Category Archives: Personal

Piedmont Natural Gas: Customer service WIN

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(This is the follow-up to yesterday’s post, “Dear Piedmont Natural Gas“. Start there for the full story.)

As I write this follow-up post, the gas has been turned back on, my hot water heater is working away, and my wife and I find ourselves on the far side of a bad situation turned good.

We last left off with a phone call from Piedmont corporate and a promise to have our gas turned back on by 5 pm CST. Not only did Piedmont come through, they came through big. The technician they sent was early to the appointment and went above-and-beyond to make sure we were taken care of. While I wish this entire situation never happened, the outcome is the very best of a bad situation, and I want to close this out with a big thanks to Piedmont Natural Gas.

Once Piedmont corporate learned about our problem, they went the extra mile to resolve it to our satisfaction as quickly as possible. I don’t know everything they did, but they went as far as reviewing the recordings of both our Friday and Saturday customer service phone calls, calling both my wife and myself to schedule reconnection, and taking the time to explain exactly what happened, why it happened, and then take responsibility for it. Kudos to Piedmont.

Thanks also to all of you for being so supportive. In the grand scheme of things, this was small potatoes, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting. The retweets, supportive comments, and personal commiserations went a long way towards making this a lot easier.

Dear Piedmont Natural Gas: Updated

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My wife and I recently moved to a suburb of Nashville, TN. Through no fault of our own, we had our natural gas service shut off yesterday and the provider, Piedmont Natural Gas, is refusing to restore our service until Tuesday, December 4. Here is my letter of complaint to Piedmont requesting that they make this right.

My wife and I moved to Hermitage, TN in late October 2012. She called to have natural gas service transferred into our name the week of October 22. Yesterday, November 30, our landlord got in touch with us to let us know the previous tenants had received a bill and we needed to touch base with you and take care of the problem. Which we did.

Here’s the payment confirmation number: 5752712
Here’s the line item from my checking account’s online system:
11/30/2012 Sign Debit* PIEDMONTNG/SPEEDPAY $70.15

But guess what? Our gas got cut off.

And guess what else? You won’t turn it back on until Tuesday, December 4th.

And guess what else? The representative my wife talked to yesterday afternoon told us the gas would *not* be cut off, that there wasn’t an appointment to have it cut off, and that everything was taken care of.

The best part? The gas was *already* cut off. Before we called. Before we were able to make payment. Through no fault of our own.

This is absolutely, completely and totally, 100% the fault of your company and your representatives at Piedmont Natural Gas.

It is wholly unacceptable that, after explaining our situation to your representative on the telephone this morning, you refuse to turn our gas back on.

You and I both know you have the ability to send a truck out and have our gas turned back on. You and I both know that you’ve done it for other customers in the past, and that you’ll do it for other customers in the future. I respectfully request that you do it for my wife and I now.

This one is on you. We did our part. Now do yours and make this right today.

Best,

Jeremy Kendall

Piedmont, the ball is in your court.

(I informed Piedmont that I would be making this complaint public here on my blog, and will update this post with both sides of the story as the situation unfolds.)

Update: Poor customer service with a positive result

Yesterday

By yesterday at 10 am CST, I had spoken to Piedmont customer service, sent them an email, written this blog post, and pinged them on both their Twitter account and their Facebook page. I kept an eye on my phone, email, and social networks all day, finally giving up around 5 pm. Finally, at 6:41 pm CST, almost three hours *after* Piedmont customer service closed for the weekend, I received this reply via Twitter:

Jeremy: I’ve made Customer Service aware of your blog so they can look into the situation. I’ll let you know what I hear. ^JW

Piedmont had six hours to touch base with us and resolve the problem. I pinged them in every possible way, making what I felt was a reasonable request for restoration of services. Rather than jumping on the problem and restoring our service, we were contacted after hours and told that customer service has been “made aware”. Thanks, but I’d already covered that one, and they won’t be open until Monday morning anyhow. Not impressed.

This morning

I didn’t sleep well last night, so I went down for a quick nap this morning. When I woke up, I had a missed call and voicemail from Charlotte, NC. The message was from Piedmont Natural Gas asking for a return call. As it turns out, they called Megan as well. After a day-and-a-half without service, Piedmont has promised to roll a truck and have our service turned back on.

I appreciate the extra effort they’ve taken to reach out to us on a Sunday, but I don’t appreciate having to fight for it. We’ll see if we get a truck this evening or not. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update: Victory!

Our gas is back on and we’re happy with how this thing turned out. Please see my follow-up post, “Piedmont Natural Gas: Customer service WIN“, for the details.

Goofing off with unit tests

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[UPDATE: The library and test have been refactored. See the commit for full details.]

Sometime last year I saw a unit test for the song “Ice Cream Paint Job“.  I thought it was hilarious, and I hate I’ve never been able to find it again.  I liked it so much, in fact, I decided to write my own musical unit integration test.  Behold the MelissaTest, a short, simple test covering the main premise of “Melissa“. Bonus points for me: the test passes.  Enjoy.

<?php
 
namespace MercyfulFate\Album\Melissa\Track;
 
use MercyfulFate\KingDiamond;
use MercyfulFate\Priest;
use MercyfulFate\Witch\Melissa as WitchMelissa;
use MercyfulFate\Album\Melissa\Track\Melissa as TrackMelissa;
 
class MelissaTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
 
    /**
     * @var MercyfulFate\KingDiamond
     */
    protected $king;
 
    /**
     * @var MercyfulFate\Priest
     */
    protected $priest;
 
    /**
     * @var MercyfulFate\Witch\Melissa
     */
    protected $witch;
 
    /**
     * @var MercyfulFate\Album\Melissa\Track\Melissa
     */
    protected $trackMelissa;
 
    protected function setUp()
    {
        $this->king = new KingDiamond();
        $this->priest = new Priest();
        $this->priest->attach($this->king);
        $this->witch = new WitchMelissa();
        $this->trackMelissa = new TrackMelissa($this->king, $this->witch, $this->priest);
    }
 
    protected function tearDown()
    {
        $this->trackMelissa = null;
    }
 
    public function testBurnMelissa()
    {
        $this->assertFalse($this->witch->isBurned());
        $this->assertFalse($this->king->swearsRevenge());
 
        $this->trackMelissa->priestBurnsWitch();
 
        $this->assertTrue($this->witch->isBurned());
        $this->assertTrue($this->king->swearsRevenge());
    }
 
}

My Top 5 Favorite Geek T-Shirts (That I Own)

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I’m a sucker for t-shirts, have been all my life. My high school sweetheart gave me grief for always wearing t-shirt and jeans. During my college years, credit card companies found me an easy mark by offering free t-shirts in exchange for my John Hancock. When I go out with Charly I still use the old, tired, “I’ll put on my dress t-shirt” joke.

If I had the means, I would be the Imelda Marcos of bad-ass t-shirts. Since I’m not (yet) independently wealthy, I need to be selective, feeding my addiction with nothing but primo stuff. Selecting from the geek category, in no particular order, here are my top 5 favorite geek t-shirts of all time (that I own).

I’m Well Built

Atlassian - $19.95

Atlassian makes a lot of really sweet software, stuff I use on a daily basis, both at the house and at the day job.  While I’ve never actually used Bamboo (that’s next on the project list), I dig the shirt for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m a fan of all the Atlassian products that I’ve used so far, and I’ve always had good experiences dealing with Atlassian support.  Second, while you can’t tell from the lame graphic, this is actually a really good looking shirt.  Third, not being particularly well built, I love wearing a shirt that says I am.  It reminds me of my old “Who needs hair with a body like this?” shirt I wore when I was 220lbs of out of shape slob.  Oh sweet, sweet juxtaposition.

Get yours here.

Mine

ThinkGeek - $17.99

What can I say about this one? It was love at first sight.  The only way I could love it more is if it were an official Office Space Hawaiian shirt, which does not exist and would be another post anyhow.  The thing I can’t understand is how few people recognize the red Swingline stapler for what it is.  Last time I was traveling, the only guy that got the joke was a ticketing agent at the airport.   We both had a good laugh.  Everyone else just looked at us funny.

Get yours here.

fork you

RubyRags - $18

I haven’t ever used Git, I’m not a fan of their marketing strategies (svn sucks! Whaa?), I’m irrationally prejudiced against Rails, but I still love this t-shirt.  Grey is a splash of color in my mostly black wardrobe, it features cool typography, short, punchy copy, and it’s got a spot on the back intended for a little DIY customization, Sharpie style.  Mine says “sucks.”  Take that, Git. Har, har, har. Also, this is the shirt you want if you’re just angsty enough to want the world to fork off every once in a while, but not angsty enough to get yourself an FTW face tattoo (and I don’t mean “for the win”).

Get yours here.

SQL query

ThinkGeek - $17.99

I picked this one up when I was working as a technical support rep, taking calls for 8 to 10 hours a day and hating my life.  While the tech support career path doesn’t generally leave one with a working knowledge of SQL, I was doing everything I could to teach myself to program so that I would never have to take another support call as long as I lived.  While that hasn’t quite worked out (I don’t take calls directly, but I live in JIRA), this shirt has remained hilarious and relevant from the first time I put it on.  Making jokes in code is like learning to swear in a foreign language, you can express your frustration about those around you without having to worry about being understood and a) getting punched in the jeans, b) getting fired, or c) getting punched in the jeans and then getting fired.  WARNING: when you start making jokes in code, you’ve crossed the line from earth person to geek.  There is no going back.

Get yours here.

Real Programmers Wear Corpsepaint

Spaz - $17

I grew up as a metal baby in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’ve never lost my taste for the hard stuff.  The combination of two of my great loves, heavy metal and computer programming, in one of my favorite mediums, the t-shirt, makes this an instant favorite. 

Fun fact: Although not widely known, corpse paint has been worn by computer programmers as early as the late 1960s.  It’s rumored that Kim Petersen, better known as King Diamond, was first exposed to corpse paint by some LISP developers who were attending a mathematics conference in Denmark in the early 1970s.

Pro-tip: While real programmers wear do wear corpsepaint, real programmers do not wear nail studded gauntlets.  They’re a major contributing factor in repetitive stress injuries.

Get yours here.

Help Fight Cancer by Supporting Linda Rambin’s Art

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A Louisiana artist, Linda Rambin has been painting for approximately six years. Unfortunately, her painting career has been postponed indefinitely due to the extremely aggressive form of brain cancer she is currently fighting, glioblastoma multiforme. Diagnosed in early October 2008, Linda has had brain surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and she is currently participating in a clinical trial that is causing her a great deal of fatigue and a host of other side effects.

The cost of Linda’s treatment and care are exorbitant. Just one of the medications for the clinical trial costs $4,500 per month, and that’s the co-pay! You can help support Linda and the Rambin family by spreading the word about Paintings by Linda, a collection of Linda’s original paintings on Etsy.com. The more people that visit Paintings by Linda, the more of her paintings will sell, helping the family to defray the cost of her treatment. (If you’re sharing about Linda’s store on Twitter, please use the hashtag #charlysmom. Linda’s daughter Charly has worked tirelessly on both Linda’s Etsy store and Linda’s Caring Bridge website.)

If you are interested in learning more about her story, please visit Linda’s Caring Bridge website. There you will find a more detailed account of her struggle, a daily blog, a guestbook for comments, and a photos page.

Please keep Linda in your thoughts as you enjoy her unique and vivid paintings. They have brought her much joy, and we hope they will do the same for you.

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade
lindarambin.etsy.com

My Contribution to the History Meme

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From my work machine:

jkendall@ventura:~$ uname -a
Linux ventura 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
jkendall@ventura:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
83 exit
70 clear
58 cd
47 ls
44 ps
35 svn
32 tail
32 jgrep
23 kill
11 sshdev

jgrep is a bash alias for 'grep --color -r -n --exclude=\*.svn\*', while sshdev is a bash alias that gets me to the dev box at work without having to type too much.

See more examples here, here, here, and here.

400mToGo Launches!

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I’m proud to announce the launch of 400mToGo, a blog about all things Nike+, including tips, news, tutorials, reviews, and the personal experiences of three “very amateur but passionate runners.”

The brainchild of Scott Wills, the 400mToGo team includes Scott, Cory Wiles, and myself. We love to run, we’re passionate about the Nike+ sport kit, and we decided that we wanted to give back to and participate in the growing Nike+ community in a more meaningful way.

From the 400mToGo About page:

400mToGo is a Web site for Nike+® runners of all abilities. If, like us, you are obsessed with running data and refuse to go running unless you have your Apple® iPod® Nano and your Nike+ chip securely attached, then this is the Web site for you.

Current stories include a review of the Couch to 5k running plan, a piece about Scott’s excellent experiences with Nike’s customer support, and a bit of good advice for every runner by Cory.

Are you ready to get running? Visit 400mToGo today.

Welcome to jeremykendall.net

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Thanks for visiting the personal site of Jeremy Kendall, web developer and entrepreneur. I hate sites that are “Under Construction” and have always felt that you should build content and flesh out your project in a development environment before going live. Yeah, well, I guess this makes me both the cobbler and the cobbler’s shoeless kid.

I’m a PHP / MySQL developer primarily. I’m working on my Java chops as we speak. My day job is a junior development position, I’m working on building a freelance development business into a second, viable stream of income, and I’m an Original Limu distributor as well. Find out more about Original Limu here.

2008 got here well before I was ready for it, and the new year finds me as busy as I’ve ever been with multiple new projects. What you’re seeing is a new CMS running on the home page, and me with no time to dig in and learn it. This is going to be a fun project, but as it’s a personal project, it will be catch as catch can until I get a few hours to spend reading some Drupal for n00bs stuff.

In the meantime I have some exciting Zend Framework projects in the works with a couple more on the way. I’m working on my first Java project at the day job, which is exciting but leaves my brain a pile of mush by the end of the work day. As soon as I deliver those projects there will be more time for my personal projects. I think this is what they call “job security.”