Secondly, I am loving this London summer and have been in salad overdrive of late.  Hot smoked trout and vermicelli salad with chilli oil and lime juice dressing.  Duck and green mango salad.  Chicken and coriander salad.  Tuna tartare with green been and mint salad.  Thai beef salad, for which you absolutely must use kaffir lime leaves.  Tricky to find, but there are a few shops near Chinatown that stock them.  If that fails you can head out to Wing Yip in Croydon, buy in bulk and then freeze the leaves.

And finally to finish with an IT-related thought (other than the HDD saga.  Fingers crossed I never need post about such things again).  I attended three IT Exec briefings in the last week, and at all three the dread phrase “IT and the business” was bandied about.  Who is this mystical – and evidently difficult-to-please – “the business”?  I support one business unit – Savings – but what I do isn’t about “IT and the Savings business”.  Try getting anything done in isolation.  Of course you couldn’t – I liaise with risk, security, finance, marketing, comms, legal, IT, internet banking, telephony etc etc to implement any Savings changes.  We collectively form “the organisation“, whose processes and technology (and sometimes people, too) cross multiple business units.  Including IT.  “There are no IT projects; there are only business projects.  Likewise there are no business projects; there are only IT projects.”  Business + Technology = Business Technology.

But let me start at the very beginning.

I keep my 1TB drive attached to my laptop permanently.  Yes both are supposed to be portable, but actually they have barely moved since I got the office set up.  Anyhow, on the 9th of June I was about to drop and drag a file to the drive when I noticed that the G-drive wasn’t mapped.  Odd.  Perhaps it had been turned off, so I turned it on.  It gave me the electronic equivalent of the little engine’s “I think I can, I think I can” before conceding that actually it couldn’t.  Things were attempting to start and whirl, but not much was happening despite the fact that the blue power light was on, suggesting that the power was fine.

So I search out the details for logging a support case with Lacie.  I am confronted with a web page.  How does one spell “whheeeeegggrrrruuunnntttweeeee” sounds coming from a hard drive I wonder to myself.  But I explain that the blue light comes on, it attempts to start, and then fails.

Two days later I get a response.  My favourite line was “When you power the drive on, does the drive have a light on the front?”.  Oh dear.  I can already tell that I’m in for a splendid experience.  So I reply, answering the questions, sometimes having to thank him for his suggestion but as my model doesn’t have that feature, I can’t look/test as he has asked.

He concludes that it could be the power supply unit and says that he will arrange for a replacement.  Excellent, what a relief.  An envelope here, an envelope there, and Bob’s your Uncle as some might say.  I ask what information Lacie needs from me in order to replace the power supply.  6 days later comes the response.  Break neck speed.  Don’t hurt yourself.

I reply same day and then have to wait 12 days for an RMA to be raised, and to be given the Lacie address where I need to send the potentially faulty PSU off to.  12 days.  To raise an RMA.  I have gone from irritated to angry at this point.  Almost an entire month has elapsed and all I have is an RMA number and an address.  So I mail off the item and state in my response that 12 days is dismal and, given the nature of the task, inexcusable.  You can imagine the response.  “Thank you for your patience.”  The web equivalent of “your call is important to us, please continue to hold and we’ll be with you shortly.”

Three weeks later I contact Lacie again.  Naturally through the web page.  Because that is just ideal.  It cannot possibly take three weeks for the mail service to deliver the part to another UK address, have Lacie acknowledge receipt and then ship out a replacement.  Can it??  Well it takes 12 days to raise an RMA, so at this point I’m not sure.  So I ask the question.  Apparently the replacement part was sent out two weeks prior, i.e. within a few days of me sending mine off.  There are obviously no SLAs around case closure time as Lacie didn’t tell me that they’ve received my failed PSU, didn’t tell me that they’d sent a replacement, and didn’t contact me to see whether that solved the problem.  So, as best as I can tell, they don’t much care either way.

So, the replacement was obviously lost in the post.  And here, good reader, is where we really come unstuck.  They send it via regular post so they can’t track it.  So I suggest that they send another replacement.  Silence.  No response.  Four days later I advance from angry to ‘red hot with rage’.  So I ask again for them to get back to me with an update.  Or a replacement.  But my expectations were falling with every passing moment.  So then I decide to reach out to their COO.  I email him.  No response.  Wonderful.  I see that we have a massive cultural problem with apathy that starts at the top and goes all the way down.

So then I take to contacting Lacie – by that marvellous web page, naturally – every day.  Another week passes.  And then I move in to my final anger phase:  white.  hot.  rage.

It has been two months.  For a simple piece of kit to go from one street in London to another.  Pigeons manage it.  So I post one final message stating that after seeking (free) legal advice – true – they are in breach of the test of ‘reasonableness’ with respect to honouring their warranty agreement, and that I would be progressing through legal channels unless the case was resolved within a week.

Silence.

So I track down Lacie’s phone number, and ask to speak to their legal department.  I get put through to Finance.  The lady on the phone sounds sweet.  Pleasant.  I explain my situation and the fact that I will be taking Lacie to small claims court.  A bluff, of course, but when the stick didn’t work I had to upgrade the weapon.  Yes, I could have purchased a replacement myself, but this is hardly just or reasonable, and having spent money on the drive and subsequent postage, I’m not feeling inclined to inject one red penny more into their dis(organisation).

Bless her, the Finance lady put me through to the UK Country Manager.  Who couriered out a replacement that same day.  Only it was for a different unit and wouldn’t fit.  That was a fun phone call.  They sent out another power supply unit.  For yet a different hard drive.  Variety is the spice of life.  Third time is the charm and I finally got the appropriate power supply to add to my nursery.  Only – and here’s where you reach for a stiff drink – the underlying problem wasn’t caused by the power supply unit as the drive still won’t power up.

So then I trot over to their offices myself, hard drive unit (and power supplies, plural) in hand.  The technician attaches the devices to a power supply and his computer, turns it on and then hits Refresh on My Computer.  Again.  Again.  It has been a long time since I did my A+ Hardware certification, but I still remember that there is more comprehensive troubleshooting available than this.  But I watch with broken bemusement.

Looks broken he assures me.

Yes, thanks for that.

Can’t you try a different enclosure and see if that’s the problem?  Rather than just throwing the unit – and my data – away and giving me a replacement.  Which is, of course, a refurbished disk.  Excellent.

“I suppose I could”, he says.

“Having waited for 8 weeks for a replacement power supply unit, I’m afraid that I must insist on more troubleshooting than this.” I say, maintaining stready eye contact.

Begrudgingly he sets about trying to find another unit.  At this point I am told that they will do what they can and call me later that afternoon.  When they did, it was to report that the drive still wouldn’t power up, so therefore it’s an issue with the disk unit itself, not the enclosure, power supply etc.  I can only trust that the full troubleshooting was done.  They don’t usually troubleshoot; if it’s not the power supply they simply replace the unit.  Which seems like a no-muss, no-fuss solution (except in my drawn out case) but hardly seems like they’re doing much to keep their customers happy.  After all, it’s not like a printer where any printer will do.  Data is data and may not be stored elsewhere and you’d think that there would be some kind of data recovery option.  But, no.

Right, so they now have my drive, the power supplies, and I have nothing.  On Monday I received an email stating that the disk was being sent off for repairs and that it would be delivered back to me after the repair.  I reply immediately seeking clarification, as I had already been told that it couldn’t be repaired and that it would be replaced.  Four days later I’m still waiting for a reply.

So, where in the world is my drive unit?  Somewhere in France, apparently.  And after calling the UK Country Manager I am told that ‘repair’ means that they are installing another hard drive into my enclosure.  Or I might get a different enclosure and hard drive.  I am, of course, fully expecting that they will insert a new hard drive into my old enclosure, not test it, and it will arrive dead because the problem was in fact something to do with the enclosure after all and my original drive was fine and yet destroyed (securely, one hopes).  That would be just my luck.

I am never buying Lacie gear again.  The UK Country Manager has been very helpful indeed.   But I refuse to do personal business with a company where either of the following is true:

1.  I only get something resembling service if I happen to speak to *the* right person in the entire company.

2.  The culture of customer service is so lacking that people dealing with customers don’t escalate issues and follow through.  Ignoring customers is not a solution.  It simply means that I’ll ignore you, too, in the future.  It’s not like there aren’t dozens of other manufacturers to choose from.

So I’ve logged a call with Lacie as I only bought it in October last year and it is therefore still under warranty.  Hopefully it will be a clean fix, or a straight forward swap of the broken part for one that, you know, works.  Nothing is really lost if the data can’t be recovered because it’s either on the NAS (purr, purr) or in the cloud courtesy of Mozy.  But still, it would be painful to have to pull everything down and across and repopulate a new hard drive.  Not as painful as not having a backup, mind.

Have you ever heard of such a wretched run of bad luck?!

Then there were the obvious posts about a certain ‘V’ drug.  That kind of spam is really rather boring and cliche now.  Time to move on.  Surely there are some new and exciting discoveries from the Amazon that you could share instead?  Or minerals from the previously-unexplored ocean bottom that could cure me of my morning irritability for only £1,000.  I would have at least thought about it before hitting ‘Delete’.

I was rather surprised to discover a large number of ‘maybe you’re not spam?’ comments.  Ones that make you stop, squint and ask yourself if this person is simply lacking sleep, or if the automated spam system that they’re using can’t yet tackle adverbs.

But the pièce de résistance (assuming that this post doesn’t trigger a tsunami of new contenders) was a recently received email spam.  I was in rather lofty company as I looked at the distribution list.  Board members.  Top executives.  And me.  Most flattering.  Especially when you consider that I wasn’t on the distribution just the once.  No sir, that would be far too easy.  Every possible email address variation had been put forward, such was the sender’s desperation to reach me.  And not even so that I could be informed of my windfall from a distant relative’s death, payable in to the bank account that I must provide details for.

So all of this does beg the question….why?  Can’t think of anything else to do with yourself than send some inarticulate splatterings to a stranger, neither requesting nor expecting a reply?  Read a book.  Make some friends.  Learn a language.  (It wouldn’t be totally out of place to suggest – based on spam received to date – that you start with English)

What a strange world we live in.

Speaking of things delicious, I have become a self-appointed master chef.  Last week it was chorizo and prawn jambalaya, this week ropa vieja (beef slow-cooked for 4 hours with stock, herbs etc), the week before that it was BBQ ribs.  Before that, king prawn chilli spaghetti.  And somewhere in there I discovered a recipe for chocolate muffins that sounded sinful.  So naturally 12 of those appeared on the table in no time.  This weekend I’m trying roast quail.

The NAS situation.  Resolved.  Netgear sent me my recovered data on brand new disks, in a brand new chassis, couriered to my door.  And somewhere in transit, the motherboard on the chassis broke, but was displaying broken-power-supply type symptoms, so we replaced that part.  You can imagine how defeated I felt, but couldn’t help but laugh at this exceedingly comical unfolding of events.  Anyway, Netgear were – as always – marvellous, and a few shipped items later I have a shiny happy NAS just purring quietly in the corner.  With data replicated on an external hard drive.  And in the cloud.  And on my laptop.  Once bitten, excessively shy, it would seem.

Picking up the blogging reins again this weekend.  Much to say.

Many millions of customers.

From over one hundred countries.

Anyone looking at the above numbers must appreciate the powerful creative energy and knowledge that exists within a large organisation’s ecosystem.  A quotation from ‘Banksy Was Here’ springs to mind:

“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked…where the street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.”

When it comes to innovation, one of the first questions that we are asked is “so what ideas are you looking at?” or “where do you get your ideas from?”.  These are perfectly valid questions, but the fact of the matter is that generating ideas is rarely difficult and are never ever limited to your Innovation team, even if your processes and behaviours suggest otherwise.  If you think about the experiences you have in your day-to-day life, there are things that you would personally like improved, functionality that you would pick up and move from work to personal and so forth.  Ideas are everywhere, but most people aren’t able to directly*do* anything with them, or even share their ideas with someone who *is* in a position to make change happen.

For a large bank, that is an enormous loss.  Tens of thousands of employees.  Millions of customers.  Many more millions of touch points and interactions with these same populations.  And yet how many banks actively encourage and empower their stakeholders to envisage and drive change?  There are very few who are able to do this, and the reasons are not surprising.  Risk, security, command and control, management overhead, disruption, noise, regulation, skills, enabling systems, change control etc.  These are hardly convincing when you consider what still larger players are able to do.

Consider Google.  Despite the emergence of other players, Google’s search engine is still *the* number one search engine on the Internet, and that means that it is used by *many* millions of users across the globe.  On countless combinations of operating system, device, browser etc.  Which would give them just cause to keep their systems locked down, with change and disruption minimised and controlled, but in fact the opposite is true.  I recently read an article on Harvard Business Review about Google, in which a new employee noticed something with Gmail that he wasn’t happy with.  He sent an email to the internal team, expecting to get back either a default reply on change control, or no reply at all.  Instead, he was shown how to download the Gmail development engine to his laptop, and he could go and code whatever he wanted in his sandboxed environment.  Once he had finalised the change that he wanted, he uploaded the code for review by the appropriate engineering team, they checked it, and a week later his change was live.  On the Internet.  In one week.  Coded by an employee from a completely different department.  Affecting countless end users.

Imagine how powerful that approach could be if it was implemented within a bank, or any large organisation for that matter?  Imagine facilitating a decentralised approach to core functions such as design and build, such that anyone who wants to contribute can?  If this sounds extreme, remember that these are not, in some cases, specialist skills anymore.  Typing on a typewriter, much less a computer, used to be a skill reserved for administrative staff, but I am yet to encounter anyone in the business world who is not able to send their own email, including navigating the email client.  The exposure that we have to IT is growing, and the level of base IT knowledge is rapidly increasing.  Also remember that the average employee changes *careers* a handful of times in his/her life.  Not just companies, but changes roles and career paths.  Is it unreasonable to expect that tomorrow’s Marketing VP will come from an IT background and has a reasonable level of IT fluency.  Whilst not everyone can code like the employee in the Google example, you’d be surprised at how IT literate business workers are.  And similarly how business-literate IT-workers are.

This means that we have a growing population who are in a position to understand the art of the possible, far beyond the limitations of their job roles.  And help drive change.  So imagine for a moment if we were able to harness the creative thinking of our millions of stakeholders.  Pretty powerful.  But now imagine if we could harness their energy and skills, too.  Incredibly powerful.  And that kind of wisdom/skills/energy of the crowds could create unparalleled success.

Let us start with a NAS update.  The blessed NAS.  If you cast your mind back, you will recall that the NAS went “bang”.  Well, one disk did, which shouldn’t be a problem when you have my four-disk RAID-X configuration.  I sent the troublesome disk off to Seagate, got a replacement and installed it.  The software then striped the RAID over the new disk and things should have been back to normal.  Instead, the RAID sync appeared to move at lightning speed, which made me question whether it had really worked or not.  But before I got a chance to test this (yes, literally between RAID configuration saying “resync complete” and me hovering over the “Start” button) another disk went “bang”.  So it appears that three disks died within the space of 12 months.  Not a great track record for Seagate, especially as they all came from different batches.  As it turns out, they send refurbished disks as replacements for a failure, and the refurbished disks weren’t stable.  I am not impressed that Seagate send previously broken disks when your original shiny disk breaks, but that is their approach to such things.

So there I was with one disk suffering a hardware failure, and another disk saying that it was operable, but not actually behaving as such, no access to files, inconsistent firmware and so forth.  Fast forward through a few house moves, travel, replacement chassis, firmware upgrades and so forth, Netgear came to the rescue.  The NAS is now with Netgear in Cork and they have managed to clone one of the disks and are extracting the data for me.  So far they have extracted 30% of my 860GB, and hope to have it completed by early next week.  Here is where I remind you that my NAS was no longer under warranty, the disks were causing the problem and they came from another vendor entirely.  And Netgear stepped up and have recovered the situation.  For free.  And are keeping me abreast of the situation.  I am delighted.  Absolutely delighted.

As a topical side note, I have signed up with Mozy and am using them as an online backup solution for my highly-prized data, in case this ever happens again.  Or in case I get trigger-happy and Save As over a file inadvertently.  Although my Mozy plan comes with unlimited storage, there is still the problem of uploading my data to their site, and 860GB would take months even with my fibre connection.  So I’m going to trickle the data up over time based on working data sets, and in the meantime I’m buying a portable 1TB drive as secondary onsite storage, with scheduled backups.

Despite my disappointment with the Seagate disks, the fact of the matter is that this is my fault.  I have always encouraged/demanded that we consider disaster recovery when designing and deploying critical systems.  But when it came down to it, when it was my money, my floor space, my system, I decided to play the odds.  After all, disasters by definition don’t happen often.  But when they do happen, wouldn’t you find and willingly pay the money to recover from it?  I know I would have.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am convinced that IT has a huge environmental responsibility and that IT can singularly reduce carbon reductions more than any other functional area. I am actually a little disappointed by the lack of truly innovative ideas coming out of the industry, since it seems to me that there are almost limitless ways that technology could reduce your/my carbon footprint. Yes, consolidating data centres is important. Using video-conferencing instead of travelling for meetings can be hugely beneficial. But we’ve known that for a while. So what else can we think of?

Understanding how we behave can lend itself to some interesting environmental innovations since we can look at what then might have the greatest benefit. For example, although we recycle paper and toner cartridges, the fact of the matter is that we print unnecessarily and this wastes energy, consumables not to mention all of the associated manufacturing and production effort. Research suggests that 45% of print jobs are one-offs (such as agendas for a meeting), and that 20% of all print jobs are forgotten once the “print” button is hit. This is then the driver behind innovations such as the re-printable paper that Xerox is researching, which will enable paper to be re-used over and over on the fly.

This is what I think of when I think of innovation. It doesn’t have to be a brand new product/channel/service that no one has ever thought of before. We’ve had paper for millennia. We have ink for just as long. But what Xerox is looking at doing with these is very new.

What about an example on a *much* simpler scale? We’ve had the wheel for millennia. We’ve had suitcases for centuries. But a suitcase with wheels? So simple, but so impactful. I can’t imagine travelling with anything else. (And actually I probably couldn’t considering the amount of stuff that I take with me and my admittedly pitiful power-to weight-ratio!)

I understand that innovation is a hot topic right now. We are all experiencing market pressures from traditional and non-traditional competitors, and the Internet has changed consumer behaviour and expectations beyond that which most of us can realistically meet. We need innovation in order to respond, compete and differentiate. But please, please don’t label something as innovative if it’s not. I would hate to see the emergence of “innovation-washing”.

I know that large organisations can be difficult to engage with, and I wish that innovation could be the cure-all or the fast track through procurement for projects that are struggling to get momentum. But it can’t and shouldn’t be, and we need to work together to explore ideas that are both innovative and feasible.

I’m sure that this challenge is made still more difficult by the fact that everyone has their own definition of what innovation is. For me and my organisation, we define innovation not by the scale of the idea, but rather by its exposure. If the business is already considering it, or would have got to it as business-as-usual, it’s not innovation.

There are so many wonderful ideas floating around, and I would love to implement even 5% of the ideas that come across my desk. But unfortunately, many ideas aren’t innovative as we define it, and even those that are innovative aren’t necessarily feasible for me to tackle considering: the current financial landscape, complexity of our environment, risk appetite, competing or changing business priorities, our customers and so forth.

We will do what we can, which will always be less than we want to do. But that’s what keeps me hungry.

So back to the NAS device, which featured in my last blog entry. When I last left you, I was waiting for a replacement disk to arrive from Seagate. That came, and I installed it and we were hoping that the NAS would simply see the blank disk and extend the RAID over this new disk. That didn’t work. When I installed the new disk and started the NAS, it recognised that a blank disk was there, which I could see by the flashing light against Disk #2. Fine, as expected. It then tried to do a file system check, which we were also expecting. What we were expecting, was that the original disk #2 was thoroughly broken and that is why the NAS couldn’t load properly last time and used to get stuck at 41% of a file system check, but now that we had installed a new disk it should skip merrily through the file system check and start rebuilding the RAID.

Unfortunately, it got to 70% of the file system check and then froze. Hours later I finally conceded that it was still very broken, so rebooted it and bypassed the file system check. It started rebuilding the RAID and during this time I got hold of the logs and sent them off to Jose. Everything looked fine in the logs and the RAID was rebuilding, so of I went to sleep thinking all was well.

In the morning I looked at the NAS and all four disk lights were on, no pulsating blue power button. So I thought that all was well and thought that I’d download a couple of files from the NAS. It wouldn’t respond. Not to pinging, not to the RAIDar software, not to the Power button. Uh oh. Rebooting it again and this time it won’t even come to life. Dead. The power button flickers and flashes but it won’t even get the disks spinning. So Netgear come to the rescue – again.

They think that there is a problem with the chassis. Ouch. You’ll recall that this is no longer covered by warranty. But Jose has already sorted this out for me and as a goodwill gesture they are going to send me a new chassis (and by new I mean the latest model, since my model is no longer manufactured) but will not support it going forward as they’re going to transfer the warranty from my old chassis to my new chassis. Very generous of them and I’m again delighted by the customer service.

So I get home to package the chassis up. When I get home it looks as though “something” has been happening as disk #1 light is on, but it’s flashing as though it’s being rebuilt. I hope not, since I have no confidence that the RAID really has been rebuilt over disk #2, and therefore if both disk #2 and disk #1 are out of order, that’s 2 out of 4 disks gone and it’s goodbye forever. Sigh. But anyway…

So I turn it off, remove the disks and label them so that I can reinsert them in to the new chassis in the right order. I haul the heavy chassis to work and somehow find a box and bubble wrap to wrap it up in. I call A Novo UK on +44 208 443 8718 and quote my RMA number. They are going to arrange for Parcel Force to come and collect the device. And that was last Friday. I flew out to the Forrester Forum on Monday, thinking that when I returned to the office on Friday that my new chassis will have been delivered, and I can take it home and see what happens over the weekend.

Not so.

I get to work this morning and there is no parcel on my desk. So I call the mail room. Nothing there. I call reception. No delivery there, but by existing parcel is still sitting there waiting to be collected and could I call the courier company to prompt them to come and pick it up??!?!

So I call A Novo UK on +44 208 443 8718 and quote my RMA number once again. They are showing the job as cancelled. Come again what? Yes, that’s right, cancelled. By Parcelforce?! I assure A Novo UK that I’m VERY keen for this device to be picked up and keener still for the replacement device to be delivered, and so they reschedule the job to be picked up.

So I call Parcel Force on +44 8700 844 500 and get stuck in a series of voice recognition systems and “press ‘1′ for…” nonsense. I then get put through to Joseph. He looks in the system and he can see the job once I give him his reference number and is going to call the driver to find out why it was cancelled. He’s then going to give me a call back.

He never calls back. So I call him back. He does – to his credit – remember me. Maybe there’s something in my tone by this point that is unforgettable. Even money says that that had something to do with it. He apologises as he was expecting his manager to call me back. His manager, Djamel, still has not called me back as I write this blog entry. Apparently Djamel is going to have a sit down with the manager of their IT department since it appears that “it happens” that sometimes a job just doesn’t get in to the system. They can find the job if a customer calls and quotes the booking reference, but the job never actually works it way through the system and their work flow, so a driver is never assigned and the job goes precisely nowhere. Much like my NAS, sitting mournfully in reception. Still. A week later.

So apparently Parcelforce is going to assign a driver and get it picked up today. We shall see. This is clearly not the first time that this has happened. Firstly, Joseph from Parcelforce conceded that it has been known to happen. Secondly, looking at the Parcelforce website there is a dedicated link for “driver did not turn up to collect my parcel as requested“. Hmm, this is obviously known problem. Oh, and the solution on their website? “Can you please book again.”

Netgear has been fantastic from start to (what I hope is soon) the finish. Jose even sent me an email earlier this week to ask how I was getting on with the new chassis. When he heard about the courier situation he reported it to his customer service and also checked to see if Netgear was out of the new chassis, which might have accounted for the lack of action from Parcelforce. Fantastic customer service from Netgear and Jose.

UPDATE 16th June 2008: Apparently Parcelforce picked up the chassis on Friday 13th June and then delivered it to Netgear earlier today.  So imagine my surprise when I got a call from reception a moment ago advising me that Parcelforce was here – again! – to pick up my parcel today.  How very useless.

I don’t know what your storage system is like. Perhaps you’re super-organised and have offsite copies and backups of backups. But I do not. If I’m working on something, it’s on my laptop. Otherwise, everything gets shunted over to the NAS. Photos. Files. Software. Movies. Music. Presentations. Project deliverables from the past. So when I tell you that the NAS had a moment, trust me when I tell you that I, consequently, had a moment.

When technology has a problem, I know the standard operating routine: reboot it. But it wouldn’t power down gracefully. It just kept blinking at me, the disk lights flashing a distress signal that may as well have been in Morse code. And so after much Googling and rebooting and pinging (and cursing), I called Netgear/Infrant/ReadyNAS Technical Support.

I have to admit that I never enjoy calling anyone’s Technical Support for anything. It’s a pride thing. It’s also a case of having very low expectations, which are generally never met, much less exceeded. I know the drill. My call is important to you. Calls may be monitored or recorded for quality control purposes. Please listen carefully as the following options have changed. [Insert irritating hold music here].

But imagine my delight when the call was answered after only a few rings.

Great customer experience tip #1: Talk to me!

And the transcript goes a little something like this:

THEM: What is the serial number of the device?
ME: Don’t know – it’s long since worn off the sticky label
THEM: You can also get the serial number via the web interface
ME: I can’t get it to boot, much less logon to the web interface. It’s a ReadyNAS NV bought sometime in 2006 I think…? (it’s around about now that I realise that the device in question is well outside the 1-year warranty period…)
THEM: OK, I can’t log a call without the serial number and it sounds like you’re out of the warranty period, but talk me through the issue and we’ll see what we can do regardless.
ME: [Wow, great attitude!]

Great customer experience tip #2: Care about me!

After explaining all of the sequences of boots and lights and results and what not, I get put through to a Level 2 engineer. After coercing the device with the software-equivalent of a crowbar, we ascertain that the device is stalling after 41% of a file system check. Firstly, why is it even doing a file system check? This generally means something is wrong with the storage. This is not what I want with respect to my NAS. Secondly, why is it getting stuck? Different question, same answer.

So in order to bypass the file system check, I simply need to hold in a button and wait for the lights to flash and then release it. No joy, file system check still starts and it still gets stuck at 41%. Engineer realises in a snap that I obviously hadn’t upgraded to the latest firmware, since file system bypass feature was only implemented in the latest firmware release.

Great customer experience tip #3: Know your products/services!

So to upgrade you simply go to the web interface and click on….no, wait, you can’t get to the web interface. Right, let me send you the full details via email of how to do this via a USB thumb drive, including scripts, which buttons to press when and so forth.

Great customer experience tip #4: Don’t just follow the script!

Fast forward about an hour and the new firmware has been installed, things flashed, devices rebooted. I call to confirm a step and a few outcomes. I couldn’t get through to my Engineer, Jose Tucci, and so he calls back within minutes. And apologises for not being available previously because he was tending to another call. And remembers my name and my situation without me having to catch him up to speed again or even quote a case number.

Great customer experience tip #5: Get involved and take it personally!

So after all of the resetting and rebooting and what not (throughout which Jose is saying all the right things, such as “this won’t delete your data, don’t worry” we realise that the device has reset its IP address and logon credentials back to the defaults. But don’t worry because Jose knows about Tip #3 and can instantly give me those. Without putting me on hold.

So while the device is feeling accommodating, I am able to logon and download the logs. GMAIL blocked the sending of said logs as it couldn’t virus scan them. (Note to Google: If it looks like a text file and and opens in Notepad like a text file then it is probably a text file. Just a thought.) So after trying a few other things – and almost in tears of frustration that there is yet another hurdle between me and a working NAS – I upload the logs to my website and email Jose the URL.

No problem, he downloads them from there and within minutes emails me to tell me of a big issue. Yes I agree that 37,700 ATA disk errors is about 37,699 too many! So he suggests that I remove and replace disk number two, post haste.

I’m a little irked by this, since a disk failed just weeks after I purchased this device originally. I mention this to Jose and he says that it could have been a bad batch, and he’ll check for me if I give him the serial number and part number of the disk in question.

Great customer experience tip #6: Don’t hide (potential) problems on your side!

Jose can’t find a history of anything relating to that disk batch. But then suggests that I try claiming the disk under warranty with the disk manufacturer because [insert information about warranty periods of disks and devices depending on when purchased from whom before/after merger].

Yes, I logon to the Seagate website and hey presto the disk is under warranty until 2011, so tomorrow it’s going back to Seagate for free replacement.

Great customer experience tip #7: Be on my side!

And at the end of all of this, you may well ask if everything is restored and back to normal. Well actually, that doesn’t matter. Even if the NAS never comes back to life, the customer experience was absolutely fantastic and that is what I will remember. 11 phone calls, 8 emails and 2 web downloads later (in the course of one day) I couldn’t ask for more. They cared. They listened. They tried. They really made me feel like they were there for me, on my side. Even when they weren’t obliged to. That is exactly the customer experience that I want to have.

Oh and they sent me a customer satisfaction survey to fill in. I hope that this blog post suffices