Category Archives: SpikeLife

Posts about me

In Case You Were Wondering, PCCW Still Sucks

I got my “representative” from PCCW on the phone this morning. He pretended to be shocked and dismayed that I never got the promised call from a manager, but he’s not a very good actor. He then told me he’d get a manager on the phone for me – but the one I spoke to previously is still out on holiday, do I want to wait until she returns? No. I want action now.

So half an hour later, he still can’t get a manager on the phone and tells me someone will call me back.

An hour later I get the call. I once again explain my situation to this “manager,” who is completely unable to answer my questions, which include:

If on February 1st they confirmed that two lines into the house were okay, why were they not okay on February 9th?
If I booked my relocation order 3 weeks in advance, why couldn’t they have used that time to make certain things were prepared?
How can there be no lines into the flat when this place had previous tenants who surely had service from them?
Why do my upstairs neighbors and next door neighbors have service when I do not?
And finally …. when will the new junction box be installed so that I can have service?

Seriously. Zero answers. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Brilliant.

So then, as a commenter to a previous post suggested, the manager said that “maybe” he could get me authorization to get a PC Anywhere thingie as a temporary solution until everything else was fixed. Great, can I get that today? No. Of course not. Because apparently this so-called manager has no authority to approve such a request and there was NO ONE THERE who did today. They can maybe get it approved on Thursday in which case maybe I could pick one up on Friday. A whole lotta maybes there.

I told him that I was completely fed up with this miserable lack of service and lack of information and that I was filing an official complaint with the Hong Kong Communications Authority, which I have in fact done.

Argh.

I’m One of the 1% – On LinkedIn

Well, I’m definitely not one of the 1% in terms of income or financial well-being, that’s for sure.

But LinkedIn has been doing this smart marketing thing as they’ve crossed the threshold to 200 million users – by sending out emails telling people they are in the top 10%, 5% or 1% of most viewed profiles on the site. I say this is smart because it has a lot of people talking about it via social media outlets and blogs, an excellent viral publicity campaign.

So I got my email telling me that my profile was one of the top 1% profiles viewed. What does that mean exactly? Well, the initial math is easy enough. 200 million users, so 1% is 2 million people. That’s a pretty big club to be in.

LinkedIn does provide decent real time statistics on who is viewing your profile so I know that in the past three months my profile has been viewed 331 times – that averages out to less than 4 views per day. That includes views by some of my 856 connections there as well as by total strangers. Not terribly impressive by any means, is it?

I’m also told that I’ve shown up in search results a total of 2,232 times in the past three months – an average of just under 25 times per day and most of those people aren’t clicking on my name when I do show up. In no small part that’s probably because the top two searches that lead to me are things related to companies I no longer work for.

Well, given that from time to time I’ve really “worked” LinkedIn, I suppose it’s nice to be in the top 1%. Plus since I had a friend bragging to the world about being in the top 5%, I was able to tell him to suck it (with a smiley face afterwards, of course).

However, all of that aside, the best commentary came from an email that a friend of mine sent me today. Here’s a portion of that email:

Since 2009 I’ve had the search mode off and on and know the job search struggle too well. The best advise I was given was that, “computers don’t hire people; people hire people.” I got my best results by finding people I didn’t already know (alumni and network) and getting them to meet me face to face. Every job since was because I met someone who knew the right someone. Online was easy, but a waste of time unless just looking for more contacts.

I know he’s right. And I know that I suck at face-to-face networking. You might find that hard to believe, since I’m pretty open and communicative online, but it’s the truth. I’m finding it difficult to break out of this protective shell I’ve spent years building up around me and finding it all too easy to come up with excuses for not doing what I know I should be doing.

Well, the good news is, Chinese New Year has come and gone. Many people in HK traditionally get their bonuses at this time of year, and so there’s a lot of activity on the job market. I’m hopeful that my extended vacation will come to an end soon.

We’ve Moved – And PCCW Fucked Me

So we finished moving everything over on Saturday and we’re now resident in Ping Long Village in Lam Tsuen Valley, Tai Po.

The good stuff first:

One of my blog readers lives in the neighboring village and stopped by to offer all sorts of useful tips on transportation and shopping around here. It was a nice welcome.

We’ve met all of our immediate neighbors – the family living upstairs and the two families next door. I compare that to my four years in Mid Levels, when I never knew my neighbors, even the ones on the same floor. To me that’s one of the big plusses of village life.

Last night we went out for dinner. When we got back and parked in the village car park, I pointed out the village temple to my gf. We walked over to take a closer look. Sitting in front of the house next door was a British guy and his Filipino girlfriend. They said hello, we told them we had just moved here this day, and he went into his house and came out with bottles of Jack Daniels and Absolut and glasses with ice. We soon met another British neighbor and sat out in the town square enjoying the evening. They told me that the little shop or restaurant or whatever it is at the end of the village sells big bottles of Tsing Tao for HK$10 and that’s the local hangout.

Of course lots of firecrackers all last night and all day today.

We headed into Tai Po early and were very pleasantly surprised to find some places open. The big Cantonese seafood place had a huge line out front, people waiting for combination Sunday/New Year dim sum. We found a little cha chaan teng nearby with no English menu but friendly staff and customers and had breakfast there. We saw signs of some shops opening up even though it’s the first day of CNY and also some guy on the street wanting to give me free copies of the Watchtower magazine. Thanks but no thanks.

The slightly smaller space of the flat plus the lack of any closets is temporarily driving me crazy. The second bedroom will become our closet but for right now everything is still in cartons and suitcases still we can get some stuff from Price Rite. The third bedroom, the one that will be my office, is packed from floor to ceiling and I’m going a bit crazy figuring out how to arrange everything and what to throw out – which is why I’m taking a break to write this now.

Which, by the way, I’m doing on my laptop tethered to my iPhone, because PCCW fucked me, pretty much as expected.

Once I knew I was moving, at least 3 weeks in advance, I called PCCW first. I only selected the move day of February 9th after they confirmed they could hook everything up that day.

One week before the move they called to tell me there were only two lines going into the house, not the four I would need, so I told them to give me the landline and the internet and we could wait on the NOW-TV.

So February 9th arrives. And half an hour before the time slot for PCCW to arrive, the installer calls up to tell me he can’t install that day. ”But you must!!!” – I might have screamed. ”Cannot.” I tell him to have his manager call me.

Meantime I call the main service number and get some guy on the phone who says he can only book orders for new relocations. He gives me the name and phone number of the guy who originally took my order. I ask if he’s working on a Saturday – no idea.

I call that number, get a voicemail, but the guy calls me back within 15 minutes. He checks into the system and says that the junction box is too far from my house and they need more time to run cables there. I ask him how that is possible when it was confirmed to me one week earlier that at least two lines were okay. He doesn’t know. I ask how this is possible when this is not a new house, when other people lived here before me, surely they must have had service. He doesn’t know.

He says he’s sorry for any inconvenience. I tell him it’s not just an inconvenience, that I work from home, and what is PCCW going to do about my lost income? I tell them to do something temporary, run a cable or something to my house, till they can have the permanent fix. He says he’ll have his manager call me.

An hour later, same guy calls me back. He says he’ll transfer me to the manager. He puts me on hold and every 10 minutes comes back on to see if I’m still there and to apologize. After 30 minutes he says he can’t get the manager on the phone but he will definitely call me back that day.

Which never happens. No one else calls me.

And now it’s Chinese New Year. And this year it’s a four day holiday instead of three.

Fortunately, the mobile phone signal is a lot stronger here than it was in my previous two villages. So I get enough signal for email, Facebook, that sort of stuff. Not enough for uploading or downloading.

And as of now I have no idea when everything will be installed.

Oh well. Back to unpacking.

Where I’ve Lived

With the movers now here packing stuff up, time to think about places I’ve lived so far and the place I’ll be living in soon …..

1954-1978 The Bronx, same building the entire time, same apartment from 1957 to 1978, although from 73-75 I was really living in college dorms in Boston (my mother remained in that apartment until 1992 and has been in her current apartment from 1992 to the present).
1978-1987 – Manhattan, upper west side, same apartment the entire time – ten years of two people living in a 300 square foot studio. How I ever squeezed my record collection into there remains a mystery. We stayed for ten years because we kept hoping the building would go co-op and we could make a killing but eventually we gave up waiting. It is probably the reason that I can’t live in small little shoe boxes any more.
1988-1993 – Astoria, Queens.
1993-1995 – Bloomfield, New Jersey

And then comes Hong Kong:

1995-1996 Happy Valley
1996-1997 Mid Levels
1997-1999 Kennedy Road (what some agents creatively call “Wanchai Mid-Levels”)

And then San Francisco:

1999-2001 Twin Peaks

And then back to Hong Kong:

2001 – North Point (this was a service flat that I stayed in for a few months while waiting for my then-wife to follow me from San Francisco)
2002-2003 Sai Kung
2003-2004 Kennedy Road
2004-2008 Mid Levels
2008-2011 Shan Liu, Sai Kung
2011-2013 Kai Ham, Sai Kung
2013-? Lam Tsuen

The point of all this? Not much I suppose, though I notice that when living in the U.S., I very rarely moved. As a child living with my parents, we were in the same apartment for 21 years (and my parents stayed in that apartment for another 13 or 14 years after I moved out). (Yes, it was rent controlled. Thank you NYC.) I stayed in my first apartment for 10 years, my second one for almost 5 years.

But in 15-1/2 years in Hong Kong, I’ve stayed in 10 different places. I’ve had pretty good reasons for moving each time but the fact is, I’ve moved an awful lot.

Actually I was really happy with my flat in Mid Levels but my landlord had gone abroad for a few years and decided he wanted to return to Hong Kong and needed his place back. I liked Shan Liu but I eventually decided that having an entire village house was too extravagant. I would gladly have stayed in my current location for many years but my landlord decided to be greedy.

You may ask why I’ve always rented and never bought a place here. The sad fact is that the one time that I had the money to buy a place, it simply wasn’t something I wanted to do. It’s one of those “if I knew then what I know now” deals but there ain’t no way to go back in time and change it so it is what it is.

Anyway, Lam Tsuen, here I come!

Bank of America Does the Right Thing

Since I was so quick to criticize in two previous posts (here and here), it’s only fair that I should report back that everything was straightened out by this morning.

BofA’s help desk called me at around 1:15 AM (I was up so not a problem for me). I’ve managed help desks in the past and I know there are two kinds of help desks. The first is the one that we mostly encounter, some high school graduate in a tiny cubicle with a headset typing key words into a computer and then reading back whatever text seems most appropriate. The second is experience, well-trained staff who have studied and understand the products and have some degree of authority vested in them. BofA’s help desk was the second kind.

The woman told me she’d read my blog post and understood the situation. She told me that she would make calls and try to get some action for me. Then she told me about SmartPass, which is BofA’s double authentication system for web transactions. When I told her that wouldn’t work for me because they won’t send me a verification number by SMS, she told me they also have a digital dongle (like the one I have from HSBC), that it normally costs US$20, and that she would send it to me for free. And she told me that she understood the errors came down to training issues of branch staff and she would highlight this as an issue for management attention.

When I woke up this morning I had an email from the branch manager telling me they had credited the money back to my joint account even though they had not received the funds back from HSBC yet. I have no way of knowing whether this action came about because of the branch manager or because of the initiative of the person from the help desk. (I’m assuming it’s the latter.) My mother redid the transfer and this time it went through smoothly and the money’s in my account.

So while I was critical of Bank of America (and justifiably so as far as I’m concerned), I also have to give them credit for having a help desk that was truly helpful.

Disaster over. Normal life resumes.

Bank of America Cheesing Me Off Even More

I posted the following on Twitter:

#bankofamerica sucks. and when I say it sucks, I mean it really seriously truly absolutely SSSUUUCCCKKKSSS

As I expected, they have someone monitoring Twitter and I got a response back from @BofA_help.

I work for Bank of America. What happened? Is there anything I can do to help?

I can’t describe my issue in 140 character bursts, so I sent them a link to the previous blog post. They replied:

Thank you for the follow up. Please DM your name, zip and phone number so we can call you to discuss your concerns in detail.

Except … you cannot send a direct message on Twitter to someone who is not following you. You’d think they might already know this? Apparently not. So I tweeted to them:

I can’t DM you since you’re not following me. you can send me an email at hongkietown at gmail dot com and I will send you the details.

You’ll never guess their reply.

We do not communicate via email. Please DM the requested info so we can call you to discuss your concerns. Thank you.

Holy crap. They don’t use email. So I then had to specifically tell them that they need to follow me so that I can DM them. Five minutes later they finally did that. So I’ve sent the DM.

Now let’s see if they’re willing to spend a dollar to make a call to Hong Kong.

Here’s How Much Bank of America Sucks

Those of us in Hong Kong love to rag on HSBC and sure, they deserve it. But they’ve never screwed me the way that Bank of America has. Here’s what happened.

I have a joint account with my mother with Bank of America in the U.S. I’ve needed the money in this account for my basic living expenses for the past six months. I am unable to initiate wire transfers over the internet from this account so my mother has to go into the branch office and sign the forms so that the money comes to me. It has always come to my account the same day she has sent it.

Until now.

Last week, she went into the same Bank of America branch she always goes to. The guy she sees there, the one who knows me personally and has handled all of the transfers, had the day off. So she goes to another person there who fills out the forms for her.

BofA has never needed the SWIFT code to complete the transaction. It goes through just fine with the bank name and a few other details. But this person took it upon herself to be “helpful” and put a SWIFT code on the form. The wrong code. If you look up SWIFT codes for HSBC, there are dozens, if not hundreds of them. And this person filled in the code for HSBC Investment Holdings Ltd, which is pretty far away from HSBC Hong Kong.

As such, the money left the U.S. but never arrived in my account. 5 days later Bank of America told us that they would inform HSBC and get the money transferred correctly. One week later they have told us that HSBC cannot transfer the money to my account and can only send it back to Bank of America and that they have no idea how long that will take.

Bank of America insists that there is absolutely nothing else that they can do and have helpfully suggested that I should find some more money and transfer that to HK while I’m waiting for this mess to sort itself out.

I know this will never happen and perhaps I am being naive but it seems to me they should say, “We screwed up, we’ll send the money to your account and we’ll sort out the other money when we get it back. It was our screw up and we will do what it takes to make it right.” But of course they’re not going to do it.

In the meantime I have bills that are about to be overdue and a doctor who needs to be paid this week to continue treatments that I need.

My mother wants to hire a lawyer but I’m not sure what lawyer would take this case given that it’s just been a week and, while the money may seem like a huge amount to us, in the grand scheme of things others might see it as a trivial sum.

Either way, it’s been one week. She doesn’t have the money. I don’t have the money. It has vanished into the ether and it could be weeks until this gets sorted out.

Personal Updates

I’ve got some spare time while I’m sitting here waiting for Lightroom to export a batch of photos. (Lightroom is painfully slow on my desktop Windows PC for some reason, although it is remarkably fast on my MacBook Pro.)

For those of you who actually come to the site, rather than reading via RSS or Facebook or Twitter links, you’ll see that the top item remains I Need a Job – Help! and that’s still the case, although things have significantly improved since I wrote that.

You’ve likely seen the post about our upcoming move to Tai Po and we’re really excited about that. We love the flat and we love the village. We’re going to miss Sai Kung, perhaps more than we realize at the moment, but we’re looking forward to exploring Tai Po and the surrounding area.

I’ve had one IT consulting job for the past six months. On average I’ve only had around 2 billable hours per week and so I haven’t been making a whole lot of money from this (though I did get a nice business trip to London last month). They’ve now told me that this year they may have the budget as well as the need for me to devote more time to them. Aside from the fact that this would mean more money, it’s a good company filled with nice people and I enjoy the work I’m doing for them.

A couple of weeks ago, someone recommended me for a part time writing job. I’m not really permitted to say what kind of writing it is or for what kind of company. I turned in first drafts on a couple of projects in the last few days and the company director said that he liked them and that I’m “not a bad writer.” The money is very, very good here (plus it got me a business trip to Taipei last week) and so I’m very pleased that they like what I’ve given them so far.

The photography side of things is also picking up with a few paid shoots last month and this month and a few tentative bookings on the horizon. The photography work I’m doing pays very little but it’s probably the work I enjoy doing the most.

I’m enjoying the freelancer/contractor life and enjoying that I’m mostly able to work from home and feeling as if a 16 ton weight has been lifted from my shoulders as a bit more money is coming in. While I don’t want to jinx things, after an absolutely craptastic 2012, 2013 is looking all bright and Little Mary Sunshiney.

That being said, I am still in search of work – either a permanent IT management position or more IT contract work. So please do keep me in mind should you hear about anyone looking to fill an IT management role.

So, happy new year, happy 2013 (a bit late), happy year of the snake (a bit early)!

Taipei Taxi Talk

I don’t get too many taxi drivers in Taipei who speak much English. When I do, the conversations are often memorable. Like last night, when I got in a taxi and asked him to take me to Carnegie’s.

Taxi Driver: Jazz bar? Piano bar?

Me: I don’t think so.

TD: You will sing there?

Me: No, I have a terrible voice.

TD: I don’t think so. I think you have a wonderful voice. Have you ever heard of the singer Neil Diamond?

Me: Yes.

TD: I think your voice sounds just like his.

Me: Um ….

TD: I think when Neil Diamond was young, he was very handsome. Is he a Christian?

Me: I’m not sure. [He was born Jewish.] But most Americans are Christians.

TD: Like Dolly Parton? Johnny Cash!

Me: Yes, they’re Christian.

TD: Whitney Houston!

Me: Yes.

TD: She was very beautiful.

Me: She was very sexy. So sad.

TD: I think you have a very kind heart.

Me: Thank you.

And we arrive at the bar. The meter says NT$105 and he says I should just give him 100.

Me: Are you sure? Thank you!

TD: God bless you.

Me: Thank you.

TD: God bless you.

Me; Take care. Have a good night.

TD: God bless you.

Okay, maybe you had to be there.

New Place Found!

Well, that was quick. We found our new place, put down the deposit and the landlord signed the contract. We’ll do the lease in a few days and move in right before or right after Chinese New Year. It’s in Lam Tsuen, roughly near the famous Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees and also quite close to the Kadoorie Farm and Botanical Gardens.

An agent called us on Sunday, we went over on Monday and pretty much as soon as we saw the place, we knew it was right for us. The village house is practically brand new. (We’ll have the bottom two floors, not the whole house.) They built a huge wooden deck in front of the house, sort of American style, while the side of the house has a huge walled-in patio complete with an outdoor kitchen – sink, cabinets, counter space. It’s a five minute walk out to the main road and about a ten minute mini-bus ride to the MTR. I don’t think we could have found better on our budget.

One thing I’m really looking forward to as a photographer – our new village has this long row of really old Chinese houses. Some of them look abandoned and overgrown, others are still lived in.

Fullscreen capture 182013 123917 AM

Fullscreen capture 182013 123619 AM

These are shots taken from Google Street View. But you can bet I’ll be taking plenty of my own photos once we move there. They’re quite old but I’m guessing it might not be long until someone tears them down and puts more modern houses in their place.

This is roughly the view we’ll have, again taken from Google Street View:

Fullscreen capture 182013 123811 AM

Oh, wait, here’s the view from the balcony, photo taken with an iPad:

As sad as we’ll be to be leaving Sai Kung, we’re really looking forward to getting into this place, getting it fixed up and exploring Tai Po and the surrounding area.