A few days ago we got our renewal notice for our contents insurance. With the invoice for 2011 in our hands, we realised in panic: “oh-gosh-we’re-soooooo-under-insured”. So we created a list of all items we own, took photos of everything in our house, stored the pictures in the cloud for obvious reasons, and eventually I popped into my preferred ASB branch to deal with the upgrade. I was told to call an 0800-number to speak with an insurance specialist and did so when I came home from working in town today. Without going into any detail here, the phone call was less than useless and I was quite frustrated when the call was over.

Then I remembered the ASB Virtual Branch on Facebook. I went to the page and clicked through to the customer service people available for chat. There’s someone available seven days a week, 8am – 9pm. When I went online, there were two young ladies around for a chat – I chose the one in the top row (see image below). Her name is Elysa, and within a couple of minutes she became my personal customer service heroine of the day. After a few lines of chat it became clear that she wouldn’t be able to help with insurance issues via the Facebook application, so she called me back. Since our insurance is already queued for renewal, she wasn’t able to upgrade it or give me an exact quote, but she did everything possible to help me with what I needed. She was in no position to increase my insurance on a Friday night, but she made a note in our file that I had tried to increase cover, in case anything happened to our house in the next two days. When I hang up, I felt like being in good hands, and that she’ll sort it all out on Monday.

But she didn’t rest. She hunted down a representative of the insurance company ASB are working with, and when she called me again she was able to confirm that our insurance cover had been increased and that we’ll receive a confirmation letter and new invoice next week.

She didn’t have to do any of this. She could have confirmed what the guy on the phone hotline had told me before, because it was the truth. She could have said she can’t do anything for me on a Friday night. She didn’t have to add a note to my file, after all being under-insured legally means being under-insured, and if I try to change this on a Friday night, you would be right say “bad luck”. And she didn’t have to try to get hold of someone at the insurance company, especially not after we had agreed on leaving it until monday morning. But she did.

Sure, this is in no way a sign that the virtual branch on Facebook works as intended. I could have gotten lucky with someone from the call centre who might have gone the extra mile, too. But on Facebook I was able to chose who I wanted to interact with. To be fair, all the people on the virtual branch look friendly, helpful and professional. But still, I had a choice. And ASB offered me interaction via a medium that I’m familiar with. After establishing the initial contact, talking on the phone didn’t feel as weird as it often does when you talk to some random stranger, who may or may not even be based in some low-wage country far away from New Zealand.

From now on I will certainly prefer the Facebook virtual branch for all matters I would like to discuss with someone at ASB. Even if they can’t help immediately, they seem to have picked great people to represent the bank in the online world, so I’m sure that every problem will be solved in the end.

The Japanese have a different system for dealing with wet umbrellas. To keep the water outside when the weather is crappy, all shops have a plastic cover dispenser for umbrellas at their entrance. You put your umbrella in from the top and when you take it out towards the front it’s covered in a condom like wrapper. This is how the shop floors stay dry and people don’t slip. And you don’t need to fear that anyone will get you completely wet when they wave their umbrella around in order to get it dry before they enter the shop. Awesome idea!

It would be great to see a more reusable solution, using a plastic cover once and then throwing it into the rubbish bin doesn’t sound right to me. But it’s a start and certainly limits some risks associated with wet floors.

But when you want to go to a museum or a restaurant, you’re usually not keen to carry your umbrella around, regardless if it’s placed in a cover or not. That’s why such places often have a lockable umbrella holder at the entrance of the building. Put the head of the umbrella in, close the lock, remove the metal plate to lock and your umbrella will be waiting securely locked up until you return. That’s how Tokyo stays nice clean and tidy even in nasty weather conditions.

I can only talk for the Tokyo region, since I didn’t travel anywhere outside of the big city, but I assume it’s the same anywhere in Japan – whatever you do, wherever you go, whoever you encounter: people are always nice and go the extra mile to fulfil the wishes you didn’t even know you had. There was the shower head in our hotel for example, which had a little leak. Not a big problem and I certainly wouldn’t have complained about it, but when we used the shower again the next morning, it had been fixed. Without us saying a word. Not only had the cleaning staff seen the problem, they had even organised the repair. Great service!

There were lots of little things where I though “Wow, that’s great, I didn’t really expect this”, but one of the best things happened to us at Junkudo. Junkudo is a huge book store in Ikebukuro, one of the must-see parts of Tokyo. The store has nine stories, with level nine hosting foreign books. Since neither Kai nor I speak Japanese, we went straight up to the top floor to look for a book we had seen advertised in a newspaper. When we couldn’t find it, I approached the information desk and asked for it. Luckily I had the newspaper clipping with me, so it was easy for the person I asked to look it up in their computer and locate it within the shop. For some reason they had it one level below, and they sent me down to get it from there. Now, in both Germany and New Zealand “Go to level xyz” means that you have to find the item you’re looking for at that location for yourself. At Junkudo it meant, that someone on level eight was informed via phone that we were looking for the book, and while we took the escalator down, which probably took us less than two minutes, this person grabbed the book and placed it at the information desk for us. When we arrived to ask for it again, it was already waiting for us. Great service, again!

I got really excited about the high level of service, and when we met a friend for lunch at our last day in Tokyo I got an explanation as to why the Japanese are so service oriented. It has to do with the custom of “omotenashi”, the atmosphere of hospitality and welcome. It’s the thought of creating a nice, welcoming experience for guests – with an attention to details – that got transferred into the whole service industry. It’s a great custom and it certainly makes Japan a great experience for visitors.

For one, I didn’t like the old, gloomy theme, so it made me feel depressed when I looked at it. Why I chose it in the first place? No idea.

And sometimes, when I had a thought I wanted to get out there, I did a search and saw that someone else had discussed something similar, I chose not to blog about it. Which is stupid, I know. If there was only ever one opinion allowed for each topic, we would live in a very sad world.

I didn’t even blog from MAX last year, which was very stupid, too, since I like going back to look up the sessions/speakers I saw and review how they influenced my opinion over the time. It’s easier to do this in my own blog, than trying to locate my notes somewhere on my computer. But at least I had a good reason not to blog from there: I tweeted live from the conference for the online magazine Create or Die and wrote some more articles related to the conference for them. This was probably the only good reason not to post something to my blog for the whole year of silence.

What brought me back to rethinking my habits was that I noticed some people officially quitting their blogging activities. I know that in times of Twitter blogging seems to be a bit “old-fashioned”, but other bloggers still are a great source of knowledge and inspiration for me. I don’t read all the feeds I get into my Google Reader, but I do scan all titles at least a couple of times per week and I follow up on what catches my interest. I makes me feel sad to see people giving up on it and I was just about to start moaning about it, when I realised that I wasn’t any better. I never officially quit, but reading some of the “latest” posts made me aware that it was going down and then stopped with no explanation. I don’t want it to end like this, and even more I don’t just want to consume other people’s work. I want to contribute again, and I’ll make the best effort to get back into regular blogging! :-)

The blog design is still far away from being nice, but the move from BlogCFC to Wordpress was quite painful, so I currently don’t care much about the looks, I’m just glad that all old entries survived the move. Most entries are assigned to the wrong category now, but this is something I can live with and one day, when I can’t think of anything else to do, I’ll change them manually. But for now it will be ok, I guess. Let’s get back to dealing with all things usable (or unusable)…

Another tiny adjustment I’ll have to make is the integration of widgets and change of header, although the theme was tagged as custom header and widget ready I can’t find in a rush. So there will be some more changes during the next couple of days…

I checked my shopping cart and there I had the chance to either log in as a registered customer, or to give them my name and billing address. I didn’t have the choice to “create an account” with them at that stage. So I gave them my contact details and an email address I usually use for online orders and newsletters and stuff like that. They sent me a friendly activation email: “click here to activate your account”. At the bottom of that email they gave me a user name and a password, but I didn’t read the complete email. I wanted to get the order finished quickly, my normal experience is that there are hardly ever any additional information in an activation email so I didn’t read a single word of that email but just clicked the button to activate my account. Back on their website I wanted to go on with my order but they wouldn’t let me unless I’m logged on with a proper user name and password. As I thought I didn’t have one, I tried to create one. But the system realised that I already gave it my contact details and told me that my email address is already in use – if I couldn’t remember my password I should press the “Lost Password” button. But to request a new password you must know your user name and as I was still convinced not to have one, I became slightly annoyed. It would have been a very easy thing to avoid this situation: they could have mentioned that the user name and password had been sent out with the activation email and everything would have been good. But they didn’t and so my only option to finalise my order was to create another account with a different email address. That finally worked and I hope to receive my ear bags soon. But I will always have the strange feeling that the shopping experience wasn’t a good one.

New Zealand is a real coffee country. Not that we actually grow coffee beans, but when it comes to preparation, our barista are the best in the world. After drinking a coffee in one of the cafés in Wellington you’ll find it hard to drink your Cappucino, Latte or Macchiato elsewhere in the world. But apperantly it was not good enough for New Zealand to have first class coffee makers in the country, they wanted to revolutionise the coffee preparation. Which led to the existance of one of the most unnecessary products on earth: the Riccocino. The Riccochino is a FROZEN coffee you’ll get at the gas station and prepare yourself by putting it into a special microwave oven. Depending on how many coffees you’d like to prepare at the same time you choose a button, in case you want two Riccocinos (hopefully because you have vouchers for two free cups) it takes 3.15 minutes. Then you open the lid of the cup and find out that there is still some kind of ice cube in the middle of your cup. You put it back into the microwave, press the “Boost” butten, just to realise after 10 more seconds that your Riccocino ist still not hot. Three more attempts and some fire sparks in the microwave later your coffee is hot, but it doesn’t taste good, in facts it’s pretty disgusting. Very sweet, so that the first sip feels like a chocolate treat, but I felt sick after drinking about one third of the cup. Thanks that it was for free… Conclusion: time-consuming, circuitous, probably unhealthy (due to the microwaving and additional ingrediences that don’t belong to coffee) and not tasty at all. I guess, this one won’t stay on the market for long…