Comments on: I Trust American Express With My Money?

By: Mark Nelson

Mark Nelson — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:44:27 +0000

@quantum:

You see irony, I see nothing more than an object lesson for all of us, and in fact a pretty simple one. Sorry if whatever humility I have doesn’t come across in my writing, but yeah, I make as many mistakes as anyone else. I try to learn from my own, as well as those of others.

For the most part, the articles you find annoying are just fluff that fill in the spaces between the meatier technical articles.

If it helps, at least 50% of my traffic goes to these five technical articles, and I defy you to find any attitude at all in them, much less smugness, self-satisfaction, or arrogance:

http://marknelson.us/1989/10/01/lzw-data-compression/
http://marknelson.us/1996/01/01/priority-queues/
http://marknelson.us/1996/08/01/suffix-trees/
http://marknelson.us/2007/08/01/memoization/
http://marknelson.us/1996/09/01/bwt/

Well maybe not defy, how about if I say I just think they are not particularly judgmental, which is what I’m betting you find objectionable.

One final disclaimer: the people at AMEX didn’t have too much to do with how badly botched this survey was. Their only mistake was not performing more oversight on a project they farmed out.

By: quantum flux

quantum flux — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:21:42 +0000

There is a little irony to that link. I suspect that you view yourself as supremely competent and above something as outrageous as goofing up on testing a system that is customer facing (like those incompetents at AMEX!)

Considering the general smugness of the post (and the whole site really), maybe a link proving that the most self confident tend to be the most incompetent wasnt the best choice.

By: Mark Nelson

Mark Nelson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:33:49 +0000

@Jonas:

I wish there was a happy ending, but really, just more bumbling. Amex customer service sort of distanced themselves from the problem, but did promise to credit my account $5 – never happened though.

The company did fix the survey, and I got to see it working properly, but no $5 from them either.

Personally I think this explains it:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL

By: Jonas

Jonas — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:27:19 +0000

I wouldn’t mind sending $5 to hear the happy ending of this story! Or do I think too highly of Amex?

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:17:24 +0000

As an update, I complained to AmEx customer service and have not heard back from them. 24 hours after the email was first received, the page was still refusing to accept my name and address for the payout. A couple of hours after that an attempt to access the page announced that the survey was closed and I should try again on Friday.

One way or another, American Express will pay me my $5!

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 02:02:19 +0000

Looks like Bangalore (or Moscow, or Beijing) really screwed the pooch on that one.

Oh well, I guess it’s better than speaking with Tarbash, I mean “Ben”, in a Bangalore call center & trying to understand the questions as they’re read to you.