Global Nerdy

Freedom is a Mac OS X app that temporarily cuts off your network access so you can get work done. It disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time, after which it re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. The only way to circumvent Freedom during its imposed blackout is to reboot the machine; it’s believed that the hassle of rebooting will be enough to keep you doing it. Freedom is free as in beer, but if you find it useful, its makers encourage you to send a donation.

All tech articles and no play makes Jack a dull nerd. Here’s a fun little exercise — can you identify the cartoon characters by their silhouettes in the illustration below?

Click the image to see it at full size.
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I’m installing the latest version of Ubuntu — version 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron” — using Wubi, the installer that lets you install Ubuntu directly from Windows. It’s a Windows app that retrieves and installs Ubuntu files and sets up a separate partition. As ITWire puts it, “No more burning a downloaded ISO image to CD. No more booting from the CD to install Ubuntu. No more disk partitioning decisions. No more Grub boot manager.” I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s a little story about customer service: while staying at a hotel villa in Disney World, Paul Campanale tossed away a cardboard container, not realizing that it contained his wife Karen’s engagement, wedding and five-year-anniversary rings. Employees at the hotel told Campanale that recovering the jewelry would be impossible, but executive housekeeper Drew Weaver realized that the trash from the Campanales’ villa wouldn’t have reached the compactor yet. Weaver and seven volunteers from staff put on protective clothing and went dumpster-diving — and found the rings.

I’m telling this story here, in a blog primarily aimed at techies in startups and small- to medium-sized companies, because it’s an excellent object lesson.

Those of us in small companies and startups often like to boast that one of the upsides of working at such a place is that you get to “wear many hats” or “play many roles” rather than just being siloed within the confines of your job description. However, I’ve seen on many occasions that as soon many of these boasters will often shy away from any customer-facing role because they see it as a miserable time-sink on par with meetings. It’s one of those times when you see so-called “small and agile” people suddenly revert to “big dinosaur” thinking and try to foist the burden onto someone else — someone’s whose job description is a closer match for the unwanted task: “Isn’t that marketing’s job? Or sales? Or maybe the receptionist can handle it.”

Sifting through the trash for something that a customer threw away out of absent-mindedness or distraction — some less charitable people I know who go so far as to say “stupidity” — could be seen as a low-value exercise. After all, the odds of finding the missing rings might have seemed low, the search could take a long time and occupy people who could be doing other things, and there was no profit to be made. A manager’s — and seven volunteers’ — willingness to perform an unpleasant task that probably wasn’t in their job description has probably earned the loyalty of the Campanales, who in turn have probably become life-long Disney resort evangelists. In fact, I’m certain that their evangelism is why I heard about their story, and also why you’re hearing about it now.

The lesson to take from all this? Everyone in a company, no matter how insulated from the outside world, is customer-facing. Make your customer feel special, and you’ll be special to them.

I’ll close with this chart from Creating Passionate Users, in which Kathy Sierra explains the difference between your customers feeling satisfaction, love and passion about your company:

Click the chart to see it with its original article on Creating Passionate Users.

[Found via Consumerist.]