Articles by Chris Metcalf

By popular request, I thought I’d write this one up. It’s a quickie.

A month or two ago, I was lucky enough to spot a pair of very cool vintage theater seats with a big “FREE!” sign on them sitting on them down the street from my apartment. After my eyes lit up with the possibilities, I convinced an anonymous neighbor to help me haul them to the elevator.

Then I asked my awesome father for some carpentry assistance, since I can’t fit a table saw in my apartment.

He totally came through for me with a great “floorboard” made from some gorgeous teak/holly flooring (commonly found in sailboats) edged in oak. Mounting it to the seats was pretty straightforward - just some 10-24 stainless bolts backed by fender washers and nylock nuts. I added some standoffs made from nail-on nylon “magic mover” pads to make them easy to move around.

The result is awesome. They work great as a couple of extra seats for guests that stay out of the way when I’m not using them. And I love the quizzical look friends get on their faces when they try to figure out how I managed to steal them from the movie theater.

Apparently I was too busy to even mark the passing of my own birthday.

Monday was the big-two-seven for me. My god I’m getting old…

Photo from luvtequila2005’s CC-licensed photostream

For the last two years, I was a BlackBerry user and a T-Mobile customer. As a whole, I was very happy with their service. Their coverage was good, their data plans were cheap, and they rarely did anything sketchy to try and rip me off, besides that normal cell phone company “Hah hah! You sent five extra text messages so we’re going to bill you at a rate of $32,153/mb for that extra 800 bytes of data you sent!” trick. None of that evil stuff AT&T or Cingular did so many years back that drove me away.

But, I’ll admit, I was seduced by the new girl on the block. The hot new iPhone 3G with her sleek black exterior and big sexy screen. And I probably didn’t do my homework as well as I should have. I knew I’d bought my BlackBerry two years ago, and I was sure it was in the summer, but I didn’t know exactly when my contract expired. Worst case scenario I’d ride out the final month of my contract then I’d be in the clear. I was positive I’d be fine, so I jumped…

10. days. early.

This, of course, I didn’t know until I got my final T-Mobile bill today and discovered a $200 early termination fee. Apparently T-Mobile considers porting your cell phone number a request to terminate your contract, so they decided I was on my way out.

So I called T-Mobile customer service at 9PM on a Monday night, fully expecting to wait an hour only to be told “Well sir, you should have reviewed your contract before you terminated your service.” Shockingly, within about 10 minutes there was a human at the other end of the line. I explained my situation and, to my surprise, he said “Well, you were only 10 days early, so I think I can help you out”. It took a few cycles of him putting me on hold to talk to supervisors, since he’d never done an override like this one before, but he was able to convert my $200 termination fee to a $7 “contract buyout fee”.

This is an example of truly awesome customer service. Being polite, reasonable, and fair to your customers, even as they are walking out the door. More companies should emulate this. If you’re looking to buy a new (non-Apple) phone, you can do much worse than T-Mobile.

Photo from Fr3d.org’s CC-licensed Flickr photostream

I’ve discovered (quite accidentally) that if you put backslashes (”/”) in your GMail label names, iPhone Mail interperets them as nested folders. A handy trick for those looking to simulate a folder structure in thief webmail. I use Folders4Gmail to accomplish the same thing in the webapp.

Just trying out the WordPress iPhone app (from the bus no less).

A deeper iPhone review is on it’s way - I’m still trying out some things.