lot of tools to make the  a podcast or radio story really come alive. It’s okay to add a pause where an interview guest thinks. It’s okay to “act” while reading a script — in fact, it’s very much your job to make that script come alive.

Rob Cottingham, who pens the hilarious Noise to Signal cartoon, was in the audience of my session and did up this great cartoon summary of my points:

Just when we tell them to get on Twitter, we make them learn our strange character codes that mean things on the service. DMs, RTs, @replies, #hashtags, ^codes… it’s not exactly the easiest learning curve.

That said, I think we need another tag.

Here’s an example. I follow Klout‘s Twitter account because I’m keen to learn when they have some news — an enhancement to their service, an announcement of downtime, that kind of thing. But Klout’s Twitter posts are almost all either @replies to people or automated robot posts. There’s got to be a way to filter those out… some kind of universal tag, like how the ^ tag became a way of indicating which person authored a tweet on a multi-author account.

And that tag should be [drum roll] the ~ symbol.

When used at the beginning of a tweet, ~ would indicate that that particular tweet was devoid of personal @messages and was a corporate announcement.

Okay, not really.

Clearly, there must be an alternative to this tongue-in-cheek proposal. Some companies have established different Twitter accounts — one for news, one for chatty things — but somehow that’s not the answer either.

Because filtering isn’t doing the job quote yet. So far, only Tweetdeck (to my knowledge) lets you filter out characters across a stream. For instance, you can (and I did) filter out RT from streams because I didn’t want to see any retweets. But that was for an entire stream, and not account-specific. And Tweetdeck forgets your filter as soon as you shut the program down. Hootsuite, the Twitter manager I use now, doesn’t even have that function (as far as I’ve been able to tell).

Is there a better solution? Am I missing something?

You can watch this video if you like. It’s only about a minute long.

It struck me recently, that the screen you show to the security people when getting your carry-0n bags screened is pretty easily faked. You just need any barcode and you can type in the info you need below it. This would be about a 30-second job in Photoshop.

Save it to your cellphone and bingo — you’re into the “security” area.

Why would this work? Because the person checking boarding passes to get you to the x-ray lineup doesn’t actually scan anything. They just eyeball it — they’re looking to make sure you’re flying on that date, and they wave you in.

Of course, once you’re about to b0ard, they scan it and will figure out pretty quick that you’re using a fake screen.

But that could still get someone dangerous into what’s supposed to be a very secure area.

Is this something that hasn’t crossed their minds?

Thank you for your Facebook Ads payment. The details of the charge are below. Please note that, due to processing delays by some credit card companies, this charge may not show up on your statement for a few days.

Transaction Details:
Payment: $51,313 CLP
Date(s) of advertising services provided: December 23, 2009 at 12:00am to Today at 12:00am (Pacific Time)

WTF? I owe $51,313 to Facebook for running two relatively small ads for three weeks?!

I currently have two ads running on Facebook. They look like this (and yes, please feel free to click them; thank you!)

Together, they generate a fair number of impressions but relatively few clicks. Certainly not $51,313′s worth!

And then I remember that Facebook is frequently confused when it comes to its advertising.

Turns out, Facebook was billing me in Chilean Pesos. I really owe a little more than $100.

So as to not stop my heart again, I try to change the currency to my own. Guess what? Facebook has a way of screwing that up too:

Nice.

Imagine my surprise when I logged in one morning to find this:

For some unknown and clearly arbitrary reason, the gods at Facebook banned my account for running “abusive” ads. The essence of the message above is: “You tried to post an abusive ad. We’ve banned you. There’s nothing you can do about it. Now go away.”

This is bizarre to me. The only campaigns I’ve run are simple and certainly not abusive. Naturally, the Advertising Guidelines they’ve posted don’t help an iota. Under Facebook’s rules, one can’t post an ad that contain “political agendas,” that “advocates against any organization,” or is “grammatically [in]correct and [doesn't] contain proper sentence structure.”

Good thing the web as a whole doesn’t have that last condition.

The ad I ran that appeared to trigger this ban was this:

I’ve read Facebook’s guidelines several times. The only thing I can think of that bugged Facebook was the use of the CBC logo. However, considering CBC has officially endorsed my unofficial CBC fan page as its own, it’s rather a moot point. Or perhaps it’s because I didn’t put a period after “corp” — even though most Canadians know the CBC’s nickname: “The Mother Corp.” But I can’t believe this ad is “abusive,” as Facebook claims.

More Arbitrary Facebook Ad Guidelines

Among the offenses that will get you banned permanently from placing ads on Facebook are:

• Using a ‘&’ instead of the word ‘and’
• Ending a sentence with an ellipse (‘…’)
• Running an ad promoting a political point of view

The Solution

Facebook should take a lesson from Google, which at least tells you why your ad wasn’t approved and gives you an opportunity to fix it. If Facebook were to just email and say “You should use a ‘.’ after ‘corp’,” I’d be happy to fix it. I get my ads run; Facebook gets money. Problem solved.

Instead, people create a second profile with a fake name and run ads under that name instead, pointing to the same destination page as the original banned ad. In fact, considering these banning decisions are made by actual human beings, there’s a good chance that one could post the exact same ad under a different name and have it sail right through the approval process. One person’s “abusive” is another person’s “mild irritant.” We’ve already seen this in the approval process of Apple’s App Store.

Unfortunately for Facebook, I’ve given up trying to get this ban reversed. Instead, I’ve put that money into Google ads and other online promotional means.

I’ve got a few A/V requirements when I present, notably that I like my notebook right at the lectern with me, and that I like the podium (stage/riser) to be free of anything else like chairs, tables, and so on. I tend to move around a lot when I speak, so this helps make sure I don’t faceplant (which, amazingly, hasn’t yet happened in 13 years of professional speaking).

Fast forward to the evening before my presentation. I’m at the event’s reception, meeting the delegates and sponsors, and up walks my client. We introduce each other, go over a couple of last-minute details, and then she leans in and asks, very politely: “Um, so we were able to get you a clear podium, but I wasn’t sure why you needed one?”

I told her that I move around a lot and would just prefer that there’s enough room up there for me to wander. She gets this blank look on her face, then one of those “Oh-my-god-I-completely-misunderstood” looks on her faces.

Turns out, she thought a “podium” was something you stand behind (actually, that’s called a lectern), not something you stand on.

And this was the result.

Here’s today’s exchange with NetNation/Hostway, the provider I used in the past (and still, sadly, retain some domain names with).

Enjoy this nonsensical response.

Their original email — 2:24 a.m.
The service(s) listed below are about to expire and require your immediate attention. You must renew or your service(s) will be deactivated upon expiration. Your service(s) and possibly your business will be interrupted. Domain: thirdtuesdayvancouver.com.

My response — 11:19 a.m.
I would like to renew this, but when I go to account manager (following your link) it doesn’t show me that domain. Help! I do not want this domain deleted.

Their “response” — 11:48 a.m.
We received a request that you no longer wanted this domain, so it was closed, and autorenew was removed. If this is no longer the case, please provide us with the last 4 characters of your account manager password, and we will re-open it, to enable renewal of the domain.

Do you have any experiences like this that turned frustratingly comical?

And I realized today that pretty much everything they say on those messages is a lie. Case in point:

“We are experiencing a higher-than-average call volume.“

Bullshit. I’m looking at you, Shaw Cable. You’ve had that on your “please hold” message since 1821. It’s not that you’re suddenly experiencing more calls, it’s that you’ve chosen to not add more staff. I mean, did suddenly — just before I called on Tuesday at 11:20 a.m. — hundreds of people flood your call centre to order the iPhoto slide show channel?¹ Give me a break.

Some companies even have the audacity to take this one level further with “Because of overwhelming demand for our product, we’re experiencing…” Really Rogers Cellular? You’re doing that well? Because your financial statements are reporting the opposite — that, in fact, your bottom-line income² for 2008 actually dropped as compared to the previous year. Yeah. Overwhelming demand.

“Our menu options have changed.“

No. They haven’t. Companies use this line because they want to rope people into listening to their whole spiel first — which often includes product ads.³ Menu options don’t change often. Even if they do, do you really have to leave that on your message for the next five years?

“So that we can route this call to the right agent, please choose from one of the following options.“

This is one of the oldest tricks in the books. It’s called the “Operator 123″ trick in marketing circles. You know those ads that say to call their number and ask to speak to operator 123? Here’s the secret: there is no operator 123. That was ad number #123 you just responded to and by asking for a specific operator, you’ve helped them track which ad you responded to.⁴

That’s basically what’s happening with many of these corporate “please hold” messages. You’re going to talk to the same operator no matter what button you push. What you’ve done instead is logged a little reference in some tracking database what product you own or what your complaint is. And then, you simply get pawned off on whichever agent comes up next.

“Your call is important to us.”

Oops, excuse me — I throw up in my mouth a little. The paradox here is that the companies who dole out this rote, weak statement are the ones who seem to care the least about their customers — at least judging from their customer service. I mean, how do they know my next call is going to be important to them? Maybe I’ll just yodel for the first 30 seconds. That’s not going to be so important…

“Please choose from one of the following options.”

This would be great, if the options they’re offering have anything to do with why I was calling. Today, my financial institution called me seven times in the space of an hour. I was on an important call at the time and let it go to voicemail. Since there were so many calls in the space of such a short time, I wondered if there was something wrong. So I called their number.

Now remember, I am calling to ask why they called and if it were important. Which option would you pick?

1. Check your balance, pay a bill, transfer funds, or change your personal access code
2. Branch information or for our phone directory
3. Loans, mortgages, or lines of credit
4. Information on our new tax-free savings account or other investments and rates
5. Visa questions including lost and stolen cards
6. Personal or business banking needs

I guessed 6, only because it was the most generic. Of course, it was at the end.

Which of course, brought me to the most frequent lie of them all:

“To make sure you get excellent customer service, this call may be recorded.”

Um, what?! I’m going to get better service because a hard disk somewhere is recording our conversation? Get real. I have no doubt that if the call goes weird, you might be able to use it to train future reps on what to do, but the fact that you’re recording our chat won’t help me get anything. Here’s the real reason they record the call: Legal reasons. Organizations these days want a record of everything. Especially government and public sector organizations. It also helps them prove to you they were right and you are wrong, should it come to a dispute. But really, aren’t they always?

There are fewer and fewer companies which offer something as simple as this:

You’ve reached the customer support line of ABC Widgets. Please hold for an operator.

Would it be that hard?

Luckily, the Internet has a solution for everything, and some sites offer a tip sheet on which buttons to press to get through to a human being faster. For instance, when you call Tivo, just say “Live Agent” at the recording and it’ll blast you through. Not so easy at Dell Support where the secret code is⁵ 1, 7266966, 1, 4, 4.

1. This is actually a real channel — called The Frame — that Shaw sells. Go watch channel 165 on Shaw digital cable and see for yourself.
2. which Rogers calls “comprehensive income”
3. Call the Apple Store in Vancouver and the first thing you’ll get is a message proclaiming proudly “The iPhone 3GS is here!” Then, when you actually get to speak to a human you discover that no, the iPhone 3GS is not here. Hasn’t been for weeks. And they have no idea when they’re coming in.
4. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing; it’s pretty clever marketing, actually.
5. I’m not making this up