The kind folks over at Trigger/Isobar asked me to review the new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone 7 phone. They kindly delivered it in a shiny black briefcase to my offices, complete with a large bouncer and a secret code to open the case.

Let me be clear: I hate Nokia and I hate Windows, especially Windows on the phone. About a year ago I bought a Mac, I bought an iPhone, I bought an iPad and I never looked back. I have had 12 months of painless computing for the first time in my life. So I am not exactly a friendly audience for a combination of platforms which have brought me close to tears in previous years.

My last Nokia phone was an e71, which I struggled to get to consistently to sync with my Windows PC for a long eighteen months. After learning more about the Nokia sync services and Windows security settings than I ever wanted to know, I joyously retired this awful phone into my cupboard and fired up my iPhone 4, never to look back.

With this in mind, and with some trepidation, I ejected the SIM from my iPhone and put it into the Nokia Lumia.

I'm going to keep this brief.

The Lumia is a nice looking phone, thin and slick. As a touchscreen, it has no clutter on the device, and when you figure out how to turn it on (the buttons aren't labelled in any way, so to realise you have to hit the middle on the side takes some trial and error) you are greeted with the pretty and responsive new Windows Phone 7 OS.

The OS is very nice. It has stolen just enough from its competitors and added enough tweaks that it's fun, intuitive and friendly to use. It's nothing like it's earlier versions which is about the highest praise one could offer it.

My first step with a phone is to get my contacts, email and calendar setup because that's at the heart of what I do with my phone.

This, unfortunately, is where this short adventure ended. You can very easily get your contacts across from another phone, which I did with my iPhone in about 30 seconds. But, if you want to keep them synced with Outlook and you happen to own a Mac, you instantly have a massive and insurmountable obstacle.

After nearly an hour of Googling and fiddling, I realised that the recommended option is to use Hotmail Connector to do this. However there is no Mac version of that piece of software. The Windows 7 Phone Sync software, available in the Mac App store, does an admirable job of syncing photos and other content, but offers nothing to do with Outlook.

I tried connecting to my Exchange server, but since it doesn't have a valid SSL cert (admittedly not a good thing) the phone refused to connect. This would be forgivable if my iPhone didn't just give me the option to ignore this cert error and move on. I'll manage my risk, thank you very much.

And that's where the story ends folks. It took me less than 5 minutes to setup my iPhone to sync with Outlook on my Mac and to connect to my Exchange server. Even if there is some solution here I'm missing, I'm not prepared to spend any more time on this. Why should I?

I presume if you're upgrading from a previous Nokia or Windows 7 device (though how you could leave either of those experiences with a willingness to try those platforms again I have no idea) or maybe from Blackberry or an older Android device, you might be up to the hassle. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the user experience on this phone and its social media integration, camera and other features look great.

But I'm past the point in my life where I'm going to fight to get my data to sync to my mobile device. Perhaps this is the luxury and the limitation of having only Apple equipment. For sure that's what Apple wants, for me to feel locked into their proprietary platform so that any shift is painful. But you know what? I just don't care. I have enough scars from my previous Nokia experience that to ask me to even give myself a paper cut in switching platforms is going too far. It's just not worth it.

If I were a professional, paid reviewer I would go through the effort and I might even come out excited about what seems to be a powerful and well designed device. But to the extent that I can simulate the average consumer experience, my conclusion is simple: I am annoyed and I've only been trying this phone for an hour. When my iPhone screen powered on a few seconds ago I felt a deep sense of relief. All is well again.

No. No, thanks.

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Taken with picplz at Noordhoek Beach in Noordhoek, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Milnerton in Milnerton, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Observatory (Suburb) in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Observatory (Suburb) in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Neighbourgoods Market in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Llandudno Beach in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Cosy Bay in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Linder Auditorium in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Emperor's Palace Casino in Kempton Park, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Craighall Park in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Bhukara in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz at Protea Hotel Victoria Junction in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Taken with picplz.

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Taken with picplz at Protea Hotel Victoria Junction in Cape Town, South Africa.

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It annoys me that I have to write another one of these pieces, but I've come to realise that this is a standard slot of time I need to schedule after attending these events. For whatever reason, Geek Retreat draws what appears to be the most criticism with the most volume. Albeit within a tiny community, and albeit for a very short moment in time.

This year's Geek Retreat took a risk [full disclosure: I was one of the organising committee and I was directly involved in the project discussed here]. Instead of making it a gathering of digerati gathering to try and make the industry, the internet, the world a better place, we decided to focus on what made the Geek Retreat special before: an opportunity for some influential, interesting people to get together, socialise, talk about geeky stuff and maybe get some interesting projects and ideas moving over the weekend.

We also took another risk this time, limited to a particular group of people at the retreat of which I was one. And that was to create a fictional view of the Geek Retreat that intentionally parodied the event, even creating a fictional attendee. We accepted that Geek Retreat is always controversial and always stands in the firing path of criticism like being elitist, and so we fuelled that fire a little. It was a dodgy manoeuvre I'll grant, and one that ran the risk of annoying people. It also ran the risk of making the Geek Retreat seem even more pointless and irrelevant than people already believed it to be.

Perhaps both of these outcomes occurred. I have had some conversations today that confirm this, and I must say my overall response to that is: meh. Shrug. Whatever.

I haven't done the math, but I suspect close to 100 people have attended Geek Retreat over the past three years, and I've rarely (if ever) heard negative views from those attendees. This weekend was no exception. People had a good time. They hung out. They drank some fine beer. They did some meaningful projects and some frivolous ones. And that, my friends, is all.

At no stage (at least not recently) has the Geek Retreat held itself up to be anything more than a voluntary, paid-for weekend conference for people to come along and mix fun with some innovation and work to see what transpires. It's a melting pot, and it's an unconference. No-one quite knows what will happen but generally it's proved to be worthwhile.

Levelling criticism from the outside, particularly when we've flooded the airwaves with some fairly juvenile material, is probably fair. But as the real information emerges (Heather Ford has posted a good summary here) hopefully it will be judged more on what happened than what didn't. As a matter of fact, a number of interesting initiatives were kicked off and a good deal of more serious information was shared. It's the nature of a noisy ruse that it's going to be noisy.

I guess in the end I'm willing to stand up and have my part in this thing thought of as being stupid or pointless firstly because I had fun (which I'm sure I'm allowed) and secondly because everyone is entitled to their opinion and I'm fairly well used to being at the centre of one or other controversy. I'm even willing to go as far as to say that we might have taken a few missteps and may not have serviced the reputation of the Geek Retreat well by doing so.

But then again, part of playing a prank is feeling guilty and having fun at the same time. I think it would be to compound the absurdity of this for anyone to take it more seriously than that. The detractors were already there before we even drove to Stanford this weekend. Their criticism was going to ring loud whether we went to look after AIDS babies or plotted to overthrow the governments of the Free World. That's not a presumption, that's a matter of historical record.

To all and anyone who was either offended or irritated; to any participants who do or did not want to put their name against such a thing; to anyone who was caught up in it and feels a fool for it; and to the industry as a whole who (as one conversation I had today has it) would feel "fools by association" because of this, I make a personal apology for my part in this. That was not my intention and there was nothing mean-spirited about any of it. Mark: I don't feel that I owe that apology, but I'm offering it anyway because these kinds of things tend to have a life of their own, and I still have to work with everyone in 2011 and I can't afford to burn bridges over a joke -- even one that I happen to think had a valuable and serious side for anyone who could look beyond the nonsense.

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Lost has always been a show clinging on by its fingernails. The dramatic and thrilling commencement back in 2004 gave birth to statements like “the television event of the decade”. And Season 1 did live up to that on numerous occasions. The eeriness of the Island and the slow, methodic unfolding of the character backstories that tantalisingly hinted at being interwoven.

That was then.

From the Season 3 drudgery of Sawyer and Kate’s captivity in the polar bear cages to the descent into outright sci-fi with the arrival of time travel in season 4 & 5, Lost appeared to be sacrificing its sense to its name. And those of us who watched held out ever scanter hope that the writers had a plan, that their mindgames had reason. And that every bizarro event, Dharma-tattooed shark and giant stone statue would be explained by the end of Season 6.

Now, before I proceed let’s remind ourselves of something here: these bastards had the better part of 3 years to plan this ending. It didn’t sneak up on them like the unsuspecting Chris Carter hurtling down a tunnel full of super soldiers and black oil. Smug and self-congratulatory, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse hammered away at their typewriters for over 1000 days before delivering the Season 6 finale to the US last week. Keep that in mind.

What they managed to deliver after those 1000 days was, basically, bullshit. I can’t really think of any other adjective more apt. What it lacked in resolving of the many Lost mysteries it utterly failed to deliver in any other way. It’s shocking ending was only shocking in the scale of the squander it represented. With all that budget and endless sun-drenched Hawaiian beaches and, one presumes, all the latitude anyone could ever ask for, all they could come up with was some pathetically lame quasi-religious message. They went into the light. They loved each other, and that’s all that mattered. Sorry, it’s getting hard to type on a keyboard covered in vomit.

When Ronald D. Moore ended Battlestar Galactica last year with a deux ex machina, he at least delivered *most* of the answers the show had posed in its four seasons. Yes, there were lots of things left hanging and he showed himself to be guilty of a certain amount of sloppiness in planning that show, but it was an emotive and action-packed conclusion. It made you want to rush right out and start watching from the start again.

Lost, by contrast, made me want to buy the DVD box set and use it as fuel to the fire of the stakes Lindelof and Cuse should be bound to.

The web is full of tedious attempts to try and make sense of the ending and explain how it is either (a) really beautiful and emotional, and therefore did us a service by leaving basically everything unexplained or (b) how it explained everything, provided you’re willing to accept 65 pages of invented bridging story. Well, neither of those is acceptable to someone who appreciates good storytelling. Leaving things unexplained is fine provided that lack of explanation somehow enhances the emotional or intellectual impact of the ending.

Simply not explaining stuff because you either forgot about it, it was too much of a muddle or you chose to focus on “the characters” are not good reasons. They are the lynching kind of reasons, in fact.

So what, in short, was the story of Lost. According to the show and to the desperate fans who are trying to prevent themselves committing murder or suicide, it’s this:

A bunch of people crash on a weird Island. They start hearing weird shit which eventually turns out to be a monster made of smoke. The monster’s brother, Jacob, brought all these people to the Island on purpose (amazingly working it out they only they lived when their plane crashed). But the smoke monster is even smarter than his brother as it turns out, because he has someone knock him off. So now he can leave the Island by getting one of these hapless folk to destroy the Island. In the end, he loses, is killed, and some of the hapless survive and some die. As they die they hang out in a parallel reality in which they live out an idealised version of their lives which helps them to move on.

As a story, maybe that’s ok, maybe that’s as compelling as the instructions on the back of a packet of fast-bonding adhesive. Sadly it portrays a far more coherent and clear story than what we were dished up.

What we were dished included the Dharma initiative, Charles Widmore, the “Others”, a huge four-footed statue in the ocean, an Island which was “the cork” keeping in “the wine”, “EM” energy, time travel, teleportation of Locke’s father, Benjamin Linus in the Algerian desert – and well, fuck it, at least 400 other individual items begging for cohesion and a place in the story.

To say none of this was explained would be unfair. It would also be so close to the truth that you’d forgive me that unfairness. To sit here the day after seeing the Lost finale and be in a position to shed light (if you’ll bear the pun) on almost none of these mysteries is an unforgivable failure on the part of the writers and showrunners. 

So, a note to any future writers: when you finish off your masterpiece, 6-season, high-budget serial we actually expect you to answer all the major questions. Don’t have Cara Thrace vanish into thin air because you couldn’t think of how else to get rid of her. Don’t send Jack into the bat cave to put the “cork” back into the “wine decanter” and then have him appear on a rock outside and die without explaining either the wine, the decanter, the light, the water, Jack or the cave. We’re not watching your show because we care about your fucken characters. We’re watching it because we want to know how a 400 foot statue, a smoke monster and an Island that heals paraplegics makes any sense. And if you can’t work that out then perhaps your talents are better used in advertising (which is all about asking leading, impossible to answer questions) and not TV dramas.

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I am a painful customer. I’ll admit that right up-front. I’m the kind of customer you don’t want because I can be a bastard when I don’t get what I expect. And my standards are probably ridiculous and I can be rude and unkind, lo, even cruel on occasion. I have made people cry. Let’s just get all that out of the way.

I also deal with a lot of customers in my job – and some of them have almost made me cry. So it’s karma, but in which direction I’m not exactly clear.

In my many, many clashes with an equally large number of call centre agents, support desk engineers, escalation managers, duty managers and other euphemistically anointed, outsourced-to-bangalore personnel, I have learned a few things. I’ve also learned a few things from the horrible experiences I have put our customers through on occasion. So I am writing this in a bizarre state of self-righteousness and contrition, which is more of a suffering than it may seem at first glance.

1.       The humanity!

Listen Amachandirjan (or, “Bob” as you have introduced yourself on this call) I know your manager has told you that you’re supposed to say shit like “How are you today, sir?” and “Is there anything else I can assist you with today, sir?” but guess what, humans (that would be me) do not respond to such patently insincere platitudes. In fact, when I’ve just finished a 45 minute rant about how my software product is failing to do the main thing I purchased it to do, my expectation is that you will at least have the decency to break down a little, whimper, that kind of thing. Reading the “Section VII: Wrapping Up A Call” portion of your cheap, orange, plastic ring binder is  (I think) permission to ignore the Geneva Convention, if you know what I mean.

Amazingly even although I have been as close to suicide bombing as I could probably get whilst dealing with a support agent I would have been pacified by a little humanity.

2.       ….but not too much humanity

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my life in a services business it’s that people don’t want to hear about your problems when they’re paying you good money to solve theirs. The fact that you’ve been on shift a long time, or that your company’s policies are pretty stupid or that you’re as frustrated as I am (sir) is not relevant. Your pain is no comfort to me for the simple reason that it makes me feel even more helpless than I did before I called. If you, who work for the Dark Empire cannot reason with the Dark Lord, what chance do I have?

Your job is to make me feel like you’ve got it under control. At least. Take my problems away, not help me to understand that I’m well and truly fucked.

3.        Call Me Back

And let me know what’s going on. How hard is this? Apparently, very.

I know from my own experiences there are three reasons why someone who says they’re going to call you back doesn’t, in fact, do what they have promised. One, because they’re wankerous bastards who are incompetent and would find it difficult to separate a pile of bricks into two piles of bricks. These are, I think, the smallest group.

Two, because they’re so busy and their support team is so woefully understaffed that they have no time for anything, ever. This is, of course, not exactly their fault, but refer back to point 2: there’s nothing I can do to help them out in this situation. My advice (which I take where I can) is find a way to bypass the call centre in these cases and plead my case to someone with shares in the company, or (at least) a suit made from something other than polyester.

Third, because they don’t want to have to call me back and tell me the horrible news that someone has screwed something up so spectacularly it made the Challenger disaster look like a plate of pink muffins. I personally believe this is the more prevalent of the cases. Who wants to be the messenger that ends up being shot?

No matter what, I want to know what’s going on. I might not be happy about it, I might shout, I might use my expensive post-graduate Arts degree to come up with inventive new insults and creative metaphors which amuse me and the unfortunate souls who sit near my desk, but the truth is I’ll calm down. And I’ll say “Thank you for letting me know”. Because people with problems appreciate an update. They want to know what’s going on, how long their problem is going to be a problem. And that someone is trying to sort it out.

4.       Don’t blame me

It’s so tedious to have to include clichés in this post. I’d far rather write some witty, engaging prose, something to really test my writing muscle. But you’ve forced me into it. So, then. You know that old thing about the customer being right.

Usually the call centre, front-line people know this. Or aren’t smart enough to try something else. When you finally get the “engineer” or the “manager” on the line, though, this sort of thing starts to happen. It’s your fault because you didn’t sign up for the service that actually works. Or you ticked some contractual box that let’s them off the hook. Or we never said our product actually connects you to the Internet, for that it’s extra.

I’m not saying you need to accept abuse from customers, and I should probably get pushed back at from time to time when I’m just being a cantankerous swine. But to a very large extent being RIGHT and giving GOOD SERVICE are not compatible. In service being right is secondary.

That’s hard to accept, but it’s true. I don’t pay you to be right, I pay you to help me.

5.       Stop apologising

..to calm me down. Or for any other reason. A big Telco in South Africa seem to have trained their staff to do nothing other than say they’re sorry. They sound sincere, I’ll grant that. They sound so sorry in fact it makes me want to pat them on the head and feed them a biscuit. But I’m not phoning to be placated. I want IT to be FIXED. Or at least I want you to try and fix it. If you can’t fix it, tell me you know someone who can. If you don’t know someone who can, tell me you’ll try find them. If you have no idea what to do, tell me you’ll think it over and call me back (and then refer to point 3). And then go off and find someone smarter than you are, give them a blowjob or a handjob or whatever or threaten to snip off their ring finger with a pair of garden shears. But your apology means nothing to me. Less than nothing.

I’m sure there are many more tips one could provide, and as I’ve said, I take these as much as I give them. My clients may feel the same way as I do at times. Although I do think I at least TRY..and perhaps that’s the most important piece of advice to any company or employee who is involved in service. Just TRY ok? Sincerely, give it a shot for me, go into battle for me and I’m there. I know it’s tough, and we all made mistakes all the time, but in service you get points for effort. That’s the good news, because putting in effort is not hard, it’s just a bit emotionally draining at times. This I understand. You don’t like?

Who you gonna complain to?

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