Spam on the IM-ernets.

In fact, I think there’s some sort of code here.  Can you decipher it?*  Here’s the transcript…

johnnyjacobsonnpghgwdinnbi 7:53
kajxzetyvwfhifyHijgbjagtsihmpsti

geoff barnes 7:54
ahh, good. I have been waiting for your message.

johnnyjacobsonnpghgwdinnbi 7:54
wcamfheyksuauhowqrybqrczjdrya?ttxpi

geoff barnes 7:54
yes

johnnyjacobsonnpghgwdinnbi 7:54
gziaadoonpoduwhmsvremembercszcfme?

geoff barnes 7:54
sometimes, but not today.

johnnyjacobsonnpghgwdinnbi 7:54
usmgvit’sqpiovme Taylormdioejlbpleyfxh

geoff barnes 7:55
Really?

johnnyjacobsonnpghgwdinnbi 7:55
rjawyvcukiu busynidshthis weekend?szfxpi’m lookingemduwfor somengptsone toortubhavezpkxvazhuinlittle…bgxwefunuzvyiwithyjane mxbdj

geoff barnes 7:55
Oh well.  I’m having trouble reading that gibberish.
56:00
I guess we’ll talk again later, right?

* Check out what’s underlined.

Fandango Sucks & Cinemark does too

UPDATE 3

And it gets even more better…

Dear Geoff,

Thank you for your email and interest in Fandango.

Our corporate office has informed us that your refund has been processed.  Please allow a few business days for the refund to post to your account.  Again, we would like to apologize for the issue you encountered at the Cinemark 18 & IMAX Theatre.

If you have any further questions or concerns please let us know.

Have a great day.

NOTE: Please do not click the reply button. Emails sent to this address are not read.

To send a response to customer support, please click the following link, or copy and paste it into the address line of your browser:
http://fandangocust.suth.com/ticket.asp?ci=269043&tn=07318487GB&rn=080731-000051&fm=1

Best Regards,

Erin
Fandango Customer Support
www.fandango.com
Wireless access: mobile.fandango.com

If they get all the way to the finish line on this (credit issued as promised), I’m going to be pretty impressed.  And I’ll say so, and let people know that Fandango appropriately resolved my issue.

UPDATE 2

So I heard back from Fandango again today.  Pleasantly surprised with how smoothly this has gone:

refund@fandango.com to me —————————————– Refund Amount            : $24.00 Credit Card Number       : ****************

show details 11:24 AM (3 minutes ago)

Reply

This message is to inform you that your refund request has been processed and should be credited to your account within the next 3-5 business days.

——————————

UPDATE 1

I received an initial response from Fandango this afternoon.  Long-winded, but encouraging.  Now waiting 5-7 days for follow-up from the appropriate department.  Here’s what they sent:

Dear Geoff,

Thank you for your email and for taking the time to voice your concerns.

We would like to offer our apologies for the less than perfect experience you had with Fandango and our theatre partner, Cinemark 18 & IMAX Theatre.  This is not the experience moviegoers who use Fandango should have.

When ordering through Fandango, the sale is made directly through each individual theatre’s point of sale system.  We can only sell tickets if the theatre’s system indicates that seats are available.  If a show does not have seats available when you arrive at the theatre, then there has been an unusual operational error at the theatre.  Fandango is an independent company providing show time information and ticket purchasing for several theatre chains throughout the country, but does not participate in their business operations.

We will be contacting Cinemark 18 & IMAX Theatre as well as Cinemark corporate management to inform them of this error and work with them to prevent similar errors from happening in the future.

Most of our theatre partners prefer to handle all their own refunds and exchanges,  this is why our FAQs ask you to contact the theatre directly. However, Cinemark theatres are the one theatre chain that cannot compensate our customers, as you may have noticed we do request that our customers who have purchased for a Cinemark theatre contact customer service directly for further information.  For this reason we handle all refund requests for Cinemark theatres.  Please also note that if you are directed back to Fandango by any of our partner theatres we will gladly help resolve the issue.

We have forwarded your email to the appropriate department for further investigation of your refund request.  You will receive a follow up contact in the next 5 to 7 business days at the email address you have provided to us.

Fandango processes thousands of orders without incident and we regret that yours was one that met with difficulty.  We are continuing to grow and improve, and we truly hope you will give Fandango and our theatre partner, Cinemark 18 & IMAX Theatre, another chance to prove ourselves to you in the future.

We appreciate your understanding and we thank you for making Fandango your choice for online movie tickets.

NOTE: Please do not click the reply button. Emails sent to this address are not read.

To send a response to customer support, please click the following link, or copy and paste it into the address line of your browser:
http://fandangocust.suth.com/ticket.asp?ci=269043&tn=07318487GB&rn=080731-000051&fm=1

Best Regards,

Erin
Fandango Customer Support
www.fandango.com
Wireless access: mobile.fandango.com

INITIAL POST

My experience with Fandango sucked.  It was my first, and will definitely – DEFINITELY – be my last.  What is the point of buying tickets in advance, paying 20% as a “convenience fee” (where the convenience is clearly for Fandango+Cinemark), to then show up for a movie in which there are no remaining seats??  Cinemark wouldn’t do anything for me: Since I bought my tickets online, they said, I would have to take up my complaint with Fandango. (Never mind the apparently irrelevant fact that Fandango sold me tickets – as a Cinemark partner, to a movie at that Cinemark theater.)  Fandango’s customer service FAQ says I can’t be helped, and tells me it’s Cinemark’s issue to resolve.

Fandango and Cinemark each point the finger at one another, each blaming the other and directing me to take up my complaint with someone else.  Nobody’s responsible.  And that’s a hallmark theme of crappy customer service: NOBODY’S RESPONSIBLE.

So I’m starting an “Awareness Campaign,” during which I will chronicle my efforts to recover $24 spent for goods never received.  Below is my first letter to Fandango, written after having failed to find resolution either on their site or at the theater itself last night.  I’ll update the blog with developments, links, etc.

To whom it may concern,

I purchased tickets to Dark Knight yesterday, and when I arrived at the theater there were no seats in the theater! The manager of Cinemark 18 in Tarentum PA told me they could not issue refunds BECAUSE I BOUGHT MY TICKETS ONLINE.

I don’t care what relationship the theater and Fandango have.  That shouldn’t matter to the customer.  I paid MORE for my tickets online (including the unbelievably obnoxiously named “convenience fee” of 20%), drove 15 miles, and couldn’t get a seat in the theater!?

This is totally unacceptable, and I demand an immediate refund.  If the refund is not promptly made, I will open a fraud investigation through my credit card company.

Sincerely,
Geoff Barnes

And folks, please share your Fandango stories here too.  Your effort in doing so will not be wasted.

I took the survey

And if you’re a web professional (or amateur, for that matter), you should too.  Click here, or on the link below to take it.

MVM via WV – Sweet Caroline

Spent the weekend in West Virginia, just east of Berkeley Springs.  If you’ve never been there, I can recommend it not just for the bear-watching and wild blueberry-picking, but also for the breathtaking natural beauty of the Appalachians.  If you go, however, try to avoid getting Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline stuck in your head.  It changes the experience dramatically, and who’s to say if it’s for the better?

Da da da, Love your hair.

Interviewing an IA candidate, for really good reasons, INXS’ 80’s hit, “Guns in the Sky” would not leave my mind.

Tutorial: Move your Verizon contacts from your deactivated RAZR to your iPhone

So I stood in an utterly unglorious line for 7 hours last Friday. At 9:30, I got in line behind millions thousands hundreds of folks exactly like me in one respect: we all had a pathological fixation on the single goal of attaining a certain kind of phone before the end of the day.  The phone in question, I hardly need to mention, is a new 3G iPhone.

And it’s a great phone.  But over the past couple of years on Verizon Wireless, I have been unable to sync my phone’s contacts with my computer’s contacts.  Verizon has a service called Backup Manager, which I used, and on the few occasions when I needed to restore my phone’s contact list, this worked well.  But I initially had to manually input every entry into that phone (btw, a Motorola RAZR), and I didn’t relish the prospect of doing that again.

Looking for a lazier approach than manual transfer, I asked the twitternets for an answer.  Jonathan Snook (@snookca) pointed me to an iPhone Setting which allows an iPhone user to transfer contacts stored on another SIM card.  But Verizon’s a CDMA carrier, so there’s no SIM card to be had.  Brynn Evans (@bmevans) suggested I use backup manager in conjunction with a mysterious-yet-promising hack cooked up by Chris Messina (@factoryjoe).  An outstanding idea, and Chris was quick to confirm that he did, indeed, have such a hack on hand.  But Verizon stymied this plan by disallowing my login to Backup Assistant.  Despite the fact that I could still log into “My Account” on Verizon, apparently Backup Assistant is tied to discrete phone numbers.  Since my phone number had been taken away from them, they explained, my contacts backup was gone forever.  (Hogwash, I think, but this was the end of this exploration.)

So here’s the thing: even though the lazy options had been exhausted, there’s a not-at-all-difficult way to do move your contacts off your Verizon phone, but it requires you to have a discoverable bluetooth on your computer.  Here’s how it works.  You should be able to follow these steps to accomplish the same result – which is to say: easily move your contacts from your Verizon phone to your iPhone.

1. Turn your computer’s bluetooth on, and make sure it’s discoverable.
2. Turn on your Verizon phone’s bluetooth, and pair it with your computer.  (Never mind the fact that you’ve never found any good reason to do this before, you’ve got a great reason to do it now.)
3. If your computer’s a Mac, it will ask you what, in general, you’d like to do with files sent to it via bluetooth.  Create a folder on your desktop.  Name it something like “Files I Got Via Bluetooth.”
4. Select Contacts on your phone.
5. Select Options.
6. Scroll all the way to the bottom of that ridiculous list.  See the one that says, “Send Name Card.”  Select it.
7. Only one card will have been selected (likely the first on your contacts list).  Hit the “Add” softkey option, and select “Add All.”
8. Press “Send.”  It’s going to ask you where to send them.  You’re going to tell it to send to the computer to which you just paired your phone.
9. On your computer, notice all the activity.  You may need to confirm that it’s okay with you for the transfer to happen.  You may not.  Either way, if you go look inside the folder where your computer accepts bluetooth transfers, you’re going to see a ton of vcards (.vcf files) – one for each contact on your Verizon cell phone.  This is a very good thing.  It means you got that stuff out of the vault that is your now-useless old cell phone.
10. If you’re on a Mac, select all (Command+A) of those vcard files and open them.  I use Address Book, so that’s what I used.  If you use Entourage, fine.  Address Book will lead you through a duplicate removal/merge process, after which your old contacts will officially be part of your Address Book contacts.  Now you can move them onto your iPhone.  If you’re using MobileMe and have Push properly configured, your new contacts will arrive on your iPhone shortly with no further effort from you.  If not, there’s one more step.
11. The next time you sync your iPhone, make sure you’ve got Sync Contacts selected in iTunes.  Your contacts list on your iPhone will update itself, and your once trapped contacts from your old Verizon phone are now happily alive and usable on your iPhone.

I hope this works for you.  It worked for me like a charm.  But one little footnote: As I write this, it’s 11:00 PM.  I devised this method at 6:00 PM.  In the 5 hours since then, I’ve had hours of unrelated conversation over a big meal, and I re-stained a 150-year old dresser. My RAZR is sitting in my desk drawer at work, so my terminology might be slightly off. This tutorial was revised and now accurately reflects the Verizon OS’s language.

If you use this approach, I’d love your feedback.

Unsurprising new look

Not much else to say.  I’m going plainjane (sorry, Jane) for awhile while I work up something slick and personal for end of Summer.

Music Video Monday – Abba

I don’t know if I’ve posted it before, and I’m too lazy to check.  It’s that awesome though, that Brady Bunch style, that it’s worth posting over and over again.  So here, today I bring you Abba’s Take a Chance on Me.  If you change your mind, I’m the first in line.  (If you don’t change your mind, I guess I’m not.)