Socially|Mundane

Yes! (Makes football touchdown knee-jerk with simultaneous arm pull.)
Torley (Linden) wrote a great little piece on his experience with company support from two different firms. The contrast demonstrated is how one leaves him feeling rather frustrated and the other leaving him with a warm, highly satisfied feeling.

The main idea being summarized:

"It is inaccurate, but all-too-human to blanket your opinion of an entire company with a single experience."

I have been touting this about how people blast Linden Lab in the Second Life blog for a long time.

Yes, I understand the frustrations we all feel from time to time. Yes, understand the need to vent. Yes, I understand you really do feel you are being 'cheated', even if you are not putting any money into it (basic account, no payment info on file and such) - and I don't mean any of these comments sarcastically.

I genuinely understand it.

However, I repeat Torley's words:

I make it a point in my life - yes my everyday, real life to always keep this in mind. Note my posting about "misplaced anger" - we don't always place blame where it's deserved or, worse: we place a blanket of blame over everything and everyone even remotely associated with organization that is associated with the cause of the frustration, whether they can do anything about it or not.

So, the next time teleports in Second Life aren't working and the asset server if barfing all over the place, try not to chastise Jeremy Linden when he just so happens to post the week's Knowledge Base update for example.

And when that stuff does happen - take it in stride. Just sit back and smile. You know it'll be fixed. You know, deep down somewhere, there really are Lindens frantically working on it. So just sit back and laugh about it. I had my region go down in a rolling restart and it didn't come back for 20-minutes. I chuckled (really, I did) - IMed concierge support and said "hey, my region's been down for 20-minutes, can you do whatever it is you do to bring it back? Thanks - see you later."

it was back in another 5-minutes. And the best part is, I didn't feel the need to sweat it out for thirty minutes - and so the rest of the night was a wonderful one. And I was still laughing about it.

If TP's are dead - find your significant other, plant your ass on the ground next to each other and have a little IM-intimacy or something. But whatever you do, at least try to remember, place blame where blame belongs, and don't spread it like butter over the whole company.

Or worse, misplace it altogether.

Like blaming Linden Lab for "breaking" a product with a server update, when in fact, it's the creator's fault for not fixing their product, which had been known to break at least two-months before it actually did.

And for the record: one of Torley's examples is with Sony. And I concur, their customer support (regarding rebates anyway) is top-notch consistent.

Two customer service stories | Torley Lives