What is it with people now-a-days and their “Do you know who I am and I’ll talk bad on twitter about you” bullshit. I had a customer, mind you a $20/mo customer, pull this card today.

Please terminate page.ly service and reverse the original credit card charges. If you check the correspondence with [REDACTED] on our behalf, you will see your organization’s work and responsiveness has been completely indadequate. It took us one day to accomplish with a new hosting service what we were unable to accomplish with you in a week. I am willing to write this off as a bad day/weekfor you, if you simply reverse the credit card charge, despite the hours wasted and stress you crated for us. If you think on review your service was adequate, I will happily debate you on that topic in a more public place.

The emphasis is mine. First let me say, we dropped the ball and we take full responsibility. The setup took longer than it should, and when it finished file permissions were wonky, and to top it off our our management system would not authorize the client. A grade A clusterfuck for sure. We fixed it up though, over a few days and 3 tickets. Not our best moment, but we took care of them.

If this customer had stopped writing before that last sentence I emphasized. I swear before you I would have polished his ass with my own lips in heartfelt apology and humility. And there would not be a story here.

Instead they got this response from me. We of course take responsibility for the problem and issue a full refund, but they also got a heavy dose of snark:

I looked back at the tickets from [REDACTED] and you are correct, we did drop the ball on getting things taken care of in a timely fashion. We’ll happily terminate the account and refund the payment. We stand by our product and our service, and if we don’t come through on that promise it is our fault.

I would like to also add that your threats of taking things public are not the best way to achieve you end goal. Perhaps you were burnt in the past, and some evil company maybe got the better of you and stole your lunch money. So you may had called them and had to wait on hold for 3 hours and missed your soccer game or something. And you may have sworn, right then: “this will never happen to me again, so I am going to flex my muscle next time and use this thing called the internets to have my revenge. I can use twitter and facebook, and I will say bad things.. and that will teach those mean people to mess with me” On that day you may have decided to reclaim your honor, and you might have taken your @aol email address out into the wild of the internets, head held high, just waiting for the day someone was even going to even think about messing with you.

But truth be told, you had a bad experience at page.ly, and we feel bad about it. Cause you know, we are people too. And we dont like feeling like we got taken advantage of so we try every day to deliver the best product and customer support we can, and if we fail we are wise enough to own up to those mistakes and try to make it right, regardless if the customer on the other end threatens some lame bullshit about telling their social graph they were unhappy.

Thank you for giving us a try, I am sorry it did not work out.
I will cancel the account and refund the payment immediately.

NOT my finest work, but this is how we deal with bullies at page.ly. Every once in a while we get the tough guy that for whatever reason (right or wrong) is ready to start a social media flame war over some real or imagined transgression. That’s really what they or anyone else is doing when they pull the “I’ll take this to twitter” card, they are being bullies. Alec Baldwin lost his shit when a flight attendant made him comply with federal regulations, for some reason he was above the law made a PR nitemare for the airline. Real nice Alec.

So how do you deal with this in your own business?

Click here to view the embedded video.

it’s typical uninspired bubble bullshit from the SF echo chamber.. the good news is mindless valley leadership icons like Dave McClure, Loic and Scoble will masturbate to it being the next flipbook and they will raise a Series A.  Tell them party like a rockstar and live it up, spend every dime because the rides gonna be short and the fall is gonna hurt like a mutha fucker.

At first I thought it would just be a fun gag and no one would care. Some 16,000 followers later, and thousands of hilarious RT’s, scrolling through the mentions and RT’s every few days is a sure laugh.

It’s pure comedy to see people add their own one liners and take Willy out of context.
A few recent choice examples:

Clearly Willy’s words are universal.

So Willy will be done by the end the summer, and I asked his followers if he should start over.. Survey says yes. So look forward to Willy starting fresh with the Sonnets and Macbeth (I think was one of his first plays) this Fall.

At first it was a gag, then it got interesting as people took notice.. now I almost see it as a civic duty to add a little culture to the often times inane and shallow conversation on twitter.

Please continue to enjoy. Willy is here for the duration.

What does it take to get a verified account on twitter now-a-days? You should all harass twitter inc. and tell them to make @IAM_SHAKESPEARE a verified account. hehe. Enjoy – @strebel.

Solution: Use a gen1 iPhone.  Like me.

Teach you hipsters.. don’t you know the new ironic thing is to not have the latest must-have gadget?

Edge FTW!

This car is like bacon bits on bacon ice cream. Just that much more amazing.  The R8 GT

Sally and I (Page.ly) along with a good friend of ours Chase (Authoritylabs.com) have rented a sweet 4bd/2ba house in the Delores Heights neighborhood for about 4 weeks this summer (late june -late july).  Why?

1. Have you ever spent a summer in Phoenix?  I have spent 7 of them and I am over it. I said last summer it would be the last full summer I spend in Phoenix. Heres to setting a goal and achieving it.
2. Our office in SF has gone woefully under-used.  We are going to solve that a couple ways: (a) we are hiring (b) we’ll be there.
3. I am kind of tired of flying out there to meet with these silicon valley investors shoving money in our face. I figure if I am going to keep saying no, I’ll at least do it without wasting the $ on airfare.
4. The Scene.  We know some people out there and want to get to know them better. What better way to get to know everyone than invite them over and cook for them.  Sounds really old fashion I know… but yes. Sally and I enjoy cooking/entertaining and enjoy getting to know people on a personal level outside the trappings of sxsw or a brief weekend conference.
5. WHY THE HELL NOT?
6. Must.. See uncle jesse’s…full house.

June 24th….. SF or bust.

I’ve been searching Gods all my life, now I know them. There is a meaning to life. There are things worth believing in. There are things worth being passionate about.

All of this plays a part in trying to give a positive sense of something to believe in. A positive crusade of thought, of meditation, of emotion – that you can use to advance humanity tremendously – and that excises deliberately the God of War.

When you find the Gods inside yourself, you’ll find the God of war and he will be one of the most powerful passions in you. You have to freeze him in his own private hell and make your positive Gods the Gods that take you over.

And by the Gods that take you over, I mean you have to find those passions that are so much more powerful in you than anything you’ve been allowed to express in your life – and making those things the things that you work on – not putting off until you’re 40 or 50. The things you feel passionate about at the age of 15 and 16, and going directly to those things and trying to implement them when you’re 20.

Pass go, forget the 200 dollars, go directly to Park Place and put your life there, on the line, with all the emotion, power and passion and insight in you.

And fuck the God of war.

Click here to view the embedded video.