This week, FedEx lost me as a customer for life. In the big scheme of things, I don’t think it makes any difference to FedEx since my usage of their service is minimal. However, I believe that the reason they have alienated me as a customer are symptomatic of a corporate culture that no longer cares about the customer.

Earlier this week, on Monday, I sent a FedEx Express letter from McLean, Virginia to Fresno, California using my FedEx account in the bill-to field. The letter was delivered and as expected, I saw a charge for ~$21 on my bank account (since I use my debit card for paying the FedEx account). Imagine my shock when immediately after this charge, I saw another charge from FedEx for $3,198.46. That is one expensive letter delivery!!! Of course, I get on the phone with FedEx right away, but wouldn’t you know it, the company that delivers the “world on-time” is completely clueless when it comes to customer service. Their customer service is open only during business hours.

Strike One! A global shipping and logistics company that does not provide 24/7 customer service.

I call Tuesday morning and after several minutes of touch-tone hell, end up speaking to Andrea Mith. I think Andrea was having just as bad a day as I was about to have. She asked me what was wrong. I politely summarized to her that FedEx had taken a large amount of my money without my permission. She sounded completely non-plussed with this accusation and took down the relevant details I gave her. She then asked me to hold and went away for an etnernity. Came back and told me that the problem was taken care of. I pressed her for details, but she continued to be vague and then ended the call.

Strike Two! A global shipping and logistics company that does not care about its customers. Even when alerted to the fact that I had been wronged, there was no apology…none…nada…nothing in the way of even remotely expressing empathy for my situation. In fact, quite the opposite — sounding bored and uncaring about what was for me, a significant problem. Also, poor communications and not taking responsibility for the situation.

I waited till the afternoon and checked my bank account. No credit from FedEx. I am still out $3,198.46, so I call FedEx again.

This time, I am greeted by Anna Cornado. She has no knowledge of my problem. That’s OK…by now I am expecting that FedEx due to its incompetency, has no way for customer service to track customer calls and issues. (Maybe they need to call SugarCRM and start using their CRM software.) I repeat the drill. Anna puts me on hold and goes away for a while. She comes back and tells me that the problem is resolved and I have been given a credit. I advise her that my online bank statement is real-time and I see no credit. I press her for an authorization number (since we all know that all credit card transactions have a transaction/authorization number). She comes up with an internal tracking number. Completely useless to me. Seeing that I really have no choice in the matter, I decide to wait a few more hours.

I call back in the evening and ask to speak to a manager. The friendly customer service rep takes my information and advises me that her manager is busy and I need to hold. I hold for 1 hour and 15 mins. and then hang up. I call back. Ooops…it’s evening and we are no longer answering the phone at FedEx.

So I log into my FedEx account and notice that it has been updated. It claims I shipped an ~800 lb shipment to somewhere in Sepulveda, California. Well, at least I now know what I was billed for. But what’s this…a button labeled “Dispute” for the charge. Of course I click on it. I am taken to a form which has a drop-down list of possible reasons for disputing the charge. Now I discover that not only are FedEx customer service agents incompetent, but so also are its web designers. None of the options in the list apply, so I pick one that’s close enough. It immediately displays a field for comments. So I start typing away. No way…the field size limit for Comments is 21 characters. I stared at my screen for a full minute. What idiot designed this? How are you going to comment on a dispute in 21 characters or less. I resisted my temptation to use four-letter words and put “Not my shipment” into the field and submitted it.

Another frustrating day and I am still out $3198.46.

Wednesday morning I check both my FedEx and bank accounts. The bank account says there’s no credit from FedEx. Not wanting to start the day with the evil customer service people at FedEx, I decide to wait a couple of hours. Later in the day, I check my bank account and, what do you know, there is now a credit from FedEx.

I am overjoyed. I am going to get my money back. (Note, when FedEx charged my card, the money was immediately removed from my account. However, when the credit was posted, the money was yet unavailable in my account.)

Later on Wednesday, I logged back into my FedEx account to see what had happened about my Dispute. The screen mentioned that my balance was now $7,711.45. This situation just went from bad to worse. FedEx had just billed me for another package that I did not ship.

Strike Three! A global shipping and logistics company that is unable to maintain the transactional integrity and accuracy of its records.

FedEx. You are out!

I am angry, very, very angry. Thankfully, the amount is above the limit of my debit card so all I have to deal with is the payment liability. I call customer service and ask to speak to a manager. I am shortly transferred to Rene Gonzalez. I explain the problem, and tell him in no uncertain terms how much I despise FedEx. Without being rude, I demand that the problem be corrected immediately. Rene acknowledges the problem and although he doesn’t understand the cause, assures me that it is corrected. I request that my account me closed and he says it’s done.

I tell him that I am never doing business with FedEx again and if even one of the customer service agents I had spoken to since the problem began had said “Sorry” and expressed some empathy, I would think very differently of FedEx. Rene says, “I am sorry! I was going to apologize but wanted to understand the cause of the problem first.” You have got to be kidding. After I explain the whole situation, you have to look for the cause of the problem before apologizing to me????

This makes me more angry. This is a FedEx customer service manager? I can now see why the attitude is downhill from there when it comes to the customer service agents.

I checked my FedEx account today, fully expecting to be locked out since I requested that it be closed. No such luck. FedEx incompetency is alive and well. The $7,711.45 charge was gone. But last night, I received a paper invoice for the same amount. I’m not sure what to think.

But, one thing’s for sure…I will never use FedEx services again.

Microsoft has launched the 2 millionth web portal where I can get the same useless stuff I don’t really want. But wait, there’s more…see http://ideas.live.com/.

Now I am confused. Where does Microsoft want me to go today? To live.com or start.com. Maybe I won’t go to any of them.

If you buy a copy-protected CD, beware…you may unknowingly bring some unwelcome guests on your computer.

Like many other ASP.Net developers, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the final VS.Net 2005, SQL 2005 and ASP.Net 2 bits off the MSDN site. This past weekend, after what seemed like an eternity, I managed to get the 4GB+ DVD images downloaded. Knowing that the installation programs would want a clean slate, I first uninstalled everything, including .Net 2 beta.

I then proceeded to install the release version of .Net 2 (small download) just to test some apps that I have sitting around. Everything worked as expected. Great!

When my downloads were finally completed, I proceeded to install VS.Net 2005. The install program complained right away that the old bits need to be uninstalled. And it was right…I had missed the Document Explorer. Click – click – click…it’s uninstalled. Nope…that didn’t do it. Still complaining about something.

I couldn’t figure it out and finally decided to take a shot in the dark and uninstall .Net 2 Release version. That did it!

Now, I may be exaggerating, but that is just INSANE. To require uninstallation of the .Net framework (release version) to get VS.Net 2005 installed is just plain stupid.

Microsoft needs to fix this, and while they are at it, can we dispense with installation programs altogether. With all the talented engineers on Microsoft’s payroll, isn’t there a small team that can replicate what has been available on the Mac for two decades now…just copy (or XCopy in Winspeak) files and you are done. Microsoft should stop trying to impress us with spiffy U.I.’s and focus on getting the basics right first. 

I want to be able to copy a folder containing an app’s files from a CD or DVD onto my computer and have the application work without sitting through five minutes of progress bar hell. (And don’t even get me started on app restarts and system reboots.)

So Scoble and whoever else at Microsoft is listening…for the love of God…fix this!!! Free us from installation and progress bar hell.

Maybe we should add up all the time people worldwide have spent staring at progress bars for the last decade and send Microsoft a bill. Let’s see, if 50 million people each spent two hours waiting on app installations in the past decade and the average hourly rate is $25/hour, that’s a cool $2.5 billion. Spend even 1/1000th of that and the problem can be solved.

If Microsoft’s engineers were forced to evaluate features in terms of productivity dollars, Windows would be a very different beast. Too bad for us that user productivity is only a marketing mantra at Microsoft.

In the past few weeks, I have had multiple people email me that my blog was no longer working. The behavior described is that the browser would hang forever on the page. I believed them, but could not reproduce the problem. No matter which system I typed in the URL from, it worked. Quite puzzling.

The mystery continued until today, when I got multiple such emails and I finally decided I have to do something about it. Through the process of elimination, I was able to figure out that the problem occurred only when a link from another web page is used to access the blog (or from a bookmark). I was never seeing the problem because my test case was to type in the URL. Having figured out when the problem occurs, the general reason for the problem was obvious, but not a specific one. Since the problem only occurred through a link, it pointed to a referral tracking/logging issue.

Digging around, I chanced upon this post in Scott Hanselman’s blog. The problem occurs if DasBlog’s “Movable Type Blacklist” setting is enabled. Turns out that not very long ago, Jay Allen, who maintains the MT Blacklist that DasBlog refers to at startup, has started banning IP addresses, but returns a valid HTML document with comments instead of an HTTP 302. This causes issues with DasBlog’s referral logic and prevents the page from loading.

Glad I got this one figured out…it was driving me nuts.