Are you serious?

I just bought a new iPhone 4s. So far, it seems a huge improvement over my old iPhone I've had for about three years. More on that some other time.

I stuck with AT&T as my carrier...not because AT&T rocks my world with their product, just because that's who I've had all along and I could stay grandfathered under their unlimited data plan. I got the phone delivered through the mail yesterday, so all I needed to do was go to AT&T's on-line customer center to deactivate the old phone and activate the new one. It seemed pretty simple, and for the most part, it was...except for one hiccup that almost blew my mind.

Pretty deep into the process, I needed to input something called an ICCID number from the phone's SIM card. What the heck is that? Well, there was a nice link I could click to find out how to get this number. And here is what it said:

That's right, it told me to take off the back cover and remove the battery. Well, I'm not a technogeek, but I was pretty sure that taking off the back cover would completely void my warranty, and taking out the battery (which, incidentally, isn't intended to be replaceable), would risk damaging my phone and making me wish that it was still under warranty. I confirmed all of this to be true with a quick Google search.

Another Google search revealed that I could get this ICCID number simply by going to the settings menu on the phone. Or, if I really did need to see it printed on the SIM card, I could just insert a paper clip into a hole on the side of the phone and the card would pop out. Or, if I really wanted to be lazy, I could just look on the bottom of the box the phone came in and, lo and behold, there was the ICCID number.

So, this raises an interesting question. If there were three really easy ways to get this number, why would AT&T ignore all of those and instead tell you to risk breaking the phone and voiding your warranty all in one clumsy action?

I think there are three possible answers. Either their activation website is run by a complete buffoon, or this is one damned evil company with a diabolical plot to sell new phones and avoid honoring warranties, or Sprint or Verizon has hijacked their site in a corporate espionage maneuver. I'm not sure which of these three is more feasible...they all seem to have merit to me.

The good news is that I got the phone activated without having to bust it open. I just wonder how many people have taken the bait on this. Their one savior is that there are two screws that have to be removed to open the phone up, and these require a really tiny jeweler's screwdriver that most people won't have just lying around. Of course, you could just take a hammer and chisel and crack the back off. I suspect the end result wouldn't be much different. Maybe AT&T should list that as an option.

I believe I can see the future....

Tis the season for projections into the future. What will 2012 bring us?

This seems to be a favorite past-time of a lot of the talking head shows in early January. Prophesies range from how many hurricanes will we have to which celebrities will get divorced to what will the job market do to what features will the iPad 3 contain. It would probably be an interesting exercise to go back once a year and compare predictions versus reality...maybe one of these days when I'm not doing anything else I'll look into that.

What I have done lately is watch a few classic science fiction movies, namely "Blade Runner" and "2001 A Space Odyssey". Like most futuristic sci-fi, both of these movies attempted to see into the future and paint a picture of the world as it would exist many years from now. For Blade Runner, it was 1982 trying to predict Los Angeles in 2019 (I think the Philip K. Dick novel that the movie is based upon goes back to the late 1960s.) "2001 ASO" was made in 1968, and it attempted to picture the world as it would exist in, you guessed it, 2001.

Both movies probably got a few things right, but in most cases they over-estimated the advancements that we humans would make in 30 to 40 years (I'm assuming that 2019 in LA won't look that much different than it does now.)

There are two things that both movies got wrong that caught my attention right away. The first is somewhat whimsical - neither movie anticipated Pan Am going out of business. Both movies featured the airline-turned-spaceline prominently, not realizing that the company wouldn't make it past the early 1990s.

The other misfire is more interesting. Neither movie predicted the invention, much less the proliferation, of cell phone technology. They still envisioned phone booths where you would sit down and have a private conversation. Sure, they spiced it up a bit and made them video phones, but phones were still these huge, clunky machines with buttons in privacy booths. Talk about quaint. Incidentally, 2001 ASO also failed to anticipate the divestiture of AT&T. So, no Sprint or Verizon for those guys.

What I find interesting here is how something that is so completely integrated into everyday life now wasn't even on the radar screen back then. Despite their attempts to paint all the little details of how people would lead their daily lives in the future, from flying cars to rotating space stations to Velcro zero-gravity shoes, they couldn't imagine much change in the ubiquitous telephone with a handset. This was a paradigm that they just could not picture going away.

From this side looking back, it seems an obvious oversight. But that's easy for me to say. It sort of makes you wonder what major shift is just around the corner that will one day be obvious, but for now is all but unimaginable. And it makes me appreciate even more the incredible foresight that the real inventors sometimes have.

Nothing's gonna change my world...

Well, it's the last day of 2011.

As so often happens in the waning hours of a year, the TV news shows are packed with year-end synopses and best-of, worst-of and top-ten most-[blank] lists galore. Being somewhat of a retrospective kind of guy, it's a favorite time of the TV year for me.

There's no doubt that 2011 was a busy year for the world. It's always hard to diagnose the significance of events in close perspective; it takes awhile to let things sink in before true relevance crystallizes. Nevertheless, 2011 certainly seems to have had more than its fair share of major events.

There were earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, riots, political uprisings, economic meltdowns, political meltdowns, leadership changes, bad guys getting killed, wars, really famous people dying, and I'm sure lots of future-famous people being born. There was even a near-nuclear meltdown. Even though any given year has an assortment of all of these events (except maybe the nuclear meltdown thing), it's hard to say that 2011 was your typical run-of-the-mill year. It seemed a banner year of events by both quality and quantity measures.

Because of people's competitive nature, there's always a tendency to want to pick the single most important event of the year. This has always seemed a bit nonsensical to me. Categorization of events on a calendar basis is itself somewhat irrelevant, since time marches on independently of what the calendar or clock says.

Furthermore,  prescribing importance of events always depends on your point of view. I'm sure the people of Fukushima would have a hard time agreeing that the Arab Spring was more important than the spring earthquake and tsunami that rocked northern Japan. Just as I'm sure the people that work at Apple have a hard time accepting anything as being bigger than the loss this year of Steve Jobs. Anyone who has ever lost a relative, or had a baby, would most likely point to those events as their most important of any given year. And of course, people from Wisconsin would probably vote that the Superbowl was the biggest event of the year.

So, I think I'll just consider 2011 to have been a fairly dynamic and super-charged 12-month rolling average. Maybe it's a sign of the times in which we live. Technology, which shapes much of how we experience things these days, has certainly reached a point where the pace of change seems to have outstripped our ability to keep up.

Or maybe we're just more aware of our times now. Although I'm sure people living during the early part of the twentieth century were just as disoriented with the changes happening then as we are now, at least there weren't millions of people yelling at you about it  through Twitter.

Maybe global climate change actually is for-real, and today's crazy weather isn't just a part of a reoccurring cycle, but a shift of things to come. Maybe the political and economic institutions that have dominated for the past century or more have finally run their course, and we are indeed at an inflection point in history. Maybe the stability of certain things we used to take for granted (like American prosperity) was, in fact, an aberration, and now things are getting back to normal.

As always, time will tell...Happy New Year.

Why I didn't sign on with SiriusXM

I don't care for companies that don't have enough faith in their product to deal honestly and openly with their customers. They feel that they have to somehow trick their potential customers into paying more than a fair price for what they are selling, either using bait-and-switch techniques, or failing to disclose hidden costs, or requiring that you buy more than you need or want. Airlines, insurance companies, carpet stores, and shady car dealers all come to mind. So do cable companies and pretty much any company that sits in a semi-monopolistic position.

Add SiriusXM radio to that list. Since Sirius acquired XM, they essentially have a monopoly on the satellite radio business in the US. And, true to form, they are using this privileged position to stick it to their client base - customer satisfaction be-damned.

I bought a new car this past summer and it came with a six-month free trial subscription to SiriusXM radio. I had never had satellite radio before, and I was pretty excited at first - suddenly I had this huge selection of radio stations to pick from, many commercial-free, with a full spectrum of genres from which to pick, from news to traffic to alternative rock to opera...a practically endless variety of programming all there for me to explore.

I quickly got over my excitement. It turned out that "commercial-free" didn't really mean free of commercials, especially those promoting Sirius itself, and that the robotic DJs on most of the stations, with their ever-present and failed attempts at being either cool or funny, were even more obnoxious than the loudest local DJs - at least the local guys appeared to have souls. Worst of all, though, was the fact that every niche-music station had a playlist that was no more expansive than your typical Top-40 FM station. The only difference being that, instead of hearing the same 40 pop songs every day, I could now hear the same 40 Beatles songs every day. That may sound good on paper, but in reality it gets really old really fast.

All that being said, it was nice to have such a wide selection of stations at your fingertips regardless of where you were driving, clear as a bell, and you could literally drive across the country without changing the station (if you have NO imagination), or worrying about trying to pick up something other than radio evangelism in the middle of West Virginia. So, although the product didn't turn out to be all I had expected, it was still something in which I could see some value.

And then the letter came in the mail for me to continue my subscription as a paying customer; and I was willing to become one. But, it became obvious to me that Sirius realized that their product isn't all it's hyped to be, and the only way they could sell it was to deceive me.

Let's look at the offer: $12.95*/month, with a one-year subscription commitment. Two red flags here...one is the one-year subscription. Why tell me it's $12.95 a month, when in reality I don't have that option here. I can't go month-to-month at $12.95 each, I can only go annually, pre-paid at $150.40. Furthermore, at the end of that year, the whole thing renews automatically and at whatever the going rate is at that time. The only way to prevent this is to physically call them before the expiration date. And the subscription is heavily geared towards getting you to pay using a credit card (they actually charge you $2 to get an invoice that would allow you to pay with a check.) So, the onus is on me to cancel my subscription in a timely manner, or else get charged for another year at any price Sirius chooses (do you think the price will go down, given the virtual monopoly that they enjoy here?)

The second flag is the asterisk next to the price. On the back of the letter is the explanation, which I reproduce in a much larger font than it was actually printed:

"*Additional Fees & Charges: Early cancellation fee may apply. Prices do not reflect applicable taxes, fees and charges. See SiriusXM Customer Agreement for details."

There's several things here that bother me. One, I hate having to look for these disclaimers. What are you trying to hide?. Two, the taxes, additional fees and charges add another few dollars a month. So, it's really over $15/month, and it took some doing to figure out what this number actually was. Why not be up-front about this? The fees actually look to be fairly predictable, so it's not like Sirius doesn't know what these numbers will be before-hand.

Three, and probably most annoying, the Customer Agreement that they refer to isn't included in the letter. I have to go on-line to find it. I should also have an attorney with me when I do. It's 17 pages of fine print, much of which is written in legaleze. What I was able to comprehend on my own, though, revealed that:

1. The agreement could change at any time, and they are not committed to tell me when it does. It's up to me to come back "frequently" (their suggestion) and read through all 17 pages again to make sure I'm cool with the changes. And if I'm not...
2. I can cancel, but I probably will have to pay a cancellation fee (the amount of which is not specified in the agreement.)
3. They can delete any station at any time, "with or without notice to you." The kicker here is how "Your continued use of the Service following any programming changes will constitute your acceptance of such changes." Think about that one for a minute...there's kind of an interesting chicken and egg thing going on there.
4. Here's the best one...if Sirius for any reason ceases broadcasting, all pre-paid subscriptions are considered non-refundable. Even in death they reserve the right to get the last laugh.

I could go on and on...there's 17 pages of one of the more lopsided agreements I've seen in awhile, and I review contracts for a living.

I think the one thing here that gets to me over all others is the automatic renewal requirement. There is no other option in their service agreement. Why is that? For convenience of the customer? I doubt that. Given the one-sided character of the rest of the agreement, I think it is fair to say that it's there to keep you hooked. Regardless of how dissatisfied with the product that you become, regardless of how far up they tweak the price and fees, regardless of how they tinker with the legal details of your contract, even if they cancel all of your favorite stations without telling you, the only way out is to pick up the phone and cancel, and probably pay one or more fees to do so. And, isn't it odd that I can sign up for the service on-line, but the only way to sign off is by calling them?

I think Sirius knows that a lot of customers will likely lose interest in their product in a year or less. One way to stop the migration would be to always strive to exceed the customer's expectations, to offer new and exciting features periodically, to impress me now and then. Or, the other way, would be to structure an agreement that tends to trap the customer in something akin to a loveless marriage.

Sirius has chosen the latter. And with that, I bid my satellite radio Adieu.

Welcome to Stepping Lightly

A series of "I need to write this down" thoughts that pop into my head constantly.