Ivy Sea Online: What's your civility quotient?

Workplace Civility
"Treat others the way you want them to treat you."

Can Money Men Threaten Me?
"It's not nice, but the first rule of starting a fight is 'Don't start a fight you cannot win'"

I hate rude people. I think they're rude because acting that way works for them getting around in life. They seemingly "win" every conflict by being rude. Being civil seems to be becoming less and less common in society these days. Being rude generally drives up the stress level for everybody, provoking a fight-or-flight response. In the workplace, incivility has no place. Because "the customer is always right," there's not much I can do about rude customers except rant about it here. I try to be civil to them, but still it's not a pleasant experience and it's one of those things that makes customer service such an unpleasant job.

If you're a customer who always asks to speak to the supervisor as soon as any little thing happens, you may be one of the people I'm talking about. Consider that the person you're talking to is trying to help you, and that they are not the enemy. He or she has a lot of latitude in how they treat you, and in what favors he or she can do for you. By acting rude, the other person is less likely to want to help you, and his or her main concern becomes, "How do I get rid of this person as fast as possible?" Companies don't want rude customers. Since typically only a small percentage of customers are rude, and because customer service people like to be treated like humans, they may decide that the don't want you as a customer. People like having the satisfaction of a job well done. Being rude pretty much obliterates that possibility. I would say that most companies end up ignoring the rude people, a sort of "turning the other cheek."

I do really want to provide first-class customer service, but one rude person can ruin your day. But like the school bully, a rude person ends up lonely and unwanted due to his or her behaviour. And this emotional emptiness and lack of empathy is often a cause of rudeness, making it a self-supporting cycle.

I don't hide my contempt for device driver writers. Your typical device driver for hardware devices is a real hack. It seems that big companies who decide to port their hardware to the Mac have the worst drivers. At least the people who work for small Mac-oriented companies know how to write drivers. The big companies tend to turn out some really badly written drivers. Take a look at the SoundBlaster drivers for the Mac. That thing kept crashing the OS and this was well known in the Mac community. It's not surprising that Creative have been slow to release a Mac OS X driver for their 3 year old SoundBlaster Live for Mac card.

I think most people underestimate the complexity of software these days. And programming is often rushed because the programmers or the management try to take on too many features at once. People are more productive and less annoyed when software is simple and relatively bug-free. But at the same time, people decide what software to buy based on the amount of features, rather than on stability, at least according to marketing people. Take a look at Microsoft apps, for example. I know in reality, people do look at usability and take into account the aggravation factor of poorly written software, but I think this only happens after they've been burned by sloppy code a few times and are smart enough to learn from the experience.

I tried going to the Philadelphia IKEA today. What a mistake. The traffic was backed up all the way to the expressway off-ramp. Fortunately, I knew a back road which got me around the traffic. Their new 1400 space parking lot was filled up with more people driving in trying to find a spot. A lot of people were parking at the BJ's next door. But I figured if it was like this in the parking lot, it would be mobbed inside. So I went away. I checked out the Storehouse furniture store not 2 miles away. The furniture was good, but it just wasn't very modern. Nor inexpensive.

Why is it that every day I pull up slashdot, it asks me to meta-moderate?

I find certain things in England and its people quite fascinating, the oddest being how willing they are to endure what Americans would consider very long queues. I was reading about people queuing up for the tills for 40 minutes to an hour at an IKEA. I have seen this happen during the not-too-often IKEA sales, but this seems to be the norm every weekend and holiday in England. More oddities are found in their use of language. The most confusing being how they tell time, that is, when it's 4:40pm, they'll say twenty five, a contraction of twenty-of five. Or half seven for 7:30. I really am confused especially since I haven't talked to anyone British nor do I have any close friends who are British. There is this one chap in Oxford who I'd like to pop around to see one day.

And I'd like to hop on the tube and go to Camden Town, or to Notting Hill Gate, or just head down into the City to take in some culture. Or perhaps I'll hire a car and head out to the Cotswolds, visit Bath, and check out the chalk cliffs around Dover. Speaking of Dover, I read that Sarah Cracknell enjoys surfing and snowboarding. Nothing eccentric about that. Actually it sounds disctinctly Californian.

I'm always struck by how people would ask a question about basic things which they could have easily gotten the answer to (and a more accurate and insightful answer at that) at their local library or bookstore. It's either they're too lazy to look it up, or they don't know how. I often see questions online about some basic subject where the answer can be found in the real world, but they insist on someone telling them the answer.

A related pet peeve of mine is in doing tech support, I always get a few people who want me to essentially hold their hands while I walk them through some basic stuff. It's as if they no longer teach basic knowledge at grade school, and instead taught them how to get through life by complaining loudly until someone comes along and tends to their needs. I guess that's where I have the least patience for -- those people who really don't give a damn about getting a clue.

I also must mention that I really like Sarah Cracknell. I'm listening to her album "Lipslide" which is good but some songs get skipped this listen through. She's the image of the English girl from a posh area of London.

June 4th, 1989 is the day of the Tiananmen Square conflict. See the album "Foxbase Alpha."

I must say, I probably would not go to IKEA to get work chairs. I much prefer Herman Miller for that. Herman Miller also has some classic designs. But for dining room tables and chairs, I'm thinking about going with IKEA.

Kitchen and bathroom cabinets are still up in the air. I still have to figure out exactly what I need to do in my new house.

1985 Philadelphia (Plymouth Meeting)
Baltimore
Washington, DC (Potomac Mills/Woodbridge)
Elizabeth, NJ
Long Island, NY (Hicksville)
Pittsburgh, PA

????: Burbank, City of Industry, Carson, Orange County

1991: Fontana, CA (now closed)

1994: Seattle (Renton)

1998: Chicago (Schaumberg)

2000 April: San Francisco (Emeryville)

2000-09-20: September: San Diego

2003-01-15: Philadelphia (relocation to Conshohocken)

2003: Costa Mesa, CA (relocation from Tustin)
Covina, CA (relocation from City of Industry)
College Park, MD
Paramus, NJ
East Palo Alto, CA

Forbes

"Size Matters"
Ashlea Ebeling, 08.07.00

Ikea was nearly 30 years old before Kamprad opened his first U.S. store (outside Philadelphia) in 1985. He rapidly added six more but began to wish that he hadn't. The opening costs and lack of product planning (example: Ikea's European bed sizes didn't match American mattress and sheet sizes) pushed the U.S. operations into the red. "We had to change in order to survive," says Jan Kjellman, president of North American operations.

...

He opened in Chicago in 1998 and in San Francisco in April [2000]. A store in San Diego, California, will open this fall [2000]. U.S. sales should reach nearly $1 billion this year, about 10% of Ikea's global total.

King County Journal

The Renton IKEA store opened in 1994, and is a franchise.

What is it with the Oakland/Emeryville IKEA store that makes people want to rant about it? The long queues for parking? The overcrowding due to too many shoppers? The lack of enough employees to answer any questions? Maybe they're the victim of their own success. It seems a lot of people had high expectations for IKEA, but the reality is never that great. And where are those orange (as in the fruit orange) lamps that people keep raving about?

I went to the new (relocated) IKEA store in suburban Philadelphia. It's big. Much bigger than the old store. In a prevous journal entry, I wrote about how it's been 17 years since IKEA opened their first US store in Plymouth Meeting. I hope they're successful with the new location.

I guess it takes a few visits to figure out how it works. When it opened in 1985 here, it was a very different experience from other furniture stores. No pushy salespeople, and the displays actually showed furniture used in their natural settings, not piled up almost one atop another. And the flat-packed boxes meant that you could actually take it home with you. Granted, you needed a car, and a lot of SF-bay people who didn't have cars were disappointed with IKEA at Emeryville.

The other thing people rant about is how low quality the cheap stuff is at IKEA. Yes, the cheap stuff won't last five years, but you can spend a little more and have furniture that does last ten years or more. There are also a few pieces whose designs were flawed in some way.

IKEA was festive today. I felt almost uncomfortable with so many employees and promotional people in the Marketplace area. Normally, you don't see very many employees, but this being the first day at the store, I can understand that they wanted it to be festive and have everyone there.

I think there will always be people who don't like IKEA, just like there are always people, some small percentage of customers who have gotten a bad experience and swear never to shop at a certain establishment ever again. Those people are mistaken, I believe, and their unwillingness to re-examine their own beliefs, and to try to answer the question, what went wrong, rather than assigning blame, this is something which prevents them from seeing clearly. Sure, IKEA isn't a high-quality furniture maker like Thomasville nor are they making famous designs like the Eames chairs by Herman Miller. But they fill a niche for low-cost products that last a reasonable length of time.

I think for the people of SF, a lot of people there have become familiar with the IKEA way of doing things, and the fact that the store is packed every weekend is a sign of their success. It's always striking how people are most vocal against change, but after a while they adapt to it.

IKEA's history is not on their web site, but from other web pages and news reports I've been able to gather, I have a basic history of IKEA stores in the US:

In 1985, they opened the first US store in Plymouth Meeting. Over the next few years, they opened five more stores in the US, which I'm guessing are Baltimore, Potomac Mills, Elizabeth, Long Island, and Burbank. They opened their Seattle store in 1992 (?), Chicago in 1998, and Emeryville in 2000. These are from web pages, so the dates may be completely off.

Hey, I really hate it when people assume that you don't provide any customer support when the problem is that their mail isn't getting through for some reason. Every so often, I get a user who seems to have his email filtered or blocked for some reason and they complain about poor customer support. HELLO! What the hell is wrong with you? There's got to be a better way of doing email. Right now, it's too easy for email to get lost or filtered out as spam, and have people complain about the lack of customer support.

I may as well blame spammers as well. Email is increasingly becoming unreliable due to the amount of spam out there and the efforts to block it. Relays can get overloaded, mail gets dropped, or else mail is intentionally blocked because the server thinks it's spam. Or the client has email filter on and it blocks email. Eventually, I think I may have to move to a different form of technical support. Perhaps even telephone as a back-up.

Today was the last day for the original IKEA location in suburban Philadelphia. They're relocating to a new building only about half a mile away. Has it really been 17 years since the first IKEA in the U.S. opened in Plymouth Meeting? It seems I was just moving to a new house and starting jr-high school, putting together the particle-board pieces to make desks and cabinets. It doesn't seem that long ago, but I remember how unusual the IKEA store was, and how furniture stores where always kinda sleezy with 80's style gold and black enamel furniture. Furniture in the 80's was either uncomfortable and minimalist, or very fake-looking with gold plating and black enamel paint over particle-board trying to impersonate ebony. I think IKEA was a breath of fresh air. I still have some old IKEA catalogs. It seems that all those years have passed by so fast. I wish I had a journal entry for every day of my life.

Saint Etienne. I've been listening to Saint Etienne a few times thorugh each day for the past few days. From 1992 to the present. They sound so new, yet the almost sound familiar. I was in high school in 1992.

The thing with IKEA is that their cheapest stuff isn't designed to last forever. Still, the 15-year-old desks and cabinets from IKEA are still standing and working well. I gave my old desk to my friend, and the cabinets are still working, despite some of my modifications. I must say that IKEA products are good. The thing is that particle-board can have different levels of quality. I've had cheap particle-board desks from the local discount store fall apart after only a couple of years of normal use, while the IKEA stuff still is going on strong. I think that new materials get a bad reputation due to being associated with bad designs and manufacturing, but IKEA has embraced new technologies and made them work. My new Effektiv desk is made with OSB for the desktop, and it's very strong. But if you expose OSB to moisture for a long time, it'll delaminate and fall apart.

So those of us who have lived in Philadelphia for the past 17 years have known about IKEA and their products. On any given weekend, the IKEA parking lot will be full and the aisles busy with shoppers. This past Sunday, they had a close-out sale and there was line just to get into the store. They closed the store at 4pm Tuesday. I won't be able to be at the opening of the new store, due to jury duty, but I'll be sure to stop by later today (Wednesday). I find it unusual that IKEA haven't expanded their U.S. presence with more stores, considering how many stores they have in Western Europe.

This was a good and fun thing to go to tonight. I also got a game called Sheep and a few other demo CDs. I am finalizing plans for exhibiting at Macworld NY 03 in July. It should be a fun expo. I am also planning Macworld SF 04. I don't believe Apple would really pull out of Macworld Expo, but stranger things have happened.