Short comment on MySpace

MySpace. The name itself conjures ideas of freedom, about liberty to customize, change and design your own place in the Internet. The freedom does not always work; many youths and even companies have badly designed pages.

Personally I don't have very high opinion on MySpace -- the few profiles I've seen (even professional ones) seem rather clunky and remind me of the web pages I did during the late 90s in the IT-lab. I thought the reason for the pages to look so clunky was because the tools given for customization were hard to use, people were not trained in layout-creating (and thus adding the most clashing of colours and images to their profiles) and finally; because the people Just Couldn't Do It Right.

I seem to owe them an apology.

Yesterday I was bored and thus registered to MySpace. I thought it would be interesting to create a page, maybe do a simple and refined design to show how to Do It Right. As soon as I had finished the registration progress, I started browsing the account-settings. But.. where is the "Layout Settings"? Where do I change the background, fonts, tables-colours, link-colours?

After brief Google-search the answer dawned to me; the reason MySpace-pages look so bad is not because the customization tools are hard to use; it's because there are no customization tools. The pages code has to be set --by hand-- to the ABOUT ME-box. The attached image should make things clear.

I kid you not. All the MySpace design is entered into this box, titled "About Me". Those people with bad profiles? Those are the fucking gurus who fought a horde of dragons to get where they are. It's a miracle they get anything out of this at all. You can customize school property with axe easier - while your teacher is watching.

I have not seen such a bad design in ten years. Actually, not even then. I registered at Angelfire around early -98 (at least that's when my oldest file in the space was dated). It gave 15 megabytes of space, url and all it wanted was a banner on top. It had some limited custom tools; you could set the colours of the background and the text without knowing html. When I was 14, that was a really great thing. If you did know html, you could use that as well.
Of course, I didn't have anything to put on page - though I did try to create content few times (the front page I did back then, can be found here as well - made for 640x480 resolution).

It is miserable to note that as far as MySpace goes, it gives less chance to custom than a ten year old hosting site (which even by that time's standard was pretty basic).

So, what does MySpace offer then, if not your own space? Instant Messaging services; I suppose sending a message thru MySpace can be deemed to be less important, less direct, than sending email or contacting someone in MSN. Marketing products and networking. Exellent service for people who don't irc with a shell or know how to use forums.

I see no reason why there shouldn't be a custom-page in the settings. People seem to custom them anyway, and the lack of tools makes the end-results ghastly. Companies and groups that use the page for networking could easily make their page easily more attractive. This is the page of US Presidential Candinate. If this were a normal web page, I would laugh the designer all the way to the sea. I could do better. Infact, I have*. As things stand, I have to conclude that the writer was probably elite. And the guy who designed the Marine Corps-page? He must be some sort MySpace-Messiah.

But the fact still stands, that if the user interface were easier to use, you should not need sacrifice goats to dark gods to get to Barack Obama-class.

In conclusion, I have hard time understanding how this could be the sixth most popular page in the whole damn world. I can understand how the service the page offers could be needed.. but it's hard to believe that no other site has been able offer the networking and Instant Messaging with easy customization... or, have done so and made it popular. There is something really wrong with this world.

*I might add a link here once I get my web page back online.

Problems with establishment - Part 2: Nordea

There are very few things in life one should be able to trust without any limits. On the top of this list there is the bank. If you start to think about it, your life goes through the bank. Using credit cards, ATM, paying bills.. we are dealing with our banks. Trusting our way of life to the bank; should the bank come short of our expectations, it would only take few days till we would be living on the streets.
I mean, how much cash do you have? If I would count together the amount in my wallet, pockets, small containers and so on, I might be able to rise as much as €20, and on any given day seldom more than €50. Why would I need to? There are five ATM's inside 50 metre radius, my bank is 100 metres from the front door and I have several cards if one should fail me. Having lots of currency in cash would be foolish; you can't very well walk around €1000 in your back pocket, and I would not feel very comfortable leaving that amount lying even in my apartment. Credit cards are a great invention; even if someone would get his hands on one, you should still know the PIN-number. And for added security, you can always kill your card if you find it missing.

But to the story;
I have been customer at Nordea since I was 13 years old. For many years I didn't have much contact with the bank; my mother would transfer money to my account over the Internet, which I would then withdraw from the nearest ATM. My needs were simple; I was living with my family, I didn't have rent or any other expenses that I would categorize as involuntary.
This all changed when I moved to my own. Suddenly I had a need for a debit card (instead of just an ATM card). I had bills to pay, clothes to buy, and so on. I went to my local branch and got Visa Electron and Netbank-account. The service wasn't excellent - I had to wait for my turn for a long while, and neither was the service excellent. But it would do; it wasn't like I would visit the branch every week.

As did my last story, this one properly starts after I started preparing my extended leave from the country, around October of last year. I went to the local branch after getting appointment two days previous, telling I wanted to discuss about getting MasterCard in-depth. Even as I had appointment, the service-lady came ten minutes late to the meeting - because she was in the middle of her lunch! As I had skipped mine to be there on timely manner, this didn't really start our conversation with the right foot.
Immediately she put the papers in front of me and started telling me how to fill them; she either didn't know or didn't care that I wanted answers to several questions I had. When I tried to ask questions, she kept repeating that I don't have to know those things. She didn't even know anything about the discounts I was eligible for. At one point she confessed she had actually specialized to home-loans. After several problems, where she disrespected and offended me quite strongly, I finally finished the papers, got answers to most of my questions (but on retrospect didn't find out about many important things that I should have), ordered the MasterCard and authorized the bank to remove the money directly from my account (instead of sending me a bill once a month). I left the bank angry, and told the extended version of this story several times to my friends and family.

It should be noted that when I started looking after insurance for my trip, I didn't even consider Nordea -- even though they were supposed to have the best offers.

Months went by. I left to Scotland, and the MasterCard served me excellently, till at 18th of April (Wednesday) when I got email from my father; apparently the card wasn't in the autopayment scheme as I had thought, and the bills had been sent to my home - where they had stayed unopened. My father had finally started to wonder why I had gotten so many letters from the bank and opened several -- and found the bills, of which some had graduated into reminder-bills, with additional late-fees.
The next day father called the bank and asked after my direct payment-authorization. Apparently I had made one, but they had never sent it forward to the Finance-department, which handled such things. But at least now the things were under control; the bills had been paid, everything was just dandy.

Then on the next Saturday (21st of April) I decided to withdraw some money from Lloyd's ATM. I put my card into the wall without realizing this would be the very last time I would see it. The machine ate it; apparently because of the bills (which I had paid three days earlier). To ad insult to injury, the bank had closed not 15 minutes earlier, and I would get my card back on Monday at the earliest.

Next Monday I went to the bank, where they courteously explained that as demanded by international banking agreements, my card had been destroyed. Swiftly I sent email to my bank, asking why this had happened and how they would take care of this, as I was now without money in a foreign land (I didn't mention that I had Visa Electron; I thought that this might increase the priority of my case, and help me find out how much they bothered to read about me).

24th I got the first email from the bank. It asks could I get the card back if Nordea would send guarantees? I explained that the card had been destroyed, but gave the contact information of Lloyd's Paisley-branch.

26th the representative of Nordea said I could get a new card but "that would mean the bill dated 7.5. should be paid immediately". I sent angry answer where I quote the amount of money on my bank account (several times larger than any bill I would have to pay) and mention that they still had the direct payment-authorization, and would you please use it?
After this they apparently actually checked my balance and other information, as the next (over courteous) email mentions that as I have Visa Electron and could I use that one instead, till I got home? After getting back, she would like to meet and discuss the problems. Very well.

Visa Electron didn't have much coverage in Scotland; shops regularly declined to accept it, which meant I had to use ATM's often (of which Nordea took €2+2,5%).

Back home, I found out that not only had the delightful service person mishandled my autopayment, she had also forgot to give me all the discounts (of which I had had to educate her on), so I had been paying €3,22 per month for the right to use MasterCard even from the months I didn't have the card. As a sugar frosting on the cake, they had also taken €4 from my account when my father had asked after the state of my account, after things had started going wrong. The bank even took money when you complained?!

Thankfully, after pointing out all these things to the person I had been in communication with, all the money were returned. But it did teach me not to trust banks (and Nordea in general) without limits.

Now that I have my money back, I have opened new account in Nooa Savingbank; unlike Nordea which is a publicly traded company (with the first priority of bringing money to its owners) Nooa's first priority is to increase the amount of money in the saving-accounts. This means that they don't issue ATM-cards, but they give up to five time more interest than Nordea ever did. And I can still get Visa Electron (which I get to design myself, oh fun).

Problems with establishment - Part 1: Elisa

There's something magical in the border where company turns from an extension of a person into something that nobody quite claims as their own. Years back one of my brothers said this about a company that had turned from one-man enterprise into company employing hundreds, just in five years; "it used to be that the clerks felt like they were part of something bigger, doing something new and amazing -- now they are just working there". He was talking, of course, about the level of service.

When the people who deal with the customers get farther and farther from the people who make decisions, and decision-makers from the customers -- that's when the companies become evil. Or, if not evil, inept.. which, in a way, is even worse. I mean, you can trust evil. Evil always knows what it's doing, and it has manuals how to deal with different sort of complaints. Inept... well, it's hard to complain to the customer service that your broadband isn't working when the other end of the line doesn't acknowledge that anything is wrong. But I'm going too fast. Let's start from the beginning;

Elisa is a telecommunications company selling -- among other things -- broadband and mobile phone accounts, under several brands. Founded in 1882 as Helsingin Puhelinyhdistys (Helsinki's Phone Corporation), it used to be a co-operative where you had to own a share to get a phone installed. At some point they abandoned the you-need-to-own-a-share mentality, but otherwise it worked thus till the year 2000, when it incorporated into a public company, where each old share was worth about 20 new ones. The stock changed hands (and price) several times during the following years, and I believe that the majority of the stock is owned currently by some Icelandic millionaire.
After 2000, the company has grown aggressively in size by taking over smaller companies, not always kindly. They currently employ about 5 000 people.

I'm currently subscribing to their broadband because it was one of the two companies that at the time served my area (the other being TeliaSonera). I had some bad experiences on the other company (my mother had, and still has, their broadband). Long story short, the broadband worked at times really slowly, sometimes not at all, and the company never admitted any problems.

Now to my story. As you might or might not know, I was at student exchange from the late January to early June. Naturally, I contacted Elisa before-hand to let them know of the situation and to find out how I could avoid paying the bills - €25 per month - during the following months. They proposed to put my broadband on hold, which would have cost me €9 per month, but would have let me keep my homepage-space (where I hosted several avatars and a homepage I had made as a school project) and email-addresses (which I didn't use because I didn't want to be tied to a provider so strongly). I then said I would simply end my subscription on the last day of January and start a new one at June. For the credit of the person on the other side of the line, she was very courteous and innovative and arranged it so I didn't have to pay the fees of connecting the broadband (apparently about €50) and I even got a new ADSL2/WLAN-modem/router for free. At the time, I thought I would return home during late June, and so I asked the Internet to be connected on 18th day of that month.

On 5th day of June (when I was already back home) I got a call from Elisa; they were marketing a new broadband connection (25MB) and wondered if I would like one, for the additional price of €2 per month till the end of the year, with no commitment to stay with the plan. The person on the other end of the line didn't really seem to know what he was doing and several times I thought he was actually working for one of the competitors or tried to speak me into doubling my bills. After getting the gist of it, and after seeing that I was agreeable, he got better with his service (if not with his work) and even shared me few ways how to easily switch off the plan with minimum trouble when the year was up.

On 18th day I got a text message, proclaiming that my Internet was now connected, have a nice day. After trying different configurations for hours (new modem, old modem, switching the lines etc) without anything tangible to show of my efforts, I went to sleep. The next day I called the Customer Service again (finding out that (1.) I was supposed to have 1MB connection till they would separately upgrade my account on 4th of July and (2.) Elisa's definition of "line of eight minutes" meant the same as "wait forty minutes") trying to explain that the fucking Internet does not work.
After explaining that yes, I have some minor knowledge with technology and that I suppose I know how to connect the modem to both power and phone socket and yes, the Green Light indicating working ADSL-connection seems to be missing. The Customer Service says that perhaps he COULD send someone to check the wiring. But most probably the problem would be between the keyboard and the chair, and if so, you are the person who will pick up the bill (I find out that the bill is €70/hour). And somebody would probably come around during the next two days.

Two days later, there still wasn't any light in the modem. It was Wednesday and 21st of June. New call to the Customer Service (and forty minutes of elevator music later, thank God the line was only eight minutes long, I don't know how long I could have survived) I find out that "two days later" means 26th or 27th of June. Midsummer, you understand.

Today, on the 26th of June, I get call from my Father. Apparently the papers for my new 25M connection just arrived. To his apartment. New call to Elisa ("the line is over 20 minutes long, please hold the line, you can also go to our web page for service") and everything seems to be in order. Apparently the cable man is currently going trough the wiring, and yes, the upgrade should come to my address.
Two hours later call from the very friendly cable man explaining that the wiring had been set improperly and should now be fixed.

Now waiting for the 4th of July, when my Father might very well get a new, much better, broadband (though the Customer Service disagreed).

EDIT: The letter to my father indicated (and the Customer Service agreed and corrected) that while the new connection (which apparently is either 24M or 25M depending whom you ask) was coming to my address, the bills were going to be sent to my father.