Anyone who was raised a military brat knows all to well the horrors of moving every few years. I just moved into my new home and tallied up my moves. 24…that’s only a few years less that I have been alive! One of the few skills I have, that I hate to put to use. The chaos of moving runs the gamut of tasks. One miss step and you are likely owing someone money or wasting a bunch of time correcting your mistake.
This particular move I was doing quite well. Until the day before I HAD to be out of my apartment that is. The cleaning lady I hired to spick and span the apartment before handing it over and inevitably getting only a partial return of my security deposit, didn’t show! What to do? I had made the appointment over a month ago and didn’t have their company name or phone number handy. I was in an empty apartment for gods sake and hadn’t kept a phone book for years. Luckily I had my iPhone (don’t worry this isn’t an iPhone saved the day entry… even though it did) The yellowpages.com has a cool iPhone web app that allows you to quickly and efficiently search and view your results. After a little scanning I recognized the company and hooked up with them. Now fast forward a few weeks. I’ve started to settle in, in other words my PC, TV, PS3 and Wii are ready to go. Actually the Wii had a problem. The IR bar didn’t reach from under the TV to where my AV rack was. Solution? Very cool. 2 weeks later still no new IR bar.
Now I am finally getting to my point. I tracked my package through Amazon, which is a cool feature unto itself. It was sent to my old address. Doh! No change of address form with UPS. Rather than send an email I decided to give Amazon a call and see what could be done. It’s kinda hard to find the phone number on Amazon’s site. I didn’t give up though and decided to click on the ‘help’ link in the top right hand corner of the site, found th
e search box and put in ‘Phone numbers’. I expected the usual list of useless results with the contact us page in spot 3 or 4. Low and behold I saw the actual contact us page flashed before my eyes when this page showed up. *click* *typed my number* *enter*, bam my phone was ringing and a rep was on the other end.
I’ve seen these click-to-call things before but how many present themselves to you when you search under ‘phone numbers’ on their site. Very cool. Turns out I have to wait for the return process to finish, at which time I get a refund and have to do the order all over again. Who cares? No big deal. A bonus… the rep is going to follow up with me in 3 weeks (the normal time the return process takes, to ensure things went they way they should.) We’ll see if the human element of Amazon.com is a useful as the digital one.
