We kick off our second week with a lengthy discussion about the new Microsoft mobile software named Windows Phone 7 Series … and declare it one of the worst names ever for a product. Beyond the name, we do think the software looks interesting, and we think there may be some hints hiding in it of what we can expect from Windows 8.
Then we move on to how the “Social Media Purity Police” just need to stuff some of their high ideals up their collective behinds. This is all brought on by the Kevin Smith/Southwest Airlines war, and I get rather worked up about poor reporting on the matter, and also how Southwest bungled this whole debacle from start to finish.
When you can’t get a company to help you with a problem, why shouldn’t you use social media to goad them into finally doing something about your issue?
As I discussed yesterday, movie director Kevin Smith is locked in an all out war with Southwest Airlines over his being thrown off one of its planes over his weight. You can listen to the whole sordid tale in episode #106 of Smodcast, and while its lengthy, and full of cursing, I highly recommend it to get a much fuller view of what exactly happened.
While it is easy to say, “Well, he has 1.6 million followers on Twitter, of course he got the attention of the company!”, I’m here to say you don’t need anywhere near that many followers to get something done.
In Jan. I was awaiting for a package to be delivered by FedEx Ground, and when the delivery date came, it was snowing, so I gave them a day’s leeway. I figured it was forgivable, no problem. When the next day passed without delivery, I tracked it and saw they said it was a weather delayed again. Okay, fine, I’m willing to give them one more day.
The next day, now two days late, I tracked it in the afternoon and saw that it was again just driving around my town. I called FedEx to discover what was going on and was informed that it might not make it. I took to my Twitter account and posted:
#FedEx just sucks beyond all comprehension. Weather delay my behind
If you aren’t familiar with Twitter lingo, by adding the # symbol in front of a word makes it into a hashtag which makes it easier to search for and will alert people who watch for certain terms that a subject is being discussed. It didn’t take long for me to be contacted by a FedEx employee who looked into it, and he wasn’t able to tell me much more than the national tracking, but he did call the local office which told him they would deliver if they could.
They didn’t.
The next day, the third day my package was driving around my town, I again called the national number and was told the usual excuses about weather, so I again took to my Twitter account and a different FedEx employee was on duty that day. She went through the same steps with me and after exchanges both on Twitter and via e-mail, she called the local facility and told them that they had to deliver the package that day.
See, the problem with the weather delay excuse was that UPS, the postal service and the garbage truck were all making it to my property, but yet the local FedEx office was claiming my road was impassable. After three days of this, the Twitter monitoring employees told them they had to deliver it to me that day, no more excuses. The driver did finally show up, parked down the road, walked to my building, pounded on the door like he wanted to knock it down, left the box on the porch and stormed off before I could even get to the door.
Yes, I finally had my package, but I had to take my argument with the carrier public to accomplish it. There are people who consider what I did “abusing Twitter”, and how I used “social media as a weapon.” You know what? I did, and I’ll do it every time I feel I have no other option.
Lets go down my options here:
I called the national service number, and all they would do for me is track the packages and nothing else.
I could not call the local service center directly because they do not give out those numbers.
I did not e-mail customer because they say it may take over 24 hours to respond, so what is the point?
I paid for this delivery, it was a gift for someone, and if UPS can make it down my road in their unstable delivery trucks, the small van the FedEx Ground guy drives can make it to me. I even called the company I bought the item from to see if they could help me, but they were unable to get anything done from their end either. I was out of options.
So I view Twitter and other social media sites as just another tool in the consumers toolbox to get things done. There is nothing wrong with using a tool that is at your disposal, and guess what, it got something done. Yes, the local driver was angry with me, but you know what? I couldn’t care less. Oh no, I asked him to do his job, the horrors of it! I even offered the national number that I would meet the driver somewhere in town to get the package from them, and they refused to set that up.
In the third part of this series, I’ll touch on the subject of if we aren’t supposed to use this, why are they on the networks?
In the age of social media, there have been many pundits that have said it shouldn’t be used as a “weapon”, but the question is: Why not?
Companies are putting customer service reps on to sites such as Twitter with increasing regularity due to users turning to that site more and more as a place to vent their frustrations with a company. Last night service rep for Southwest Airlines got a definite work out as film writer and director Kevin Smith took his anger with the airline to the masses.
The creative mind behind such films as Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma and others was taking a flight from San Fransisco to Burbank on Southwest Airlines last night. After he had put his luggage in the overhead bin, and been seated, he was informed that the Captain of the fight had decided that due to his extreme weight that he was a “safety risk” and had him removed from the flight. As is the way in this day and age, Mr. Smith took to his Twitter account, and what followed was a slew of Tweets, the name for the messages on Twitter, from the director (language left intact for impact):
Dear @SouthwestAir – I know I’m fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing me off a flight for which I was already seated?
Dear @SouthwestAir, I flew out in one seat, but right after issuing me a standby ticket, Oakland Southwest attendant Suzanne (wouldn’t give
last name) told me Captain Leysath deemed me a “safety risk”. Again: I’m way fat… But I’m not THERE just yet. But if I am, why wait til my
bag is up, and I’m seated WITH ARM RESTS DOWN. In front of a packed plane with a bunch of folks who’d already I.d.ed me as “Silent Bob.”
So, @SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was
wrongly ejected from the flight (even Suzanne eventually agreed). And fuck your apologetic $100 voucher, @SouthwestAir. Thank God I don’t
embarrass easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don’t sulk off either: so everyday, some new fuck-you Tweets for @SouthwestAir.
Wanna tell me I’m too wide for the sky? Totally cool. But fair warning, folks: IF YOU LOOK LIKE ME, YOU MAY BE EJECTED FROM @SOUTHWESTAIR.
Via @byrneification “save the anger for SModcast” Believe it, Son. @SouthwestAir? You fucked with the wrong sedentary processed-foods eater!
(1/2) @pigz “I know several people bigger then u who have flown on other airlines” I saw someone bigger than me on THAT flight! But I wasn’t
(2/2) about to throw a fellow Fatty under the plane as I’m being profiled. But he & I made eye contact, & he was like “Please don’t tell…”
Dear @SouthwestAir, I’m on another one of your planes, safely seated & buckled-in again, waiting to be dragged off in front of the normies.
And, hey? @SouthwestAir? I didn’t even need a seat belt extender to buckle up. Somehow, that shit fit over my “safety concern”-creating gut.
Hey @SouthwestAir! I’ve landed in Burbank. Don’t worry: wall of the plane was opened & I was airlifted out while Richard Simmons supervised.
This wasn’t even all of them, but I shared with you the most important ones to follow the story.
The Southwest employee charged with monitoring Twitter for the evening did reply to Mr. Smith on several occasions, and claimed that calls had been placed to him to try to make amends, but the damage was certainly done by that point to the airline’s reputation.
My question is why is this such a bad thing? Mr. Smith was being wronged by the airline, publicly humiliated in front of a plane full of people, and he shouldn’t use the tools at his disposal to talk about it? Mr. Smith has been very upfront about his weight in interviews and on his podcast, Smodcast, and if his weight was such an issue, why wasn’t anything said at the ticket counter? At the gate? Why was he let on another Southwest flight after being removed from the first? He had a legitimate complaint to make, but I am sure the “social media purity police” will wag their fingers at Mr. Smith for sullying their Utopian society of social media tools as a weapon.
I have a dog in this fight as someone who used to need a seatbelt extension on airplanes, but that isn’t why I’m taking Mr. Smith’s side in this fight, and nor is it because I’m a fan of his work: it’s because companies and brands should be held accountable for their actions, and now the consumer has a way to do this. In the old days you would write them a letter, you might get a voucher if you were lucky, but usually you would hear nothing of substance. You’d tell your friends about it, and that would be it. Mr. Smith has over 1.6 million followers on Twitter, and with just a 140 character message, he was able to tell all of them about the situation.He shouldn’t do this? There is some sort of shame to this?
The shame is that people feel that you shouldn’t, and I plan to explore this more through out this week.
It seems that handcuffing school children has become the new favorite method for getting problems under control.
Haley Shalansky, a six-year-old first grader in Port St. Lucie, Fla. was handcuffed at Parkway Elementary on Fed. 3rd after throwing a tantrum. Because she only weight 37 lbs, both of her wrists were put into the same cuff, causing bruising. According to a report on WPBF, the following day the girl threw another tantrum and reportedly hit the school principal who is eight months pregnant. At that point the young girl was removed from school and taken to New Horizons mental health facility to be committed.
Reading over the two sides of the story, they differ greatly, but I think the only thing they do agree on is that the girl does have behavioral issues. That being said, she needed to be handcuffed? She needed to be “committed”? They couldn’t have called her parents and simply told them to pick her up? The school says that they have attempted multiple times to arrange meetings with the parents regarding Hayley’s behavior, but the parents have failed to show up for any of them. Okay, fine, problem there, but that doesn’t excuse the seeming extreme measures the school took in the situations.
According to TCPalm, the parents, Kathy Franklin and Mickey Shalansky, have a history of problems with the school district, and were even arrested last year for failure to appear in truancy court when a nine-year-old daughter missed 17 days of school without doctor’s notes. It doesn’t sound like these two are going to win any parenting awards, I get that, but simply going by the facts, the school and authorities mis-handled this situation.
The sheriff’s department claims that they handcuffed the girl to keep her from harming herself, but that still doesn’t seem like something that falls under their purview. Why wasn’t child protective services called? You leap immediately from tantrums to a mental institution?
I called my 89-year-old grandmother who is a retired school teacher. She taught in inner city Phoenix and her class was made up exclusively of the students the school felt were “lost causes”, she dealt with weapons, tantrums and every other scenario you can think of under the sun, and even she thought this situation was handled incorrectly. Her biggest issue was the handcuffing of the girl, “Her fight-or-flight instinct would have kicked in and she would have ended up harming herself even worse due to just her instincts taking over.” I asked her if she would have ever had a child handcuffed for throwing a tantrum to which she replied, “Sean, I didn’t have them handcuffed for weapons, tantrums you just ignore.”
My grandmother is what you call “a tough cookie.”
This is the second case of a student being handcuffed in as many weeks. The other case happened in Queens, NY where Alexa Gonzalez was taken away in handcuffs for doodling on a desk in erasable marker. What is happening in our public schools? When did handcuffing a student become a common practice for situations that would have previously called for detentions or just speaking to a mental health worker? By today’s standards I’m not sure what would have happened to me in school. I was well-known to school officials for my lack of respect and desire to question their authority. True, I never threw things or damaged school property, but I probably would have been hauled off in handcuffs at some point.
Have schools lost so much control that they now have to rule by intimidation and fear of retribution? Something is wrong in our schools, folks, and it isn’t the kids.
Thanks to Jo from Jo’s Cafe for bringing this story to my attention.
It’s the end of the week, and that means it’s TechMeme Friday!
TechMeme Friday is where Steven and I go through all of the TechMeme headlines for the evening and do a quickfire commentary on each. We get a little hung up on the first one this week because … well, it’s a doozy … but you need to listen in on what exactly is going on.
Scattercast is 82 … and with as much as I’m writing, it’s hard finding things to talk about for a podcast!.
- The fun of running your own server!
- There are a lot of annoying movies coming down the pike … stupid Hollywood.
- Whats up in TV land.
Here’s
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In episode 4 of the Braindead Techcast, Steven and I have a discussion about the immense stupidity of some people on the Internet. It truly is amazing at times, and this example if just jaw dropping.
We talk some more about Google Buzz and whether it will really ever develop into something. It might, it’s difficult to make a final call on this service at this point.
There is also some talk about how we are still putting too much value on the number of followers people have, and it is time to give up on caring a bout that.
In another entry from the files of “Movie Remakes That Don’t Need To Happen”, it looks like Escape From New York is the next film to get the treatment.
New Line Cinema is moving ahead with its remake of the 1981 cult classic Escape From New York according to New York Magazine. The original John Carpenter film starred Kurt Russell as a former soldier-turned-criminal named Snake Plissken that has been sentenced to life imprisonment in New York City. The island of Manhattan had been walled off after the crime rate had jumped 400 percent, the bridges mined and there was one simple rule: once you go in, you never come out.
As luck would have it, just as Snake was to go in, Air Force One was brought down by terrorists, and the President was trapped inside the city when his escape pod landed there. Snake is given 24 hours to get him out, and if he succeeds he would receive a pardon. To keep him in line, microscopic bombs are placed in his neck that will detonate if he doesn’t make it back in time.
In short, it was a kick-ass action film. And fans just try to forget the sequel, Escape From L.A. ever happened.
New Line Cinema has been trying to get a remake off the ground for some time now, but the script never worked. Now they have brought in Allan Loeb (21, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) to rework it, and according to the original report’s sources, “Loeb nailed the humor in Plissken without slipping into camp, and he changed Snake’s rescue-mission target from a president to a female senator, thereby upping the banter quotient.”
The other issue was the economic question of making New York City look rundown. The company has decided to go with a similar look to what was seen in I Am Legend which means a lot less set dressing than was seen in the original. (Fun Fact: A lot of post-war New York from the original was shot in downtown St. Louis … says a lot for that city)
Apparently before John Carpenter would sign over the rights, he had a couple of stipulations: that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’”; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a ‘bad-ass.’”
No word yet on who will be playing Snake, nor who will direct it. Whomever ends up in the title role has some mighty large boots to fill to come close to the coolness factor of Russell in the original.
In episode 3 of the Braindead Techcast, Steven and I have an all Google, all the time episode about how Google Buzz has already turned out to be a joke. (And that Jason Calacanis once again proves he is an imbecile thinking that this service has just caused Facebook to lose half its value … seriously, why does anyone still listen to this guy?)
The biggest news of the day is of course the announcement of the Google fiber optic test which could be a massive thumbing of the nose at the ISPs of the United States. This could get very interesting to say the least.
Capt. Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie, one of the ships on the popular Deadliest Catch series, has passed away after suffering from a stroke on Jan. 30th.
It has been confirmed that Capt. Harris passed away on during the evening of Feb. 9th at the age of 53.
Capt. Harris had suffered a stroke on Jan. 30th while the Cornelia Marie was off loading a load of Opilio crabs in St. Paul. He was taken to the local medical center, and was later flown out to Anchorage by medevac. He had undergone surgery, but put into a medically induced coma and eventually came out of it to look like he was making progress. Sadly it seems he unexpectedly took a turn for the worse and passed away.
It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to our dad – Captain Phil Harris. Dad has always been a fighter and continued to be until the end. For us and the crew, he was someone who never backed down. We will remember and celebrate that strength. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers. – Jake and Josh Harris
Discovery mourns the loss of dear friend and colleague Captain Phil Harris. He was more than someone on our television screen. Phil was a devoted father and loyal friend to all who knew him. We will miss his straightforward honesty, wicked sense of humor and enormous heart. We share our tremendous sadness over this loss with the millions of viewers who followed Phil’s every move. We send our thoughts and prayers to Phil’s sons Josh and Jake and the Cornelia Marie crew.
Capt. Harris had suffered health problems over the past two seasons of the popular television series, but it is doubtful anyone saw this coming.
My deepest condolences to the entire Harris family and the crew of the Cornelia Marie.
Seriously, if you can’t figure out what the main topic of tonight’s episode is, you may live under a rock, but in case you need help, it’s Google Buzz. We discuss how it really isn’t going to go anywhere, but it’s probably already a bigger success than Google Wave.
We then have a short discussion about how people are drowning in subscription fees, something Steven and I have been saying for ages, but been laughed at numerous times. Well, The New York Times has now discussed it … we pat each other on the back because we deserve it.
When you can’t get a company to help you with a problem, why shouldn’t you use social media to goad them into finally doing something about your issue?
They didn’t.
In the age of social media, there have been many pundits that have said it shouldn’t be used as a “weapon”, but the question is: Why not?
The Southwest employee charged with monitoring Twitter for the evening did reply to Mr. Smith on several occasions, and claimed that calls had been placed to him to try to make amends, but the damage was certainly done by that point to the airline’s reputation.
And tying for the busiest week, there were 54 this week. I’m thinking 54 may be my limit.
It seems that handcuffing school children has become the new favorite method for getting problems under control.
Scattercast is 82 … and with as much as I’m writing, it’s hard finding things to talk about for a podcast!.
In another entry from the files of “Movie Remakes That Don’t Need To Happen”, it looks like Escape From New York is the next film to get the treatment.
Capt. Phil Harris of the Cornelia Marie, one of the ships on the popular Deadliest Catch series, has passed away after 
