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Convert voicemail to email

Earlier I wrote about my unfortunate experience trying to try out (yes) PhoneTag.com, a service that transcribes voicemail and forwards it as email and SMS messages. I came across PhoneTag.com in my reading of The Four Hour Workweek, and I really like the idea of reducing the number of inboxes I need to monitor. After my initial trouble setting the service up, PhoneTag.com’s CEO, Thomas Lesnick, offered me a 30-day free trial of the service, which I couldn’t pass up. I wish I could call the experience entirely smooth, but I also want to make sure PhoneTag.com gets a fair reputation for the good points they’ve earned, so I’ll describe my experience as evenly as I can here.

Rogers: elevating customer service to below the floor

First, I found out that I’d have to drop voicemail from Rogers Canada to use PhoneTag.com’s service. This turns out to reflect Rogers’ service, and so counts as a point against them, rather than against PhoneTag.com. Sadly, Rogers Canada managed to give me false information in my quest to cancel voicemail from my service. When I stopped in to a Rogers Wireless store, I asked someone to tell me how my plan price would change if I dropped voicemail. After a few clarifying questions, they told me my plan would decrease in price by $2/month. I told them a few times, “I just want to make sure the cost won’t increase because I’d go from a bundle to a-la-carte services.” Imagine my annoyance when I spoke to a CSR at Rogers on the phone, who informed me that replacing a bundle with a-la-carte services would increase my monthly costs. I managed to show just the right amount of exasperation, because a moment later, the CSR told me she could “make voicemail not work” without charging me any extra money. While I expected a decrease in price by $2/month, no change in price satisfied me, so I went along. I canceled voicemail.

Next, I forwarded all my unanswered, busy, and unavailable calls to the PhoneTag.com service’s phone number. PhoneTag.com was good enough to secure a 902 area code number for me to use. Now since my Rogers Canada plan includes pay-as-you-go call forwarding, each forwarded call would cost me about $0.20/minute, but I considered that reasonable cost to pay to try PhoneTag.com, so I went ahead. Setting up the service took only a few minutes, and I called myself through SkypeOut to test the transcription.

I first left a message without choosing the correct microphone setting in Skype, which meant no audio recorded in the message. PhoneTag.com helpfully pointed out that it recorded no discernible audio and would not charge me for hang-ups. Good for PhoneTag.com! Once I configured Skype correctly, PhoneTag.com sent me accurately transcribed messages by email, but not by SMS. This troubled me, because I wanted to receive voicemail by SMS while away from an internet connection for days at a time, if only so that my book-keeper could contact me with urgent questions. At this point, PhoneTag.com began losing my respect.

First, their support system doesn’t integrate with their service system, so I had to create a second account especially for their support system. Without this, I couldn’t track trouble tickets. I don’t mean to put this rudely, but my calendar reads “2009″, not “1999″. I find no real excuse for this inconvenience. What’s more, to sign up for a support account involves specifying my mobile phone provider, and while I can choose “Rogers Canada” for my service account, their dropdown list does not include “Rogers Canada” for the support account. Worse, when I emailed PhoneTag.com support about the issue, they couldn’t decipher my comment and I had to send them a screenshot of their own support system signup page for them to understand what I meant. Here, sadly, PhoneTag.com and Rogers Canada have roughly equally effective front-line support workers, and I don’t know whom that maligns more.

Finally, PhoneTag.com informed me that in order to receive transcribed voicemails by SMS, Rogers Canada would charge me extra, because of the gateway PhoneTag.com uses to send transcribed voicemails by SMS.

This really bothered me.

When I signed up at PhoneTag.com for a service account, they knew I used Rogers Canada as a mobile phone provider. They should have disclosed the extra fees to receive transcribed messages by SMS at that point! I wouldn’t mind them blaming Rogers Canada for the extra fees, but I don’t appreciate finding out after I’d already signed up for a PhoneTag.com account. The fact that they extended me a 30-day free trial makes their lack of disclosure cost me less, but it doesn’t erase the time I’ve wasted setting up their service and dealing with Rogers Canada and their inept customer service. I notified PhoneTag.com and Mr. Lesnick about my disappointment, telling them that this makes it less likely that I will continue to use the service past the free trial. Shame, too, because I like their core service so far.

So I like PhoneTag.com’s core service so far, although I find PhoneTag.com’s customer service and fee disclosure policy a little shaky. If you care deeply about receiving your voicemails as SMS, and you’re on Rogers, then you might find PhoneTag.com too expensive. If you really only need voicemails by email, then you’ll find PhoneTag.com more cost effective. I’ll know more when I see my next Rogers Wireless bill. I don’t look forward to seeing how they screwed it up.

Froth Cafe

Sarah’s family has a few cottages littered throughout the township of Tiny, Ontario. During this trip back to Ontario, while the Blue Jays have traveled out of town, we’ve spent most of our “down time” in and among those cottages. I have really enjoyed the disconnected time, as it has given me the chance to read The Four Hour Workweek and come up with some new ideas for the next phase of our retirement.

More than this, we recently found out about Froth Cafe, located on Main St in Penetanguishene, about 15 km from the cottages. We’ve only managed two trips there so far, but early returns have looked good for the fledgling cafe.

In short: very good espresso drinks, fresh and bright decor, very pleasant staff, commitment to quality over speed.

Sarah and I visited Froth looking for espresso drinks: Sarah her cappuccino and I my latte. We walked into the shop and immediately noticed the bright, airy feel. Light-colored wood and clean glass dominate the decor. On the blackboard behind the counter, the cafe’s proprietors set a relaxed tone: if you want fast food, then please go elsewhere. I loved it straight away. We ordered our coffees, chatted with the staff for about 10 minutes, and enjoyed what we drank.

We visited a second time, me bringing some technology to keep me busy while Sarah and her family went shopping for clothing for an upcoming wedding. I found it a delightfully relaxing place to sip a latte or two while working away, seated on one of their big, comfortable lounging chairs.

Overall, I really enjoy Froth Cafe, and find it a shame that we might not have the chance to visit it again soon. If you have a cottage in the Penetang area, please visit them and buy some coffee and food. If you live in the area, please support this fine new establishment to help them survive the winter and provide the community with something better than fast food and burnt coffee.

Tim Ferriss' "Four-Hour Work Week"

I have started reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. When I’d read descriptions and reviews of the book, I formed the opinion that I already intuitively understood many of the principles at work, particularly as regards his steps of elimination and automation. Reading it confirmed what I’d suspected: I had already used these techniques and even counseled others to use them in my work as a classroom trainer and consultant. It sprang to mind a particular success story from my early software career.

I worked as a student-on-call at IBM in Toronto in 1997. I started on the Visual Age for RPG project, which entailed my comparing error messages between the older RPG compiler and the newer Visual Age RPG compiler. While they had automated the test that produced all the error messages they wanted to check, they hadn’t automated checking the messages from the two compilers to each other. Instead, I started doing that. I began with 50-page printouts: a master copy and printouts from each test run. I compared the two copies, then reported a defect when I found an unacceptable difference between the two. It took a few days to learn which differences they could tolerate and which ones they decided warranted a fix. It took me several hours to compare the printouts, and I resented the tedium. After a week, I had the thought that all successful people have: there has to be a better way.

First, I asked whether I could use e-copies of both the master copy and the test runs. They arranged for that with little effort. As I waited for that, I looked for patterns in the text I compared by hand, learning how to extract the messages from the surrounding text and how to describe meaningful and meaningless differences. Once I received e-copies of the master copy and a single test run, I started writing a computer program to load the two files, compare them, then summarize the differences, highlighting the meaningful ones as “almost certainly defects” and the meaningless ones as “probably not defects”. This gave me an opportunity to write my first truly useful programs in C, a language I hadn’t much used before, but one that I imagined would benefit me as a professional programmer. I don’t recall how long it took me, but I don’t remember anyone becoming impatient with me, so the time I spent must not have made me a bottleneck.

The first day, I used my new program to on the next test run, but verified the results by hand. I noticed that my program took about 30 minutes to run: I had an old computer, I didn’t know how to write particularly quick programs, and don’t forget the test runs amounted to 50 printed pages. At first, I looked around the office while my program ran for something to do, as I didn’t have access to the internet on my computer. I flipped through a few manuals, including a C manual that I thought might help me. That day I processed two test runs, the same as any other day, but noticed that my manual checking went quicker, because I could check the meaningful differences first, then the meaningless ones, then double-check the rest of the document to ensure that program didn’t miss any defects. To my delight, it performed more than well enough for me to start trusting it within a week.

Now the time had come to harvest my productivity crop. I collected that day’s test run and a new master copy, loaded them into my program, ran it, then wandered around the building, knowing I had about 30 minutes. I hadn’t realized the size and complexity of the old IBM building in Toronto. I began to understand the need for its intricate room addressing system, right down to numbering hallways, odd numbers running north-south and even numbers running east-west. I walked back to my office after about an hour of wandering to look at my program’s result. I reported two defects, then wondered what to do next. I had to wait for the next test run, and they wouldn’t run one for another couple of hours. I wandered the building some more and stumbled upon something of interest: a dart board in the cafeteria.

I started playing darts.

In less than two weeks, I’d gone from a terrifically tedious job checking two 50-page documents to one another by hand to IBM paying me roughly $150/hour (as a starving undergraduate student!) for about one hour per day, with seven hours of playing darts, reading, or generally relaxing. All this by finding an ineffective work process and streamlining it with a little elimination and a little automation. I had gained some relative mobility, as I only needed to spend about an hour a day in my office, reporting defects or fixing my test program.

Now I need to confess something: my program did not operate perfectly. Every two weeks or so, I’d notice something my program missed: a difference that my program interpreted as meaningless that I needed to report as a defect. This meant that, every so often, I reported a defect later than I could have. I was performing at far less than 100% efficiency. Funnily enough, it did not matter at all! I didn’t understand the theory at the time, but I experienced it then: the project had a bottleneck somewhere else in the system that moved more slowly than I reported defects, so I could generate no extra value by reporting those defects more efficiently!

Imagine that: producing better results wouldn’t have mattered at all, so it didn’t matter that I produced my results less than perfectly efficiently.

Since I didn’t understand bottlenecks at the time, I felt bad about “cheating” and added more rules to my program to handle these increasingly subtle distinctions between meaningful and meaningless differences. The resulting program did work better and did automate my work even more, allowing me to go from one hour of work per day to closer to 45 minutes; but if I hadn’t been refining a skill I would use later to make a lot of money, then I would have looked back on that as a waste of time. Had I known any better, I might not have bothered at all, and simply played more darts!

Long before I started reading The Four-Hour Work Week, I managed to use some of the principles he describes to turn an $18/hour job into a $150/hour, one-hour-per-day job where I got to play darts, read, and otherwise relax most of the day. I didn’t wait to perfect my time-saving system; I just started using it as soon as I reasonably could, even though it cost me extra time for the first week! Since then, I’ve managed to combine the goal of mobility with the principles of elimination to retire at 34 on passive income streams worth 1.5 times my family’s essential living expenses. You can do it, too, and I recommend The Four-Hour Work Week for beginners to read to help form their vision of a new life, and then to re-read a year or two later to refine your approach to freedom from the tyranny of tedium.