My Various Random Ramblings

So I’m very happy for once I get to write a positive blog post about GT Dining.

Our new full service Chick-Fil-A opened this month, and they finally got customer service right. The workers take initiative, if you are standing around for more than a minute waiting on your number to be called, the cashiers will ask what you had and personally assemble it.
In addition, when I went to get a refill on my Diet Coke once, they noticed they were almost out of syrup and the brix was off. So instead of just handing me my drink, they went back and changed the syrup out instead of standing around. They apologized for the slowness. That is good, regular, customer service. What makes this excellent customer service is they silently gave me a larger drink back instead of the same size. This is a basically free gesture on their part but is noticed by the customer and is appreciated.

I don’t know what GT Dining did, but all the staff at the new chick-fil-a consists of their friendliest best staff from around campus.

As a whole, I have noticed that auxiliary services tends to forget that even though we are in a contract, we are still customers. This summer, whenever there is a conference services guest in NAAE, we constantly have noise problems. I understand that the money raised theoretically helps decrease the money we pay elsewhere, but there is no reason that the guests have to be so disruptive.
The main problems we have with these guests is that they make noise at all hours in the NA courtyard, and also constantly cause the door buzzer to go off not just briefly, but for long periods of time.

The solution to this problem is twofold:

1. First notify summer residents before we are locked into contract what groups will be staying in the areas right next to us when, and any planned disruptions (such as closing the NA gym or Woodruff) so that we are fully informed of what will be going on.
2. In addition to a simple notification of how much the facilities around us will be used, make sure a 24/7 contact number to someone who can actually fix things is provided to us. As part of this contact, make sure it is in the guests’ contracts that after being warned once about an issue, that if further complaints are received there are financial repercussions for the group such as fines.

Also remember that a very small percentage of the student population lives here in the summer and bears all of the disadvantages of the decreased costs for everyone else. If us the primary customers find the guests to be disruptive, do what any good business would do and compensate us for it. Doesn’t even have to be cash, we would be happy with coupons for the food court or similar whenever there is a disruptive group. It would also be helpful to be able to see a hard number on what each group saves us each personally in other costs.

…and wants us to get robbed.

Today I got an email from GT Housing saying my apartment door had been recored. We went though this last week too and could not figure out why they changed it, none of us had lost our keys. When I went in today to swap my key out (again) this is what I found out:
One of the previous residents of our apartment had never returned their keys. Check in/out was over a month ago. They finally got around to recoreing a month later. Today I asked why it took so long to recore, their excuse was that there were tons that needed doing. The reason for the second recore a week later was that they had messed up and not tracked it properly so they could not get into our apartment.
First absurdity: They had known for over a month that someone else still had a key and never told us this.
Second absurdity: When it is us who have a safety problem, they take a month to fix it. When they can’t get into our apartment and it is their problem, they fix it within a week.
You would think they would prioritize the recores that were safety issues of no fault of the current residents over people who just lost their key. I kind of wish we had been robbed, as housing would have been probably considered criminally negligent.

Georgia Tech Auxiliary services has taken every opportunity to mess up since I have gotten here. And they all have resulted from the same thing: Not seeing me as a customer who is paying them to do their job.

Here’s some various issues I have had that stem from branches of Aux Services:
(If you want the summarized version of what I think is the systematic failure, skip this list)

• Mail arriving in my post office box up to 2 weeks after being sent first class.
• Magazines being crunched into my post office box.
• Sending the arrival notification for a package that tracking has shown there all day 2 minutes before closing
• Health services appointment scheduling system giving me server errors, going in in person to set one up and being told yes, that error happens for some people and they can’t do anything from there, I must call at 8am the next day. All of this while I am sick.
• Parking wanting to charge me a fee to switch my permit from West campus to East campus even though the change was due to housing changing at the semester. They granted me an exception, but only after I emailed department heads.
• When I go in to switch the permit, they charge my bursar account without even saying there is a fee. I then have to tell them that the fee got waived and they spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to put the money back.
• Parking giving me a ticket for parking in a no parking zone, even though I was in a parking lot by OIT between two lines among other cars. When I go in to contest it, they spout something about it being close to the construction site and if something happened to my car it would be a liability for the construction company. Well, sounds like their problem. They say I should know that that is not a parking spot even though it is not marked as not one. They halve the ticket, a sign appears the next day on the spot marking it no parking. I finally get the ticket completely voided after having to contact upper auxiliary services to get Lance Lundsway of parking to even respond to my calls.
• When moving my parking for the summer, them telling me that both North Ave garages are completely full even though they are obviously not.
• I was given a BuzzCard of plain white stock because their stock of normal ones was having issues with the mag stripes peeling off. When I finally went in to get it swapped out, I lost all BuzzCard access for 36 hours while they sorted out what happened. As part of this event, I could not get into any part of North Ave Apartments where I live, I could not get into any parking deck resulting in me waiting 20 minutes outside my deck for them to solve how to get me in, and losing all BuzzCard access at OIT where I work. Also during this period my Ramblin’ 200 meal plan silently was not charged and normal Buzzfunds were used instead.
• Transportation is utterly useless during the summer. After about 8PM, the single bus driver of each route gets incredibly lazy and will just hang out at North Ave with their bus for 20 minutes. This results in waits of 30+ minutes for a bus around campus, which is a serious safety problem when campus is so empty.
• I’ve had times when the bus driver just blows past all of residential West campus and skips all of the stops there.
• For North Ave summer checkin, I could not get my keys for 5 hours later than when I was supposed to be able to because they could not locate them.
• The Armstrong hall director could not properly fill out a RHA reimbursement which is a very regular task.
• The Armstrong custodians would talk extremely loudly and  unprofessionally on their personal cell phones at all times of the day next to students’ doors and in the bathrooms. They would also sit in our lounge or kitchen and talk on their phone. We have also had up to a 5 day period where out of 5 bathroom stalls only one is fully usable as in not incredibly dirty, not jammed, and stocked with toilet paper.
• General grumpiness/rudeness from most dining employees.

UPDATE:

• Latest stupidity: They are closing the North Ave North parking deck for the weekend for cleaning. I called in to check because there are no signs saying they are still doing it. They say they are, but are not offering the option of letting me into North Ave South to park. This is a major safety issue. It is not safe to walk to the farther parking lots at night around here, I was followed into the garage and had to call the police Sunday night.

I notice one pattern throughout all of these issues: All of them stem from incompetence or unprofessionalism of low level Aux. Services employees. Once a problem is escalated enough, it gets solved. I think management needs to get in the trenches and actually audit and supervise the work of their employees. I should not have to constantly fill out a comment card or complaint form to get an acceptable level of service from what truly is a company. In today’s job market, there is no reason to have employees who hate and are bad at their jobs.

Besides the obvious, what can be done about this? I think first and foremost we as customers need to be able to not be customers if we are not satisfied with the service we get. Find a way to opt out of parking, health and other fees. Don’t require freshmen experience to have certain meal plans, I would have much preferred to drop to a social 75.

Drop the automatic access that these departments get to our bursar accounts, make them charge us for things like a normal company does so that when they screw up we actually have recourse.

Bring in some competition. Restructure dining to not have a monopoly on campus but be in charge of disbursing the money from meal plans. Allow outside vendors to come in to locations on campus and run the place themselves. This would bring competition to the market, making it so lousy locations are not propped up by the better ones. Imagine if Woodruff were run by one company and Brittain by the other and you could choose based on which was better.

I think most importantly, both managers and customers need to be aware that there are systematic problems throughout the department and they both should make it clear that they are willing to communicate with each other and fix things.

Yep, I already have Froyo (Android 2.2) running on my Nexus One. It is very easy to do even if you want to run a rooted non-stock version.

1. Back the phone up. The upgrade process will wipe the entire phone. I use and recommend Titanium Backup. Run a full backup, everything important will be loaded onto your SD Card.
2. If you have not installed Cyanogen or some similar mod in the past, make sure you have the recovery loader installed. You must also unlock the phone and root it if you have not before. How-To
3. Acquire the Froyo firmware and the Froyo Rooter.
4. Put both zip files in the root of your SD card. To do this, you can mount the phone as a USB storage device.
5. Access the recovery loader by powering off the phone, and then powering on while holding the volume down button.
6. Go to the wipe section and use the “Wipe data/factory reset” option.
7. Install from zip first the main firmware and then the rooter.
8. Reboot and you are now running rooted Froyo!