24 July, 2016

Some Company Practices Are Just So Nonsensical

Sometimes I just have no understanding of company policies.  I think I need to remind the reader that there's no such thing as a free lunch (TNSTAAFL).  Things that appear to be free are never genuinely free, there is always a price to be paid for anything, especially when dealing with a company.

I don't know, maybe there is some law which says billing has to be like this, but I'm dumbfounded by my recent experience with Time Warner Cable (can we call them Charter or Spectrum?  or not yet?).

I just couldn't justify paying O($25) per month for a service of which I rarely partake.  (I'll use this quasi- "big O notation" throughout this entry to mean "on the order of."  It has a similar but not quite the same meaning in mathematics and computer science.)  I find a lot of entertainment in YouTube videos for example, and something like Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Video/Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. would be half the cost or less.  So I used the expiration of my SchedulesDirect subscription as a prompt to tell them, "sorry, disconnect me, please." They even offered to knock around $10/mo. off, but still, I don't watch that much on there.  After all, how many times can you watch the same episodes of M*A*S*H on WBBZ?  I must have more than 100 hours of recordings waiting to be watched on my MythTV.

A few days after I called in the disconnect order, I realized I never asked the CSR what my final bill should be, since it would be prorated.  It's also worthy to note that billing is explicitly ahead of time; that is to say, your payment is for the month to come, not for the month that ends on your billing date.  I hopped on their Web chat, and they gave me a figure for the partial month's service.  I thought I had disabled automatic payment, but they advised me not to pay anything.  However, I pointed out to them if I didn't pay for my partial month, and just wait for another bill, I'd be paying late, which I would rather not do for ethical reasons, plus a possible hit to my credit rating.  So I logged into TWC's site, scheduled a payment for that reduced amount, and thought that would set things square.  But no, that was wrong of me to think that.

For starters, there is ridiculous lag with those folks.  It turns out if you want to cancel automatic payments, you should do that before your bill arrives, otherwise an automatic payment will be scheduled anyway.  It doesn't matter that the amount to be billed might change between the bill being issued and the payment due date, which is weeks away.  I should also note here that Discover's program of Freeze does not apply to certain classes of payments, including  automatic charges from utilities (exactly like TWC).  I would have liked to prevent TWC from making any further charges to my payment card, but when I asked Discover about this, their answer was that indeed Freeze would not apply to TWC, and charges cannot be disputed before they actually post. You'd hope, wish, and think that the amount charged on payment due time would be at most any difference between any payments already collected and the amount of the previous bill.  Sorry, there will be no such luck.

When the original payment date arrived, I logged onto my Discover account and noticed a pending charge for the full month amount.  So I called up TWC and asked, what gives?  Oh, yes, we see your payment for the partial month here, and we also see that the automatic payment went through, we'll just refund that full month's amount to your payment card.  Keep in mind TNSTAAFL, because toll-free number (TFN) per-minute charges had to apply, maybe as well as telecomm charges on top of that (depending on how their toll-free routing is accomplished and their deal with their telecomms provider).  Plus the agent to whom I spoke had to be paid, the workstation he used had to be paid for somehow, the network to which that workstation was attached had to be paid for, the IVR which routed my call had to have been purchased and maintained, and so on.  Even less insignificant than these minor overheads, I happen to know from working for a small business which accepts credit cards that there is a per transaction charge plus a percentage of the purchase fee for accepting a credit card payment, typically around $0.30 plus 2%.  So that means that would be at LEAST O($0.60), $0.30 for my manual partial month payment and another $0.30 for their erroneous charge.  I honestly don't how much the transaction charge is for refunds.

An aside: I used to get my hair cut at Fantastic Sam's all the time.  I thoroughly realized why they had a sign that read something to the effect of, "minimum credit card payment is $10."  Their analysis likely figured out that paying the average shop rent, their stylists, etc. had not much margin, and that the credit card processing costs would cut significantly into that margin, if you'll pardon the pun.  As I recall, haircuts were $7 at the time, so no, I couldn't use a card, had to pay cash.

Well enough; a few days later, I saw both the charge and the refund were finalized on my payment card account.  But that wasn't the end of it.  No, that'd be too logical.

About two weeks before posting this, TWC sent a bill by mail.  It turns out, bottom line, the chat rep. got the amount total wrong, I still owed another $1.04.  Despite not being a customer anymore, they also sent along a pamphlet about their billing practices, "instructions on how to use your TV service," pricing, digital cable, remote controls, parental controls, and on and on.  Of course, they also sent an envelope, assuming I'd be writing a check and mailing it back.  Of course, again, TNSTAAFL.  They printed two "letter" size pages, one with the relevant billing information, another with ads for even more expensive services (O($90)/mo.), plus the mentioned pamphlet, the return payment envelope, had to mail it in an envelope for the whole thing, and paid postage to send it to me.

So...I went to log onto TWC's site again to make my $1.04 payment, of which I knew a significant fraction would be eaten up by transaction fees.  So be it; I don't want to deny them payment, even of that little amount, and I wouldn't want the potential damage to my credit rating.  Except...that was not possible, because TWC decided to shut down Web access.  So what's a debtor to do?  Why, make a call to a TFN to authorize another charge card payment of course.  I realize at this point I could have written a check and mailed it to them, which perhaps wouldn't cost them as much.  However, I have scant few of those left, and I don't want to "waste" them when other payment methods are available, lest I have to spend several dollars to have many checks printed which I'll not likely use (especially consdiering they should be printed as Key checks instead of First Niagara checks).  So there's more per-minute TFN charges, more agent time, and so on, plus another payment card transaction fee of course.  This is quickly eating way into the $1.04 that I owed.  And then you'd think that'd be the end of it, but I'd be wrong again.

A few of days ago, TWC sent another bill, this time showing $1.04 as a previous balance, but nothing in payments, for a bottom line of a $1.04 balance.  And once again, a return envelope was included, another one page ad for services, yet one more copy of the policies pamphlet, an outer envelope, postage to send it, just ridiculous in the grand scheme of things.  Noticing that there was no credit for my payment of a few days prior, I called them again to ask, what gives?  So of course, there had to be more TFN charges, more agent time, and so on.  The CSR assured me the second bill had been printed and mailed just prior to me arranging my payment, and indeed my balance was zero.

I have little doubt that at least one more mailing will be made showing that my $1.04 has been paid, my balance is zero, another sheet telling me that I can have a great triple play experience for four or more times what I was paying (despite telling them on the disconnect call what I was paying was too much); who knows, probably another policies pamphlet, and perhaps even though I don't owe any money, another envelope to return my (non)payment.

Let's take a moment to compare and contrast this with the IRS and some other companies, namely USA Datanet, Ink Bird, Monoprice, and Newegg.



First, I'll say I can't believe I'm using this as an example of being better, but the IRS is more sensible, at least in one, limited way.  I know it's just outside the stated limit, but if you owe less than a dollar to the IRS, the feds are willing to call it even, and you don't have to pay.


I used to be a customer of USA Datanet.  Their business model was charging a cheaper per-minute rate for long distance calls, only $0.10/minute, and transporting the calls with VOIP instead of conventional telephony infrastructure.  Plus as a promotion to join, they gave away 60 minutes "free."  The trouble is, I'm pretty sure they never profited from having me as a customer.  I live in New York and have siblings in Texas, but at the time, we were both people kind of busy with our jobs, so we would rarely talk.  For my first call, I think I talked for about 70 minutes.  So that was my free 60 minutes, plus a dollar.  They sent a bill, as you can imagine including an envelope for returning a payment, but I paid with a MasterCard.  So that was a printed page, plus the cost of two envelopes, plus postage, plus the transaction charges for MasterCard.  The next month, they sent another statement, showing that I owed a dollar and paid a dollar, so that was a printed page, an envelope, and postage.  Over the next couple of years, every few months I would make a call and leave a message on her answering machine (this was well before voicemail), which would generally only be a minute or less.  So I would be sent a bill for $0.10 or $0.20, I would pay with MasterCard over the Web, and the next month get a statement saying I paid what I owed.  This was stupidity similar to TWC; spend more to bill and send statements than there was revenue.

What I fail to understand is that USA Datanet called me up one day wondering why I had not used their service in many months.  After all, the way you would make calls is to call a PoP and enter in your account codes, and then the desired destination. Therefore they could tell when I would call, but more importantly. there was no obligation to use their service because it was not billed from a specific line/phone number.  I just told them there was no reason, I would still use their service if I really needed to talk to my sister, just that I hadn't in quite a while.  You would have thought they would have done some analysis deeper than "Joe hasn't used our service in a while" and figured out this is not exactly a profitable customer to have.  Or...I suppose they were trying to entice me to make some longer calls, like the first longer-than-an-hour one that I made, so I would be a profitable customer.

We now see the result.  USA Datanet is out of business.  Maybe their business model just doesn't have the appeal that it once did, or maybe they spent too much on providing service for more than the revenues they were receiving.



A while ago I got annoyed at the unreliability of the mechanical thermostat in my main floor refrigerator (I have another in my basement).  So through Amazon I bought an Ink Bird electronic thermostat.  About 6-8 months in, the thermostat was working OK, but it would not accept any commands to change or display anything.  It is stuck at 1.9° ± 2°.  When it powers up, it shows "1.8" which I can only assume is some sort of diagnostic code.  I wrote an email using Ink Bird's Web site asking if there was anything I could do, such as reflowing solder.  Even though they are based in China, I'm going to guess they were reluctant to tell me to do much with this thing, figuring I'd do something to it which would cause me to be shocked.  I also sent them a very short video of their unit being plugged in, and the "1.8."  Eventually they asked for my Amazon order number, and sent another thermostat.  I explicitly asked if I would have to return the defective one, and they said no.  They realized that it would cost O($8-$10) to ship it back, which is about half the cost of a new one.  They just figured this as a cost of doing business.  The thing is, I bought two more, figuring I eventually want to replace the basement's mechanical thermostat, as well as having a fully working one for the main floor.  Plus I have the one they sent as a spare, should one of the two active ones fail.  So for the price of 3, I basically have one for free.  And the one still works, it's just not adjustable, and is set for an awfully chilly temp.



A couple of months ago, I was frustrated at not being able to connect up all my audio gear simultaneously, always wanting for this cable or that cable, so I ordered a bunch from Monoprice ("MP").  The pickers must have been having a bad day because instead of getting the 5 Y cables of 3.5mm plug to left and right RCA jacks, I got 5 cables of RCA plug to two RCA jacks.  (In warehouse terms, there is "pick," where items are taken off shelves or similar, "pack" which is readying them in packages in preparation for shipping, and "ship."  A lot of operations have people do the picking, hence "pickers.")  Both varieties of cable retail, from them, for O($0.80) each.  I contacted MP, they redid that part of the order, and they said just dispose of, or use, the erroneously sent cables.  They realized that the lost value was O($5), and that it'd be around the same dollar amount for me to ship the erroneous cables back. They're cognizant of the price of good customer relations and the economics of the goof.



Finally, I will relate a tale of Newegg.  I ordered a number of items, one of which was a 3 m HDMI cable and an HDMI to DVI-D adapter, sold as a single item.  When the combination arrived, it appeared as if cable had been picked but not the adapter.  I will admit, I made a goof; as I opened the bubble pack they came in, the adapter fell out and out of sight.  What Newegg ended up doing was refunding that item of the order, and telling me to use the money towards the purchase of the "missing" adapter.  When I realized my error a few days later, and found the adapter, I called them up again, asking them to charge me for the combination item.  They said something like, tell you what, for this one we appreciate your honesty, but we're just going to call it even.  This really doesn't "hurt" us.  Part of the issue was that Newegg has a strict policy that it does not take any orders over the phone.  I'm sure they have experience where this is their most cost-effective way of doing business, either because they've gotten burned by phone orders before, or their considered analysis is that maintaining Web servers and networks is far cheaper than agent time.  While in the short term this was a "minor" loss for them, I subsequently made more purchases from them instead of Amazon specifically because of their willingness to give me the benefit of the doubt on that one set of orders.


I can only guess at the economics of of the IRS and their banking services.  I will guess that handling amounts of only a dollar might cost them more in processing fees or labor (especially if I were to mail in a check) than they would gain.

I can understand MP being wise and realizing the perspective of most customers, that most customers wouldn't want to pay the value of returned items in shipping alone for something they goofed in doing.  On the other hand, they trusted me an awful lot that I was telling the truth and not trying to scam them out of goods.  At least I'm reasonably sure since they ship in bulk, they do not pay the same rates as a "retail" shipping customer like me.  Still...there was an extra small box, more pickers' and packers' time, and so on.  All I can hope is there was enough margin in the other items I bought that day that at least they broke even, or came close.  What made me a little nervous about the long-term viability of that company is that it took over a week for the "RMA" to go through, and when I asked about it, they said their RMA people were backed up more than usual.


Ink Bird likewise had a lot of faith in me (I could have sent them a doctored video showing them the "bootup" of their thermostat and the brief showing of "1.8"), and likewise thought they were willing to take a similar hit in a second thermostat, a second box, more shipping, etc. for improved reputation.  I don't know what the warranty is supposed to be on those ITC-1000 thermostats, but somehow I don't think I was in the warranty period.

But sometimes businesses seem really stupid, as I've related with USA Datanet and Time Warner Cable (TWC).


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22 July, 2016

An Annoying Week With Allwinner

Many months ago, I got an Allwinner A33 Q8H tablet, a BrightTab, from Ollie's Bargain Outlet.  I do not know why, but one day a couple of months ago, it would not authenticate with Google no matter what I did (wipe all the tablet's data, etc.).  I'm guessing the firmware that was on it got either obsoleted or blacklisted (it would fail more or less immediately).

Earlier this week, since my Nexus 7 has developed distorted audio, I decided that I'm going to try to revive the Google functionality on this BrightTab since it's not particularly useful to me w/o Google cloud services.  In an attempt to correct this authentication failure, I copied some .apk and .odex files over from my Nexus 7.  Except I had one fatal procedural flaw: I did not back up one of the BrightTab's original .apk's in /system/priv-app .  And since the ones for the Nex7 did not work at all with this Android, it got into a bootloop, basically an unrecoverable one (since I did not have any of the original firmware anywhere), with essential processes dying over and over again.


Unfortunately, I was in for a rude awakening about Allwinner.  They seem to have implemented fastboot, but ultimately, it's not all that useful.  Most Androids, you can take partition files and flash them from fastboot.  Buuuuuuut.....Allwinner decided to go their own way, and create a whole different way of packaging firmware, one giant image lump (which apparently contains boot0, uboot, the bootloader, recovery, and system, judging from the messages which their flashing tool puts out on the stdout/stderr).

The first hurdle is, of course, that the majority of readily extant tools is written to be run on Microsoft (ugh).  Not knowing what effect these things would have on WinXP, I decided to run my WinXP VirtualBox, making a snapshot before installing anything "foreign."  This was good for about a day of hacking around, because unfortunately, this goofball of a tablet is not recognized by USB drivers, even ones that are supposed to be "universal."  Some of the Allwinner-specific tools even have drivers packaged with them, but this VM didn't seem to recognize the tablet when physically then logically connected (would always pop up the "new hardware found, please install a driver for it" dialogs).  In retrospect, one of the problems was that the tablet wasn't even being put into the correct mode (I guess similar to Samsung's download mode), possibly due to me not knowing how to do that/poor documentation.  It seemed like the instructions were wanting to do their deeds through ADB, which I knew was active because i could see the processes which were dying with logcat. Eventually I came across "PhoenixCard," which is a utility to prepare microSD cards for firmware flashing.

Cleverly, Allwinner does seem to have some sort of provision for booting from microSD cards, a feature lacking on a lot of other tablets.  That's particularly handy when you're in a boot loop and all the firmware writing tools you can find can't seem to find your tablet on USB.  But it is a really tedious way to go through several iterations of trying things.

The second hurdle was that BrightTab does not publish their firmware anywhere.  At least for the Pandigital I had, a .zip file which I could flash from recovery was available for download from Pandigital's site, so that any time my tablet's Android got corrupted (and it did, many times, before it died for good) I could reboot into recovery and reflash the stock firmware.  Also, the great pleasure of Nexus devices is that the factory images are readily available from Google's site.  There are several Allwinner boards with different ARM CPUs each, each with dozens and dozens of firmware variations for each processor (in my case, an A33).  Thankfully, Google searching eventually led me to a blogger who has collected links to a lot of them.  These pages may be in Spanish, but heck, with my 4 years of high school classes I knew most of the words used, and Google Translate helped with the rest.

The third hurdle was, given these dozens of firmware files, which one would work for my particular tablet?  The first blob I downloaded actually was pointed to by XDA-Developers, a trusted Android site.  I stuck it on a microSD card with PhoenixCard, it was accepted and flashed by the tablet, but after booting, the touch coordinates were way off, and I could not even activate the "continue" button after sliding the chooser to US English.  So, I started going down the huge-ish list of links to ROMs, looking for ones which indicated the proper size (in my case, 800x480).

The next breakthrough was finding Linux tools on Allwinner's wiki and Git repository.  This is in the form of source code for a USB kernel module and their flashing utility, LiveSuit.  (Seriously...it's "LiveSuit," like clothing.  It's not missing an "e;" I would have called it "LiveSuite," but apparently Allwinner wouldn't.)  And the breakthrough right after that was in the very explicit on-screen instructions for LiveSuit: you have to disconnect and turn off your tablet, hold a key other than power as you plug USB in, and then press power many times (they suggest 10,, but it seems the tablet may come alive to LiveSuit in fewer than 10 presses).  This apparently wakes up the boot code in the tablet to go into a special mode to accept ROMs. Now that I think of it, it's something like Apple's DFU mode, except the screen stays off.  Yay!  There was no more need to keep Windows XP in VirtualBox booted!

Another hurdle to endure was that a lot of these blobs are hosted on freemium download hosting sites.  Sure, give them your credit card number, and for varying amounts for various terms (one month, six months, a year, etc.) you can log in and have "gold member" access, which amounts to faster data rates and no wait for the link to appear.  Me being the cheap (and currently unemployed) type, I had to endure one minute countdowns, CAPTCHAs, and approximately DS-1 rates (roughly 180KBytes/sec).  Since these files are considerable (maybe at least 300M), they took plenty of time to come across, and the site had stream counting too (so you couldn't download more than one file at a time...unless of course you are a gold member).

At the point of getting native Linux flashing working, I had tried a couple of ROMs using PhoenixCard.  They ranged from not flashing (apparently a firmware image file either inconpatible with PhoenixCard or incompatible with my tablet) to flashing OK but being unusable.  But then, with the Linux kernel module loaded and better instructions on how to prepare the tablet for another ROM image download, also without needing to go through VirtualBox, the pace of trials picked up considerably.

One of the ROMs looked (and sounded) while booting almost exactly how it did after I got it from Ollie's...except the touchscreen didn't work.  bummer.  A couple of tries later, it booted OK, the touchscreen worked, but it was all in (as best I could tell) Arabic.  Actually, I found a YouTube video which explains the settings entries to look for to change any Android's language, and managed to switch it to English.  But then I thought...any time you go into recovery and wipe all data, you're going to have to muddle through changing to English.  So although the ROM seemed to be suitable, I plodded on to more ROMs.

Finally, I found an image that, when loaded and booted, it behaves much like the original firmware, except of course the Google stuff works.  I also spent about half the day today perfecting the tablet, such as installing SuperSU, copying over some of the shell environment from my Nexus 7, installing some applications and generally customizing it.

As usual though, it wasn't necessarily all the annoyances of getting where I want to be, it was somewhat the fun of the challenge of the hacks needed to get there.  So it wasn't the adventure of the destination, but the adventure of how to get to the destination.


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