Every now and then, I remember why I am so fond of tech. This is true story.

Tonight we had a major snowstorm (likewise the rest of Europe, I hear); it started at about 2PM and until now it shows no signs of stopping – the 40cm we have so far on the ground are more than enough to make traffic just go crazy. It took me about 4 hours to come home, and most people I spoke to had a similar misfortune. However, my son was a little worse than that.

His commute takes him through the northeast strip, the busiest area around Milano: the highway being all but blocked, he decides to try his luck and abandons it for a side road. After maybe 6 or 7 kilometers, the slow progress grinds to a halt.

It’s 9PM, outside temperature is -6 °C and dropping, and it’s snowing like hell.

the road where Fede is stuck

How do I help him? Having no physical means of support, I look up the actual road through Google Streetview – inquiring about signposts and advertising banners, I am able to pinpoint the exact location where he is, which looks like this:

Bitch place to get stuck

Now, this side road is a bad one to get stuck: a ditch separates the road from the fields on the right hand side, and a New Jersey barrier on the left makes it impossible to do U-turns; I suggest he talks to other people about the possibility of removing a barrier, but they are way too heavy; I then pan the Streetview image and see this:

Escape route

Being dark and traveling very slowly on unfamiliar roads, he hadn’t even noticed he went up and down a low bridge with ramps on either side. A little exploration on foot reveals that backing up in the incoming ramp is not too difficult, and about one hour later he’s safely home, if very tired.

For all I know, the people without an Internet connection are still freezing their butts off over there…

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year

By hot new client, Zlango. Check ‘em out.

This business of a six-month delivery term for a car drives me nuts. Today I decided I’d write a complaint letter to the good folks at Mercedes-Benz; I therefore went to their site and, with some effort I dug out a form (do people really still use forms? so ’80s !).

The idiot who designed this particular form starts by asking me the registration number of your car – which I don’t have, as I’m here to complain about the fact it’s taking forever to deliver it. I put in the reg no of my old car (yes, the one they took away four months ahead of time)  and proceed to write “my story” (as they call it); obviously the idiot suffers from attention disorder, as he arbitrarily decides I must use at most 480 characters to describe my problem.

After carefully engineering my tale to fit, I try to click “Send”… but the damn friggin’ button is dead!

How do I send this if the "Invio" (Send) button above is dead?

I could write a book about the many things that are wrong on this site (the pointless picture pages, the broken car configurator, the labyrithic navigation), but I think this is the best one. I must admit that this approach is more honest than many others that would accept my form only to route it to the dustbin – Mercedes Benz prefers to talk straight and let me know right away they could not care less about my complaints.

Well done, Mercedes!

(BTW, to the pimplefaced intern monitoring blogs: if you think I was pissed yesterday, you ain’t seen nothing, yet. Today I am so steamin’ pissed, I have asked Finance to cancel the order, penalties nothwithstanding)

I don’t get it.

The papers are full of the crisis battering the car industry, right? Overproduction, layoffs by the thousands, companies being saved by governments when they are on the brink of bankruptcy; in our country the government has spent several hundred of millions of euros to incentivize people to swap their old cars with newer, less polluting models; all of this is irrelevant to me, as like many working in corporates, my car is not really bought by me or my company but rather rented fover a few years with a contract including all the maintenance work. The decision to change it has nothing to do with incentives or even my own desires, but simply with the expiration of a contract.

Going back to the crisis, one would think car manufacturers have parking lots full of unsold cars. Now, can someone explain why the rather boring Mercedes E350 I ordered at the beginning of December will be delivered on June 4th, 2010 ? (and no, I don’t get to keep the old one in the meanwhile, because Mercedes-Benz Rentals went bankrupt – remember the crisis? – and yanked it back).

I admit I write this in hope that Mercedes-Benz has some pimplefaced intern monitoring blogs and wishing to make an impact on their customer service, so I’ll state this again in a search engine friendly way:

• loyal  repeat customer of 20+ years
• ordered an E350 coupe
• estimate delivery term is six months
• royally pissed off, considering switching

Let me steal their picture, maybe they'll get me for copyright infringement

To this last bullet, if the rental company gives me half a chance, I’ll happily swap it for an Audi or Jag or Bimmer of the same category !

Very excited about the upcoming training roadshow I am due to hold in the last week of january. It will be super opportunity to get to even better know all of our digerati around Europe and see some of the great work they’re doing.

Kind of a tough january, with multiple client planning sessions and all, but right time, right momentum, right motivation by all. Sometimes supertankers DO turn quickly…

figures, does it not ?

Italian “tromba” means both “trumpet” and “stairwell” – if you loiter around a tromba, don’t come complaining about the noise…

damn foreigners !

Throwing anything in the toilet seat is “severely” forbidden for foreigners. For italians it’s simply “forbidden” – we all know we’re such a law-abiding bunch, no need to get nasty…

Interesting discussion over on Irving Wladawsky-Berger’ blog about the impact of Social Media for businesses – a particularly interesting discussion on the impact on Big media (without histeria). Worth reading.

And, BTW, I just stole this aphorism derived from this Karl Marx’ quote:

“The old is already pregnant with the new”

Ha ! Money quote:

[...] the class is asking for both statutory and punitive damages for the labels’ behavior (as Geist points out, the same standards being used to go after individual file sharers), meaning that the labels could be asked to pay up to $20,000 per [each of the 300,000 ascertained] infringement.

Talk about taking a dose of their own medicine…

A cool workshop series we’re organising with some other folks as crazy as ourselves !