Incoherent Babble

As most of you probably know by now, I’ve been spending a lot of time (mostly at work I’ll admit) reading blogs and signing up for various RSS feeds across the net. First off, I love the “Live Bookmarks” feature found in Firefox, I just wish it had some better features, such as the ability to control how frequently the RSS source feed is re-parsed to pick up new data. Perhaps they’ll introduce this in a future version of Firefox, but for now I’d like to make a small request.

If anyone knows of a good web-based aggregator which has these kinds of features (Bloglines SUCKS almost as much as Blogger, so don’t even bother suggesting that one), please let me know. You can leave a comment on this post or email me! I’d really rather not have to write my own aggregator, as I can’t get PHP 5 installed on my server.

Anyway, the real reason I started this post revolves around a recent blog entry I read. As I’ve mentioned, I’m an avid reader of Mark Jen’s blog, and I have followed him since the virtual beginning, through his troubles at Google, and now into his life at Plaxo.

I’d like to point out this post about customer satisfaction (or rather, lack thereof) with Cingular service post-AT&T.

Mark points out that Cingular’s number of complaints per million users is almost 4x that of Verizon users, of which I am one. Now, usually I don’t post about anything unless I have something to complain about, but this post is an exception. I have to say that I have never in the almost 10 years we’ve used Verizon (or Bell Atlantic Mobile, as they were in ye olden times), I have never had a single complaint against them. The one and only service outage I’ve had was experienced while they performed tower maint. to accomodate the growing number of users in the area, approximately 5 years ago. Even on my trip to Hawaii, I was able to get a clear (albeit weak) signal at top of the volcano.

Despite my high praise for Verizon overall, I do agree about unnecessary fees. No matter what you do, even with Verizon, you must sign a new 2 year contract. Well, what if I DON’T WANT A NEW CONTRACT? Well, then you don’t get the service you want. And if you want to cancel before the 2 year contract is up, well, that’ll be another $185… No sir, I want the shirt off your wife’s back…

One gripe I have against the industry as a whole involves overage fees. I mean, come on. I can pay you guys $5 a month extra and get an ungodly number of anytime minutes to use every month, but if I keep my lower plan and happen to go over one month out of the year, I get slapped with $40/min?

No, I don’t have all the answers to the problem. I realize this is a major source of income for the cell service providers, but honestly, there has got to be a less shady method of making a buck. This is just uncalled for, and if nothing else proves that the cell phone industry needs some major reform, this should…

Update - March 30, 2005: Now that I read back over the blog entry and actually look at the Consumer Reports data relating to this blog (and Mark’s), I see that the majority of the Cingular complaints regarded billing, NOT service. I was working under the reverse assumption, so this throws a bit of a spin on things. While Verizon still fares FAR better than Cingular in both Billing and Service-related complaints, my blog entry probably would have taken a bit of a different spin, had I actually examined the data for myself… Ahh well, lesson learned I supposed…