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Stupid things I've figured out so that you don't have to.


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Friday, September 16, 2005

Home again, home again... and an amazing customer service story

Note: Back in Portland, now, and still way behind on writing up my trip. I'm working on it, and hopefully in the coming days will have more up here. In the meantime, I just got a photo printer, and decided to take a break from writing about India to write about my experience with the new gadget. All sorts of notable and interesting info awaits.




An excellent customer service story

I just bought a Canon Pixma iP4200 photo printer, and thus far it is an excellent piece of equipment. I paid around $130 for it, and am getting incredibly good photo prints out of it— especially when you consider the price. I bought it mainly because I wanted a way to quickly and easily print off 4x6 prints of my pictures. For anything larger, I think I still prefer Costco (optical prints, as opposed to ink-jet; calibration becomes Somebody Else's Problem), but it's nice to be able to get snapshots right at home.
The absolute best part thus far has been the out-of-box experience. This has been the first printer I've dealt with that was absolutely pain-free to get set up. It came with full ink cartridges (not half-empty "trial" ones), five sheets of photo paper, a driver cd, an excellent paper manual (a rarity in this day and age), and a four-color setup guide. This guide covered installation of the print head and ink cartridges, then split in to the "Windows Driver Installation" and the "Macintosh Driver Installation". Amazing- a consumer product that actually provides good Macintosh documentation!
The whole process was almost comically easy, and was full of very nice small touches. For example, each of the five ink cartridges has an led light to indicate that the cartridge is installed completely. As you click the cartridge into place, the light illuminates. When a cartridge is low on ink, its light blinks. Now, this sort of feature couldn't have added more than a couple of cents to the unit's manufacturing cost (LEDs are insanely cheap, and all of the circuitry to monitor ink levels was already in place), but it has an enormous impact on how pleasant the device is to set up.
Another small touch- the online documentation for most peripherals ends up sitting in a folder as a collection of HTML documents. It's usually up to the user to find it, and it's easy to forget that they're there. This device's online documentation integrated itself with OSX's "Help Viewer" application, and now there are three more options in the menu alongside "Safari Help" and "iPhoto Help". One for the electronic version of the printer's manual, one for the print driver itself, and one for Canon's "EasyPrint" digital imaging software. It's clear that the Mac version of the software was not simply an afterthought.
Once I got the thing installed and working, I had a question about the ICC color profiles that the driver had installed in my system (in the correct location, I might add). There were eight of them, and while I was 99% sure that they were meant for use with different paper combinations, there was no documentation on which profile was for which paper. After some unsuccessful Googling, I decided to give Canon's tech support phone line a try. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised.
I was initially put off by the overly cheerful tone of the automated menu, but once I got over the voice and started paying attention to the words, I found that whoever did the scripting knew what they were doing. There were never more than three or four options to choose from, the options were completely unambiguous, and each successive menu gave an indication of how many more menus were left (i.e., "Just two more questions for you", and so on). The automated part was all over after about four short menus, and when I finally reached a support person, I found him to be both knowledgeable and friendly.
He actually knew what color profiles were, and, best of all, once he realized that I was using a Mac, he came right out and said that since he wasn't sure if the Mac driver installed the same profiles as the Windows driver, and that he didn't know much about Macs, but that he would transfer me to one of the Mac specialists. The Mac guy was able to answer my question in about ten seconds, and that was that. He was also able to clear up some ColorSync related questions I'd had, which was huge- it meant that Canon's CSR folk are not simply reading off of a script, but actually know something about digital imaging and printing. Furthermore, they seem to have pretty low turnover- both of the people I talked to were familiar with particulars of printer models from more than a year ago, which implies to me that they were around then. Having worked in a call center environment for a couple of years, I can really appreciate both a) how difficult it is to retain agents for any length of time; and b) how critical that kind of retention is to providing quality customer service. Canon's call center seems to have its act together in a big way, and it shows.
Honestly, this was possibly the most enjoyable customer service experience that I've had in years. I'd fully expected to be forced to wade through menu after menu of lousy, ambiguous options only to be faced with an unhelpful CSR ("Ummm... color profiles? What're those? Are you sure you've got the USB cable plugged in to the right port? What version of Windows are you running? You're not running Windows? MacOS X? I'm sorry, sir, that's not on my list... are you sure you don't mean XP Pro?"). Instead, I got my question answered and learned a few interesting bits of Canon printer errata that I wouldn't have otherwise learned.
And now, in the spirit of "Stupid things I've figured out so that you don't have to", here's an explanation of which ICC profiles to use for which papers. The names might be specific to the iP4200, but the general naming schema should map to other Canon PIXMA printers. The iP4200 driver initially installs eight profiles:

  • BJ Color Printer Profile 2000

  • Canon iP4200 MP2

  • Canon iP4200 PR1

  • Canon iP4200 PR2

  • Canon iP4200 PR3

  • Canon iP4200 SP2

  • Canon iP4200 SP4



The first one, the "BJ Coolor Printer Profile 2000" is essentially a calibrated sRGB. For the others, the numerical suffix relates to the print quality desired. Lower numbers are higher quality. The two-letter code relates to the kind of paper. MP is for the "Matte Photo" papers, PR is for the "Photo Paper Pro" line, and SP is for the "Photo Paper Plus" line of papers.
One thing to note: apparently, the printer driver is responsible for doing the color profile conversion. So, if your photo is in the AdobeRGB color space, you don't need to manually convert it to one of these profiles in Photoshop. The printer driver should do it automatically depending on the kind of paper and quality level you select in the "Print" dialog box. If for any reason you want to do it manually, the way to do this is to set "Color Correction" from "BJ Standard" to "ColorSync" in the "Color Options" screen of the "Print" dialog box. This will cause the driver to not apply any color correction, and just take what it's given.
From what my initial test prints show, the driver seems to do a pretty decent job of profile conversion. The pictures that come out of the printer are pretty close to what was on the screen- certainly well past the "good enough" point, and probably on towards "damn good". That said, I've only done 4x6 pictures thus far, and none of the pictures have been terribly challenging from a color standpoint. I'm sure if I was printing out a larger or more important photo, I'd be spending more time obsessing over the color output. As it is, I'm quite happy with the output I'm getting from this device.
Kudos to Canon for an excellent and affordable product, for not skimping on the Mac support, and for providing superb customer service. I still prefer Nikon's cameras, but your printer has won itself a nice cozy place on my desk. Keep it up!

Friday, September 09, 2005

Corrections and notes on departure

9/10/2005, 2:23 am Kolkata time

Note: if this post comes off sounding a bit disjointed, it's because I'm rather tired. I'm trying to stay awake as long as I can as an experiment in jet-lag avoidance. I figure if I can stay awake until my plane takes off from Singapore, that'll be around early evening Portland time, and my day/night schedule should start to pop back into place. I'm not sure if this strategy will work or not, but I figure it's worth a try.

The seat-back display says that we just passed over the Andaman Sea, and are about a thousand kilometers away from Singapore. Holy cow, -54 degrees celsius outside. That's quite cold. My return flight takes me from Kolkata to Singapore, then to Tokyo, then to Los Angeles, then to Portland. I'm just over 26 hours away from being back in Portland. On the one hand, it's amazing to me that it's possible today to travel from India to Portland in such a short period of time; after all, it wasn't that many years ago that I would have had to spend several weeks at sea to traverse that distance. On the other hand, it astounds me that it is possible to spend that long traveling. Our planet is absolutely enormous.
Leaving Kolkata was surprisingly uneventful. Going through the airport, I was pleasantly surprised at how efficient and friendly the customs and security personnel were. They searched one of my carry-on bags, but were incredibly nice about it. Changing the majority of my rupees back into dollars was an adventure— I had no idea that you had to fill out that much paperwork. The guy behind the counter spent a good ten minutes keying things into various data-entry screens on his computer, and I filled out two different forms and had to present my boarding pass and passport. I'm not sure if this was something specific to India, or whether it's just how currency conversion usually works.
While waiting in line to change currency, and then again in the departure lounge, I noticed several different cats. Yes, cats, apparently strays. Running around the airport. Of course, none of the airport staff seemed to notice them. Contrast this to the US— if a stray cat wandered past security in PDX, they'd probably have to shut the whole airport down, compensate hundreds of people for lost time and missed flights, hire grief counselors to deal with the traumatized persons, and face lawsuits from PETA and the ACLU.
Getting on the plane itself was interesting, as well. There was no jetway, so we all got to walk right out on the tarmac and climb a somewhat treacherous staircase to board the plane. I haven't gotten to do this since I was in Israel, and I'd forgotten just how freaking huge a commercial airliner is. This particular one is a 777-200, and it's absolutely enormous. The engines alone are bigger than many houses that I've seen.
I have extremely mixed feelings about leaving Kolkata. On the one hand, I'm looking forward to going home as it's been a few months since I spent more than four or five days in my house and with my friends. On the other hand, I've really grown to love Kolkata and the people who live here. I've made a lot of good friends, and have gotten a slight taste of the vast cultural buffet that is India— just enough to know what I'm missing by only having seen one city.
I have to say, the people I've met in West Bengal have taught me more about hospitality than I knew there was to learn. We Americans know nothing about hospitality when compared with Bengalis. That's not to say that Americans are bad hosts, but rather that Bengalis are so incredibly hospitable that it puts us to shame. Everybody at Tathya— really, everybody we met, anywhere— went out of their way to make sure we felt welcome and at home, and as a result the only times I really felt out of place or homesick were in the hotel.
Ah, right, the title promised corrections. Correction one: most of the television I blogged about a few weeks ago (Kuan Banega 2 Crorepati, the motorscooter ad, etc.) was Hindi, not Bengali. Correction two: Indra is not the owner of Tathya, he is the managing director and one of the principal stockholders. And correction three: contrary to my initial impressions, our driver was actually quite well paid. Apparently, driving is a very lucrative profession here, and one can expect to earn a similar salary to that earned by a mid-level software developer.
Ashis called me on my offer of a bet, and when we looked into the numbers, we found that Clint had been making almost exactly as much as I'd spent on sandwich and a beer. We called it a draw, and I got to keep my battery.
Correction four is not really a correction, but more of an addendum. After reading my post on relative income levels, several people (Ashis, Somnath, Indra, to name a few) made it a point to run some numbers with me about relative costs of living. It turns out that, proportionately, the cost of living is very similar here to Portland. That is to say, Ashis and I spend roughly similar percentages of our monthly incomes on similar things. A certain percentage towards housing, a certain percentage towards food, etc. My transportation costs were much higher than his, since I drive a car and he takes buses and bicycle rickshaws. On the other hand, his food expenses were a bit more than mine, proportionately. All in all, nothing was terribly out of whack.
So, my initial impressions may have been correct if one were to simply compare empirical quantities of money, but were rather off the mark if one corrects for the differential purchasing power.
Well, I think that's about it for this post. I'm still working on writing up everything that happened since being sick- I have an outline taking up a couple of hundred lines in my text editor, and have a nice long flight ahead of me on which to write. I figure I'll post this once I get to Singapore and have internet access, and then will continue writing up everything else.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Ye Olde Massive Update, part one

9:30 Kolkata time, 9/05/2005

For a variety of reasons, I haven't been able to write out any full updates lately. In my text editor, I have the first line of a post called "Intestine Wars, Episode 5: The Intestines Strike Back" from about ten days ago. I wrote that title during a several-day-long period of being under the influence of all sorts of interesting infections and medications, and the whole time period is kind of hazy. I do remember, however, writing that title during a rare period of lucidity... and then, before I could write any sentences, being interrupted by the immediate and (at that point) all-too-familiar necessity of making a dash for the bathroom.
The ensuing half-hour completely wiped my mind of the focus and ability to do anything more complex than, say, crawling into bed and whimpering. Completing (beginning, actually) my post was as out of the question as walking to Nepal would have been. The week since then has been one of the most action-packed of my entire life, and I simply have not had time to write. I have, however, been maintaining an outline of what we did, and now that my co-workers have gone back to the US, I find myself with gobs of spare time in the evenings. So, now's the time to flesh out my outline and bring everybody up to date.
As I've said, my writing derailed when I got sick, so that's where we'll begin. Just a warning— I'll try not to get too... er... clinical. The details of being sick in India are often not very pleasant. That being said, there may be some parts of this section of the narrative that you'd probably be better of skipping. Just a heads-up.
So, for the first few days after arriving in India, I felt fine. I ate whatever was put in front of me, and, though I only drank bottled water, I accepted tea and coffee without reservation. I was trying very hard to be polite and adventurous, and as a result ate any number of interesting dishes. Not surprisingly, after a few days of this I began to notice some stomach troubles. I didn't think anything of it, though— after all, I'd been eating all sorts of crazy things, and not getting enough sleep besides. Also, Bengali food is incredibly heavily spiced1. It did not surprise me that I was having some digestive troubles. Surely, after a few days, my system would adjust.
After a few days, however, my system had not adjusted. In fact, things in the digestion department were worse than they had been initially. Also, I was beginning to feel rather weak and dizzy much of the time. By a couple of Thursdays ago (the 25th of August), I was feeling downright lousy. Friday rolled around with a new symptom— head-rushes. You know how when you stand up too fast, the blood rushes out of your head and you get kind of dizzy for a few seconds? This was happening to me every time I stood up, no matter how slowly. I'd stand up, grab hold of something, wait a second, and then go on my way. Also, my stomach was making sounds like a boiling pot. I didn't know it was possible for one's stomach to make some of the sounds mine was making. It was like some sort of gastro-intestinal symphony, complete with four-part harmony.
After I'd been at work for a few hours, I noticed that lots of people were telling me that I wasn't looking too good. I'd already been suspecting that whatever was going on with me wasn't just indigestion, and after five or six people asked if I needed to see a doctor, I decided that it was probably time to call it a day and go back to the hotel. I went over to find Kevin (my boss) to let him know that I was thinking of heading back to the hotel. He took one look at me, and before I'd even really opened my mouth, he was asking if I needed to go back to the hotel.
They called the car for me, which was good, because my brain was steadily descending into a kind of stupor in which I would have been unable to operate a telephone. Our driver had asked that morning if he could take the afternoon off and come find us in the evening, since India's cricket team was playing Australia's that day. Since we usually don't leave the office until at least eight or nine o'clock, we'd told him to go on ahead and watch the match at home. Since he was out of the picture that afternoon, one of the company's "logistics guys" drove me back.
These are a couple of guys that the company employs as general-purpose gofers. Need some random thing from a store down the street? Send one of the logistics guys. Is the toilet not working? One of the logistics guys will take care of it. Does the silly foreigner need to be medevaced back to his hotel? These guys will be happy to drive him. They're both very nice guys, and seem to be able to handle just about any random-ass assignment that the company can come up with.
In this case, we piled (well, the logistics guys "piled"— I sort of "stumbled") into one of the company's cars and headed back towards the hotel. Along the way, we stopped by a pharmacy and one of the logistics guys ran in to get me some rehydration powder ("Based on W.H.O. Formula!", boasts the package). This is sort of like Gatorade— lots of electrolytes— without the flavor. You mix it in with a liter of water, and it ends up tasting like very foul, slightly salty water. If, however, you have certain types of digestive troubles, dehydration is a major concern.
Once back at the hotel, I climbed into bed and slept. And slept. And slept. Next thing I knew, it was late in the evening and my co-workers were coming back from the office. When I woke up, I was still feeling lousy, but was somewhat better than I had been. As such, I elected not to see a doctor. It seemed like sleep had helped out a bit, and I felt like I could beat whatever was going on in my stomach all by myself. I didn't feel like eating anything that night, and the thought of food made my stomach do some very unpleasant things. As such, I held off on dinner, and just had part of a granola bar.
The next day, we were scheduled to do some sight-seeing around Kolkata. I had been looking forward to this all week— after all, the official primary purpose of my trip was for work... but my real purpose had very little to do with work, and everything to do with seeing interesting things and places. I woke up Saturday morning still feeling lousy, but also a little better than I had been. I took this to be a good sign, and decided that I'd be damned if a little sickness was going to keep me from seeing Kolkata. I resolved to fight through it, and to go out with Dan and Kevin that day.
This resolve lasted about fifteen minutes. We were maybe a quarter of a mile from the hotel when I had to ask the driver to pull over. I jumped out of the car, staggered around a little bit, crouched over, and started puking my guts out right there on the side of the road. I hadn't eaten much, so there wasn't much to vomit. As a result, all sorts of interestingly-colored (and flavored) digestive fluids came out as a result. Things came out of me that I hadn't even known that I had. That Saturday morning, myself and several thousand of my newest and closest friends got a rather vivid education as to the contents of my digestive tract. Did you know that you've got some crazy neon-green colored stuff somewhere in your abdomen? Neither did I, until the other day.
Eventually, after about three hundred years, I managed to get things back under control. Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration. I did, however, manage to go more than about thirty seconds without semi-dry-heaving. We took advantage of this lull and got back to the hotel in record time. While I made my way upstairs to my room, somebody went to the front desk and asked them to send the hotel's doctor. After a few minutes, a very nice motherly doctor appeared. She shooed everybody else out of the room, poked and prodded at me, asked a few questions about my symptoms, and then pronounced that I had some sort of digestive tract infection. "Why", she wanted to know, "had I not come to her earlier?" Good question.
She prescribed some atomic-strength antibiotics, as well as a few other medications to help calm down my stomach. I was to take one of the Domperidone tablets, wait about a half-hour, and then try and eat some soup or something else very light and neutral. Then, I was to take one of the antibiotics. I should start feeling better, she said, within a few hours.
Dan and Kevin went off to find a pharmacy to fill the doctor's prescription, and I went back to sleep. They came back twenty minutes later with an interesting discovery: by American standards, drugs are dirt-cheap here. A full course of a Cipro-centric antibiotic cocktail, a set of Domperidone tablets, and a few other miscellaneous drugs ran us about five dollars. Kaiser's co-pay for a minimal emergency dose (four tablets, or two days worth) of Cipro was something like $30, and according to my receipt it would have run me around $75 without my prescription drug benefits. I can think of a few reasons why it might be cheaper here (no pesky FDA, far less liability to cover, etc.) but none of them hold enough water to account for that kindof cost differential. It just seems to me that US drug companies are gouging the living daylights out of us, relative to their Indian counterparts.
Once I was squared away with the drugs, Dan and Kevin went off to resume our aborted sightseeing trip. I ordered up some vegetable soup, took a Domperidone, and tried to stay awake until the soup showed up. When it arrived, I was only able to eat a little bit of it. I wasn't really hungry, even though I hadn't eaten much in the previous 36 hours, and the sight/smell of food wasn't being very pleasant. I got down as much as I could, took a Cipro, and went to bed.
I woke up a few hours later, and, amazingly, felt far better than I had when I had gone to sleep. The Cipro kicked in amazingly quickly. A measure of how much better I was feeling: I was able to read again. Those who know me know that, for me, reading is handled at roughly the same mental level as breathing. I fully expect that, were I to somehow have my head chopped off, my headless body would continue clutching whatever book I'd been reading at the time and occasionally manage to turn a page. So, the fact that I'd been unable to get my mind to focus enough to read even something brain-candyish should indicate just how sick I was. I'll say it again: I was actually unable to read. Being able to get my brain to concentrate on reading was a massive improvement.
On top of once again being able to read, I was also actually hungry for the first time in a day or two. It was amazing— I was able to walk around without getting dizzy, I could read, and food seemed like a good idea. I still wasn't really feeling anything remotely approaching "good", but I was feeling light-years better than I had been. When Dan and Kevin returned from what had apparently been a harrowing day2, they couldn't stop saying how much better I was looking. I'd had no idea that antibiotics could kick in so quickly. Even correcting for any placebo effect that may have been going on, it was amazing.
It was a good three days before I was really feeling like my usual self, and a few days past that before I felt like eating much in the way of spicy foods. The drugs got me up and functional, though, and for that I'm eternally grateful. There are very few things less pleasant than being sick in a foreign country. It's happened to me twice now— once in Israel, and now once here in India. Both times have been very frightening experiences, and I'm quite happy to be done with illness for now.
A few days later, both Dan and Kevin started feeling somewhat unwell. As far as I know, Kevin's unrest didn't turn into anything, but Dan's turned into a full-blown intestinal infection. Apparently, it is sort of expected that first-time visitors will get sick. One of the people we've met here, a consultant specializing in auditing outsourced development projects, told us that he's gotten sick every single time he's come to India. I can certainly see why— the food here is vastly different than the food in the US, in practically every way imaginable. The water is not safe to drink, and it's very easy to accidentally ingest some. Public sanitation is sometimes not as top-notch as one might hope (it's not at all unusual to see people urinating into the gutters on the side of the street). On top of everything else, there are deadly mosquito-borne diseases everywhere you look (the city is currently in the midst of Dengue Fever epidemic). Basically, if you're not adjusted to it, there are more ways to get sick here than there are ways to get drunk in Boston on St. Patrick's Day. I'm glad that I've had my turn and am now starting to get adjusted properly.


1: In fact, tasting how spicy (and heavily spiced, and salty) the food is here has filled in a few puzzle pieces for me. About a year and a half ago, a new Indian restaurant opened up near my old house off of Walker. We tried it out, and more or less unanimously decided that it was too salty, and too heavily spiced, for our taste. Having been here, I can now say that the problem, so to speak, was not with the restaurant. It was quite faithfully serving up some very authentic food. Our palates were where the problem lay.

2: This was the last day that Clint drove for us. Apparently, he got quite lost at several points, and was driving crazily enough that the local co-worker who had elected to come and show us around Kolkata became nervous. At one point, according to Kevin, he took a wrong turn and got them stuck in a traffic jam on some sketchy bridge for almost an hour. This bridge, allegedly, had potholes so extensive that you could basically see the water in the below. According to Dan and Kevin, the Toyota SUV bottomed out a number of times dealing with the potholes. Note that the potholes and what-not cannot really be blamed on Clint; their concern was with his erratic driving and generally sketchy demeanor.
At the time, I was forced to defer to them on this matter. I'd picked up some strange vibes off of Clint, but nothing really bad enough to warrant a change of drivers. Likewise, his driving was always kind of erratic, but so was everybody else's in Kolkata. Also, when I had been sick on the side of the road, he'd been extremely kind to me— making sure I had water, giving me well-intentioned medical advice, etc.
The matter was ultimately not decided by us. The guy from Tathya who'd accompanied Dan and Kevin that day had been so unnerved by what he'd seen that he took the necessary steps to replace Clint. The next day, our driver was Sidni, Clint's brother. The difference between the two was night and day. Where Clint's driving was at times very aggressive, and his horn was always in action, Sidni seems to be in far more control of the car and its place in the road. He hardly ever honks, and when he does it's usually more of a "Hey, I'm in your blind spot" or "Hey, you just cut me off" than a "Hey, coming through here, out of the way".
Also, Sidni is much more knowledgable about Kolkata geography that Clint was. I feel kind of bad about this turn of events, as Sidni doesn't usually drive these days— he runs the driving company, and numerous other business ventures besides, but he does not typically drive. He was a very good sport, though, especially given the fact that the change in drivers meant that his entire schedule for the ensuing week had to radically change.
For our part, we tried to be flexible and made sure that he knew that he could take off during the day and attend to other business matters, as long as he was back at the office around eight or so to pick us up.

Ack!

OK, due to illness and general craziness, I haven't been able to post in a week or so. I'm trying to get caught up, but be prepared for datestamps on posts that don't match up with when blogger says things were posted.