I made a few updates to this site last week. If you prefer blog posts via email, there’s an easier way to signup. I also added a small heart at the end of each post. No login to jump through nor any data retained, just an incremental counter that ties into a WordPress widget.
As I tinkered on these things I had a handful of not-quite-a-full-post notes that I wanted to tidy up. Here’s the random collection for the week.
The days are long as the equinox nears. It’s bright out by 5:00am…and still is at 10:00pm, about an hour more of daylight than we had living in the Pacific Northwest. Bright does not mean sun, though, as there are plenty of wet, cloudy days.
Birds are now awake by 4:30am, if not a bit earlier, so I’m also awake by then, at least until I reach up and close the window to shut out their chirps. It’s been fun to see more birds of prey around as the weather’s warmed (thankfully the resident hares are safe and hop around most mornings).
Sticking with birds for a moment, Listers is one of the most fun documentaries I’ve watched in recent memory. Quirky and produced on a shoestring budget by two brothers who go deep into the world of birdwatching. I knew people got into birdwatching, but had no idea the extent of it. Highly recommended!
On the farm the chickens have ramped up their egg production as the temperatures warm. A while back the coop had what, at the time, felt like a mini egg.
Last Thursday I went to collect eggs and there was this teeny, tiny one! It was almost like a quail had snuck into the coop and laid an egg amongst the chickens. It, unsurprisingly, had no yolk inside, but it made for a fun surprise.
A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about trends in customer experience. These days it feels like many companies provide service that is wildly awful, but in a fuzzy and hard to define way.
I find more and more situations in which I receive poor service and have little recourse. Even when you find someone to talk to, they’re often trapped within policies that feel customer-hostile. You end up, say, calling Aer Lingus 4 times and writing a written complaint to regain the seats you originally reserved months prior.
I feel like what the industry needs is a customer powerless index. It’d measure these maddening dead ends people get stuck in where the entire service design seems tilted against them. I don’t think traditional metrics will find these cul-de-sacs.
