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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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April 28th, 2008

unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Monday, April 28th, 2008 09:13 am

... I don't care how cute you think the backronym for your business phone number is.  When you list your customer service number on your product, list the actual phone number as well as your backronym.  Don't make me figure it out.  The odds are I don't call your customer service number often enough for it to be worth my while memorizing wither your backronym or your phone number, especially when your backronym isn't even vaguely mnemonic of your company name or product, so if I already have to squint at your product identification plate to read off the phone number, I don't want to have to then take extra time converting the backronym into a dialable number.

Yeah, I know, a lot of folks just dial the backronym directly.  My brain doesn't work that way.

That much said, when I called Black & Decker customer service a few minutes ago to report that either my new-last-year Firestorm 24V¹ cordless drill's batteries had stopped taking a charge, or the charger had stopped charging them, the customer service rep didn't mess about at all. She had me give her the model number of the drill and the date code from one of the batteries, then said that since the batteries were fairly new, the most likely explanation was that the charger had failed, and she was going to send me out a new charger, along with instructions on how to test the batteries with a multimeter once I had the new charger.

Good job, B&D.

[1]  The Firestorm 24V drill rocks, by the way.  It has gobs of torque, good erconomics, and the best and most usable keyless chuck I've ever used — metal, not plastic, and with a fine enough thread that you CAN tighten it adequately without a chuck key.  Most keyless chucks, in my experience, can't be tightened enough without a tool to drill hard materials or large holes without slipping, and can't be tightened with a tool without damaging them.

unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Monday, April 28th, 2008 09:48 am

... The consumer electronics industry needs a better commodity-rechargeable-battery technology.  Purely aside from the issue of charge life, come on, people, is it really any surprise to anyone that many devices designed to operate on 1.5v manganese-alkaline¹ primary cells don't work well (or, sometimes, don't work at all) when you replace them with 1.2v NiCd or NiMH cells?²

[1]  Or lithium-iron, or silver oxide ... pretty much all the commodity primary-cell technologies in common use run somewhere in the 1.5v-1.6v range.

[2]  I'm seeing some references to a titanium, titanium-lithium, or titanium-NiMH rechargeable battery that's a true 1.5v primary-cell replacement.  However, I can't find any definitive technical information, just marketing claims that don't specify things like internal resistance or discharge rate.

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