All systems...eh

The local NPR station, KQED, is running its Spring pledge drive this week, & I got a little miffed because one of their gifts for signing up for $15/month is an emergency kit (backpack with water, food and the like), and an Eton FRX5 Emergency Weather Radio.

You know—hand-crank, solar powered, AM/FM (although not sure why you’d want to listen to AM in an emergency; or any other time), picks up NOAA and Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) broadcasts. Sounds cool, no?

Which is why, back in January when they were running their Winter pledge drive, I became a sustaining member at that level.

Well, fine—I got the backpack with the water and MREs, but evidently they were backlogged on the radio. I got a couple of no-reply email notices telling me they would be delayed, and then nothing.

Until I heard them touting this very same combination—the emergency kit and the radio—on Tuesday.

Well, that torqued me off just a little, so I fired up their rather off-putting “contact us” page and inquired how it was that they can’t send the dag-blamed radio to people who’ve already subscribed, but they’re offering it to new members?

And I was rather amused by the system-generated reply:

Because, while it gives me two excuses for why they may not get around to responding to my inquiry, the one that interests me was the second. The one that basically says “In the process of improving our service, we’re making it worse; you understand.”

Kind of like “in order to save the village, we had to destroy it.” Although not as extreme, of course.

As a product manager, I wonder about their IT processes; how you choose a new software package and plan the implementation without making provision for the transition from the old system to the new one. Without, in the process, screwing everything up. Because making things worse—even temporarily—is a high cost for improving them.

Apparently the reply (excerpted above) wasn’t sufficient, because a few minutes later, this also appeared in my queue:

Like repeating the same doublespeak will make me feel better about being ignored.

(Actually, that must mean that the system is really, really screwed up.)

However, it looks as though some humanoid did indeed read my email, because Wednesday morning I received notification that my super-spiffy hand-crank solar-powered all emergencies all the time radio is ready to be shipped. Would it be cynical of me to think that if I hadn’t pinged them I’d never have got the thing?

Well, maybe. 

However, there’s still a huge probability that I won’t get it. While it’s going out by UPS, the last stage of shipping—i.e., actual delivery—is for some unaccountable reason contracted to USPS. So I put my chances at less than 40%.