GreenEye Wire

If I am able to type on i35 you’ll know why.

Homer: We’ll search out every place a sick twisted solitary misfit might run to.
Lisa: I’ll start with Radio Shack.
–Simpsons – Treehouse of Horror VII

Why oh why do I ever go to Radio Shak for anything other than cables? Every time I’ve gone there to get anything related to computer equipment, the stuff never works. And yet I go back because it is convenient. Feh.

My mother just learned about Skype and she is all excited about the idea of being able to see the person you are talking to. Sort of like the future-istic telephone you saw on Star Trek and the Jetsons. So, I ran by the Radio Shak to get her and Dad basic web cams. I didn’t want anything complex or fancy..just a camera with a mike. Easy right?

Neither one of the web camera software cd’s that came with either of the web cams would even register on the computer as having anything on them. Heck, the DVD drive didn’t even show up in My Computer. So, I went to the Radio Shak site to download the software. Downloaded the software, ran it, and

Nothing.

The only thing about this entire process that I am grateful for is that I was actually at Dad’s computer trying to do all this myself instead of trying to talk him through it on the phone. While my Dad is very intelligent and good at many things, double clicking on the computer mouse is still a relatively new concept for him. But like Mom says “I can’t raise Soybeans to save my soul.”

I think the thing that gets me is that I really want to believe in Radio Shak. I want to think that maybe, possibly, a little store could do better than the huge Fry’s computer type warehouses. So far, however, it hasn’t happened. Their computer stuff is always crap. Always Always.

Thing is, I’ve never had to set up a web cam because my little Macbook — the cheapest one that Apple sells no less — came with the web cam already installed. I love that Apple just does stuff like this and I don’t have to mess with drivers and hardware that may or may now work.

With Youtube, it is imperative you treat your customers right.

We’ve all heard about luggage getting lost or destroyed on airlines, so that’s really nothing new. So a song about a guy’s $3500 guitar getting broken really isn’t that notable.

What is notable is how musician Dave Carroll dealt with it. He didn’t just tell a few friends he got a runaround from United Airlines, he wrote a funny song about it and put it on Youtube. And, there are 2 more in the works. (The entire ‘United Breaks Guitars’ story of what happened.)

It’s also worth it to note that Youtube gets over 100 million page views a day. Way to go United.

What’s even more interesting to note is that this could have gone the other way. If United gave great customer service and took care of the guy’s claim, they might have a wonderful PR campaign out of this. Instead of writing a song about how he got screwed, he might have written a song about how he was taken care of. Free positive advertising…

I’m not sure if United can cover this up. It seems like it would take a lot of money and effort. Sure, maybe if they make good with the guy and pay to replace the guitar, although at this point, it might be “too little, too late”.

Maybe they could work on claim policies to ensure that people don’t get a runaround like this again. But it seems they’d have to put on a good sized advertising campaign to tell people of that fact.

It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, United does to respond to this.