Category Archives: Customer Service

My autodesk.com site survey experience

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I just tried out the new discussion groups to see if anything has been fixed. After entering my password (yet again), instead of placing me back in the discussion groups with my 100-topics-per-page settings, I was transported to the main Autodesk page and given the chance to provide feedback. I was informed that a new browser window would be opened, and then… nothing. I waited a while, but still nothing. Or so it seemed. Actually, the new browser window appeared behind my existing browser window, so I found it eventually. I clicked on it, it opened another, bigger window and the survey started. Here are the questions and my responses:

Which of the following best describes your primary purpose for today’s visit?
. Other
To see if the discussion groups are still broken

How often have you visited Autodesk.com in the past 6 months?
. 6 times or more

A question about my industry group that didn’t want to copy and paste…
. Other
Question is not relevant

Do you currently own an Autodesk product?
. Yes

Are you planning to make a purchase decision related to an Autodesk product?
(I don’t know what choice to make here, none of them really fit. I’m on Subscription but that doesn’t mean I’m not involved in purchasing decisions; I am. I don’t know when the next purchasing decision will be, though. I picked:)
. No.

Which of the following titles best describes your role in your company?
. IT Manager

From which region are you accessing this site?
(Can’t you tell?)
. Australia / New Zealand / South Pacific

How would you rate your overall experience with Autodesk.com today?
. Very bad
(Actually, I don’t really know because because I haven’t yet got to the discussion groups I asked for, so I’m taking a wild guess based on recent experiences. I later checked the discussion groups and found that this was an accurate guess.)

Based on your best online experience, how would you rate www.Autodesk.com as a site that…

(Now, notice that is’s asking about my best online experience. I assume that would be best ever? Going back years, right? Before the recent update, then? OK, I’ll answer fairly based on that assumption.)

…is a reliable source of information that you trust?
9 Very Good

…leaves you feeling that your time was well spent?
8 Very Good

…helps you make well-informed decisions?
9 Very Good

…is easy for you to navigate?
5 Fair

…allows you to move rapidly to the information you need?
6 Good

…enables you to find what you’re looking for?
7 Good

…encourages you to return?
7 Good

…meets or exceeds your expectations?
6 Good

…you would refer to others?
7 Good

…has content that is relevant to the purpose of your visit?
6 Good

…gives you the amount of detail you need?
6 Good

…covers the range of information you need?
7 Good

…enables you to identify and contact the right people?
0 Very bad

…provides a positive interactive experience?
8 Very Good

…enables you to help yourself?
7 Very Good

That’s the end of that section, the progress bar is half-way though, so I go to the next section, which I assume is going to ask the same questions based on my worst experience. Oops, no it’s not! The survey is over! Thanks for playing.

Now you know. So, if in a few weeks somebody from Autodesk refers to “survey results” that supposedly show how well the recent update went down with users, point them at this post. I gave high marks for some of my responses, but I wasn’t being asked about my experiences after the recent update. I was being asked about my best experiences, which is altogether different.

This sort of thing is why I never take survey results from anyone at face value. I always insist on seeing the full details, otherwise I will give such results no credit at all. No details, no point.

Slight improvement in discussion group search

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While almost all of the problems with the Autodesk discussion groups remain, there are some signs of movement in one area at least. The search facility, which until recently refused to find anything from before the update, now finds some earlier posts.

It would appear that some kind of search index is very slowly being built, but it’s a long way short of being finished. For example, if I do the standard default search for “autocad” in all the AutoCAD groups, there are 83 found in the last 90 days. This seems plausible, but I don’t trust it. Changing the time option to “All” now does actually return something rather than nothing at all, so I guess that’s an improvement. But 188 messages containing “autocad”? Since 1998? There should surely be thousands. Also, there are apparently no messages at all containing the word “it”. Or “is”. Ever. Some way to go there, then.

If the people fixing the search happen to be reading this, please note that a maximum possible number of 30 results per page is much too low and makes it very hard to work with the search results. 100 would be better.

There are still email addresses being exposed to the spam trawlers, but I guess by now that horse has well and truly bolted. Although I haven’t done a scientific study of post frequency, it looks to me as if the discussion groups are now significantly less active than they were before the update. Given the slightly functional search, the persistence of the awful editor, and the terrible runeverythingintooneline formatting of the existing message database (particularly important for the many posts containing code), I can’t say I’m surprised at the exodus.

Here’s a couple I didn’t mention earlier

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The Autodesk discussion group editor inserts spaces into URLs longer than a certain size (about 70 characters, it seems). It will insert spaces in one place for the URL that it says is displayed on the screen, in another place for the URL that’s actually invoked when clicked, and sometimes in even more places on the URL that really is displayed on the screen. Sometimes the space appears as a space and sometimes it appears as %20.

The editor will cunningly allow you to apparently fix up these errors in the places they occur, and then the fun-loving little sprite will reintroduce the same or similar errors as soon as you save the changes. Multiple edit attempts will get you nowhere (except a padded cell, perhaps). Somebody must have had a wonderful time writing that one.

Another bug relates to the display of quoted messages. Admittedly, this was always going to be a difficult task to get right in the new environment, because of the many quoting styles that exist in the messagebase. No surprise, then, to discover that quoted text frequently displays in such a way that makes the message author look like a clueless dolt.

In related news, I’ve added a poll that asks what you think of the recent web update. I’m not making my usual attempt to remain neutral and avoid influencing the poll results this time, as it’s a bit late for that. Everybody knows my views by now, but I suspect it wouldn’t make much difference in any case. People are angry enough about this mess without any influence from me. However, it’s always good to see a wide range of views expressed; somebody thinks the update is “Fantastic”.

Discussion group search – partial workaround

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The Autodesk discussion group search facility is still impersonating an industrial suction pump in a puddle. It sucks very hard and produces little useful output. In addition to the problems already mentioned ad nauseam (apparently there have never been any posts made containing the word “AutoCAD”, but 34 have been made in the past 90 days), here’s another one I spotted today: picking on Search Tips will give you a 404 error.

However bad the discussion groups are, at least the Subscription site is working (for me anyway, I know there are still people with login ID problems) and my helpful Indian chappie came back to me with a workaround. It’s not a very good workaround, and it only applies to Subscription customers, but I thought I would pass it on anyway:

Log in to the Subscription Center, pick Search in the top right corner, then fill in your search details or pick Advanced Search for more control.

This search method does find messages that date back before the recent web update. However, there are a few problems with it. There’s no way to restrict it to just discussion groups. Even if I restrict it to just “Communities”, it returns results that include various blogs, and to threads that have been moved or deleted. If more than one page of results is found, there’s no way of going directly to a given page, it’s Next > Next > Next > Next > repeatedly. If I try to restrict the search to AutoCAD 2009, for example, it returns nothing. Finally, it’s obviously only any good for Subscription users.

Another workaround is to use Google Advanced Search and set the Search within a site or domain field to discussion.autodesk.com. However, I know of no way of restricting the search to AutoCAD 2009, for example.

Enough band aids, the Autodesk discussion group search mechanism really needs fixing, along with all the other problems. I’ve already seen suggestions that Autodesk sabotaged its discussion groups on purpose. Personally, I’m generous enough to think that it’s just gross incompetence, but Autodesk’s continued silence and apparent inactivity can only encourage the conspiracy theories. I don’t know how much Autodesk pays for PR each year, but I bet the negative impression from this disaster is worth a lot more than it would have cost to have just done the job properly in the first place.

How not to do a web update

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If you’re a major company and your various web-based services have evolved over time, you may have a proliferation of user IDs and some other issues to tidy up. You may be tempted to have a major overhaul.

If you think your reputation among your customers isn’t low enough and you desperately want this update to be an unmitigated disaster, what should you do? If you’re dropping subtle hints about moving towards a Software as a Service model, how can you remind people about the excellent reasons that exist for avoiding dependence on on-line services in general, and on yours in particular? Here are some suggestions:

  • Do everything at once. Don’t be tempted to divide this task into manageable portions, or you may have some prospect of success.
  • Close down everything for several days. If your customers might have to rely on some part of your web services to keep their products working, make sure you close down that part in particular. Let ’em stew.
  • Give the update job to a clumsy intern in your office that has never been allowed near a computer before.
  • Failing that, outsource the job to the lowest bidder. Ideally, have it done in a country that has a first language other than your own, to maximise the potential for misunderstandings.
  • When the user ID merge is done, make sure it is still broken for some people. Have multiple users with the same ID and multiple IDs with the same user. Some people’s existing user IDs will fail, so encourage them to make new ones and then refuse to allow it on the grounds that they already have an ID.
  • Make sure random people’s user IDs work in some places but not others. If they are paying for a maintenance contract, do your best to prevent them from using it.
  • Update your discussion groups to a new format. Of course, you should only do this if your existing groups are fast, efficient and reliable, and nobody is complaining about them. If it ain’t broke, fix it. Fix it real good.
  • If people have actually asked for any new features, such as signatures in their web-based posts, make sure you don’t provide them.
  • Don’t ask for feedback on any suggested changes. Before jumping in with the whole big update, don’t put up a sample discussion group to ensure that it works and that people like it. The slogan “Just Do It” works here, but already belongs to somebody else. Try “Don’t Look Before You Leap” instead.
  • Make sure you expose your customers’ private data to the world so they will never want to trust you again. If you can, make their email addresses visible to the spambots. Leave this visible for at least a week to give the trawlers a chance to do their harvesting, no matter how many impassioned pleas people make. You get bonus points if the exposed email address is also the user’s login ID. Spammers, scammers and phishers will love you, but your customers will not.
  • Make the new discussion group system slow, unreliable, and less efficient to use than before.
  • Ensure the discussion group editor messes up the formatting of people’s posts. Have it insert random junk into the posts and then refuse to let them edit it out. For bonus points, let them edit it out, but then ignore the edits or randomly re-insert new codes.
  • Make sure the search engine doesn’t find anything from before the update. If anybody attempts to change the search settings to find all posts, reward them by making sure it finds nothing at all, not even the recent posts it found a few seconds earlier.
  • If people are likely to post, say, program code, make sure you wrap it all up into one line to render it illegible.
  • If your customers are likely to use certain characters like square brackets in their posts, choose these as special characters in your editor. Mess up people’s posted program code into stuff that looks like a mass of broken links.
  • After a week or so, change your mind about the square brackets thing so that people who used that facility for their links now have posts that make them look like idiots. But don’t completely change your mind about it. Break the display of such links, but still encourage the users to insert them. For bonus points, insert each link at the start of the message rather than where the user expects it to go.
  • Log people off every so often so they have to keep logging on. Provide a “Remember this” feature that doesn’t.
  • If you are silly enough to allow people to keep their old items-per-page settings and you accidentally provide a control panel that works, make up for this by making those old settings unavailable in the control panel. In this way, you will prevent them from using a perfectly functional control panel for fear of losing their settings.
  • People who place attachments in their messages deserve to be frustrated, so you should break that feature for a while. Then allow some files to be attached, but mess up their display and randomly refuse to allow people to get at them.
  • If you think people might want to paste things into their messages, make it as awkward as possible. Copy and paste has universally worked a certain way for decades, so to keep on doing that is just what they will be expecting you to do. Do something new and interesting instead. Force them to go through a slow and arcane multi-stage process to paste the word “and”.
  • Because you don’t have full control over what appears on the screen, it’s much harder to mess up newsreader access, but make sure something makes life intolerable for those people too. Formatting attachments as garbage text is always a useful trick.
  • If you have an excellent educational conference coming up and people have complained about the associated web services in the past, take this opportunity to make them worse.

That’s all I have, sorry. My imagination must be failing, because I can’t think of any other ways a company could mess up such an update. Does anybody else have any other suggestions?

Autodesk discussion group links – feedback and bookmarks

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The Autodesk discussion groups are currently working. They are also still irresponsibly displaying people’s email addresses as visible user names. If you’ve posted to the discussion groups in the past, I suggest you check to see if your email address is out there for the spambots to pick up.

There is now a feedback form for the discussion group and Community sites, so if you’re having problems you could try that. Hopefully, Autodesk won’t need a thousand feedback reports to work out that it’s running as slow as a wet week, the search is broken and that people’s privacy has been violated.

If you have links to product categories that no longer work properly, you can modify the format as shown in this example, which is for the AutoCAD category.

Old: http://discussion.autodesk.com/index2.jspa?categoryID=8

New: http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=8

Autodesk, please turn the discussion groups off NOW

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You’re exposing some people’s email addresses as user names. Not mine, as far as I can tell, but it’s hard to say for sure because the search is broken. Anyway, this is very obviously A Bad Thing and you should not be allowing the site to be publicly visible that state.

Autodesk discussion group alternatives

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As I’m typing this, the Autodesk discussion groups are down for maintenance again. Let’s hope that when they come back up, some of the problems are fixed.

In the meantime, if you’re an AutoCAD user and have something to ask or say, where can you go? Here are a few suggestions.

  • I like the AUGI forums. It’s an even more modern, more graphical and less space-efficient web interface than the new Autodesk one, but there’s a good community there and, hey, the search feature works. Mike Perry and colleagues run a tight ship, so please read the rules and be good.
  • If you have something to tell Autodesk and want practically no restrictions in the way you say it, submit a new message on dear Autodesk, or vote for the existing messages you like. It’s looking a bit bare and empty at the moment, so go fill it up.
  • As a Cadalyst person, it would be remiss of me to avoid mentioning the Cadalyst forums.
  • The Swamp is biased heavily toward CAD programming, so if you have a LISP question then head there, but it also hosts general CAD discussion. In this community, you are expected to be courteous and professional.
  • Old-timers like myself will remember that the CompuServe ACAD forum’s Take 5 section was carried over into the AutoCAD discussion groups. It was kept going for a few years before Autodesk felt it was getting out of hand and killed it. That community refused to be killed, and actually still flourishes for newsgroup (NNTP) users at the t5 dot dynip dot com server.
  • R. K. McSwain suggests the CADTutor forums.

If you wish to point out any other sites I’ve missed, please let me know and if they’re relevant I’ll edit this post to include them.

While I was typing this, the Autodesk discussion groups came back up, but who knows how long that’s going to last?

Also while typing this I also received a phone call from a helpful Indian gentleman at Subscription Support (which was working fine as of yesterday). He asked for details about the broken search (it doesn’t find anything posted prior to the update), confirmed that it’s broken, and promised to inform the relevant department. That’s a much better response than the email I mentioned in my last post.

More Autodesk discussion group angst

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When you start using the new AutoCAD discussion groups, in addition to the broken search facility, you will have other issues to deal with. There’s a new editor with lots of features and lots of problems. Quoting formatted messages results in a mess. Switching from one tab to another messes up your text. Submitting your message results in an error page like this:

Autodesk
Discussion Groups
Discussion Groups
Oops! Server Error 500. The resource you’ve requested is not available.
   
 

© Copyright 2007 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved. Legal Notices & Trademarks — Privacy Policy

Despite this, the message does actually get submitted. People are unaware of this (possibly because the list of topics, and the popular discussions pane’s “last post” displays are not being updated as new posts are made) and re-posting their messages, resulting in duplicates.

There is some confusion about what constitutes a category in the discussion group structure. If you go from the top level to the AutoCAD level and then into AutoCAD 2009, picking the “Up one category” link takes you right to the top.

The speed of the web interface varies from quite acceptable to something rather less than that.

People are reporting problems with losing their old watched threads, and not being allowed to watch new threads without email notifications.

There’s nowhere obvious for people to report problems, so people are just starting complaint threads in random locations. What if you report problems directly to Autodesk? According to a poster in one thread, this is what he got in reply to his report that search is broken (which it still is):

Thank you for contacting Autodesk Support. Here is the recommended resolution to your Support Request:

Discussion Group is just a BBS for all Autodesk Customer. This BBS is not product support duty. So We could not give you any more resolutions. But I think you could use different key works or other mothord to search in Discussion group.

Good grief.

So, Autodesk, was user feedback sought prior to making these changes? Did the pre-release testing phase allow plenty of time for the design to be user tested, modified based on user feedback and re-tested before release?

Didn’t think so. Ah well, it’s a good thing that this valuable lesson was learned with something relatively trivial like your discussion groups and not something important, isn’t it? Like AutoCAD, for example?

Autodesk newsgroup changes

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As I mentioned yesterday, the Autodesk newsgroups have been overhauled. After spending yesterday going up and down like a whore’s drawers*, the site is now up, albeit still not 100% of the time. At this stage, newsreader users appear to be generally unaffected by negative issues, which is a pleasant surprise.

The space efficiency for Web users has improved since yesterday, and while it’s not as good as it was a week ago, it’s now good enough for me. I’ve now managed to log on, and was impressed to see that it had retained my old settings of 100 topics per page and no limit on the number of posts per page. Unfortunately, the new control panel imposes a limit of 50 topics per page and 50 posts per page, so I’m not going to be able to change any of my other control panel settings for fear of forever losing my long-page settings. Autodesk, please add options for 100 topics per page (more, if you like) and unlimited posts per page.

The litttle blobs to indicate read and unread posts may look cute, but they’re not much use to me. Before, I could open a long thread such as this one and look for “NEW!” within the page using the browser search to find the new posts. Scrolling through the page looking for brown blobs is seriously inferior to the mechanism I had last week. Autodesk, can I please have an option to have easily searched words like “NEW!” instead of blobs? Oh, and “NEW!” is much more useful than “new” because the newsgroup is obviously scattered with large numbers of words that begin with those three letters.

Search? Still broken. Autodesk, you know what to do. Also, it logs me off every so often. What’s up with that?

So, what do you think of the new newsgroup interface? What’s good? What’s bad? What simple changes could Autodesk perform to make them more efficient for you?

* Source: Rowan Atkinson, Not The Nine O’Clock News, early 1980s.

Some Autodesk web stuff now coming back on line

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Right now, the Autodesk Subscription site is back up, although some people are experiencing problems. As an Aussie, I approve of the new Subscription slogan that starts with “No Worries”, even if it’s not yet accurate. Product Activation is requesting a logon, but I haven’t gone any further than that, so it may or may not be working.

The Autodesk Discussion Groups are up and down by the minute. Links that once led directly to categories (e.g. AutoCAD) currently lead to pages with sub-category headings, but no links. The discussion groups themselves, while they’re up, have a new, much more modern look, but are unfortunately vastly less space-efficient than the old ones. My existing password no longer works and I haven’t seen an email about a replacement yet, so I haven’t been allowed to log on yet to see if I still have the option of improving the efficiency of the interface (e.g. by having 100 topics per page, not 15). The Search facility looks unfinished and fails to find stuff I know is there. There are various user-related issues, such as the user name links failing and multiple users with the same name.

The Autodesk University site is up, but registration is still disabled. The Autodesk Labs site is up, but contains some links that no longer work.

At a glance, the Alias Design, Civil Engineering, Impression and Manufacturing Community sites all appear to be up and running.

Lots of Autodesk web stuff broken right now

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Autodesk is in the middle of a big site overhaul at the moment, with many services unavailable. For example, attempting to log into Subscription Support gives me this:

The Subscription Center is currently undergoing maintenance. You will not be able to access the Subscription Center during this time.
Support Request is also undergoing maintenance. Currently, you are not be able to submit, view or manage settings for your Support Requests.

The Subscription Center and Support Request will become available at the date and time shown in the chart below.

Time Zone/Country Date Time
GMT Tuesday, September 23, 2008 5.00 am
Eastern Time (EST) Tuesday, Spetember 23, 2008 1.00 am
Central European Time (CET) Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7.00 am
Japan Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:00 pm
Korea Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:00 pm
Singapore Tuesday, September 23, 2008 1.00 pm
India – Bangalore Tuesday, September 23, 2008 10.30 am

We appreciate your patience while we work to improve Autodesk Subscription.

That’s a relatively useful message; some direct links I have bookmarked give me this kind of thing:

The server you are trying to access is either busy or experiencing difficulties. Please close the Web browser, open a new browser window, and try logging in again.[05:09:00]

This also means your resellers are unable to provide you with license codes until the server is back up again. So if you were going to rely on that, don’t.

The various Autodesk blogs seem to be unaffected at the moment, but links on those blogs may not work correctly. For example, signing up to be placed on the AU blogroll from the link at Between The Lines seems to work, but then right at the end gives me the message below, leaving me in the dark about whether I need to repeat the process at a later date:

Temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance.
This portion of the Autodesk website is temporarily unavailable while we complete some upgrades. Our apologies for this, unfortunately necessary, interruption.
Autodesk is working to consolidate multiple user accounts, simplify the sign in process, and provide a single User ID and Password for accessing several Autodesk web sites. Access to register or edit your existing account information will be restricted during the September 18-21 launch window. Additionally, the sites affected will be unavailable Monday, September 22.

This particular message also provides this handy list of sites affected:

Here’s hoping autodesk.com comes back to life on time, in full working order, with a minimum of broken links (the biggest bane of the last overhaul), and hopefully with useful improvements that make it all worthwhile.

Totally abysmal customer service from Autodesk

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I’ve been dealing with Autodesk in various ways for 23 years and have had a variety of experiences as a result; some good, some bad. The provision of the license codes needed to keep AutoCAD running has historically been pretty good. No longer. I’m currently going through the worst Autodesk customer service experience in my career. I’ve been trying for many weeks to obtain a few codes, without success.

I’ll spare you the details for the time being to give Autodesk one last chance to come good. For now I’ll just say that a combination of restrictive policies, inflexibility in the administration of those policies and downright incompetence has left Autodesk’s Subscription service looking very poor indeed. It’s a shocking abuse of legitimate customers; something that pirate users don’t have to put up with.

Autodesk Asia Pacific Product Registration & Activation Centre, your efforts to date have not been anywhere close to adequate. Get your finger out and start providing some customer service. If you can’t do so, escalate it to someone who can. Now. Before I let on how I really feel.

Update: I would just like to clarify that I have no problem with the service provided at a dealer level.

Customer Service 3 – On Hold

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What’s the longest you’ve waited on hold? I broke my own personal best last week when I rang my bank. I phoned up, went through the menu system, typed in my account number and was advised that there could be “some delays” due to “technical difficulties”. I left the phone on speaker and went about my other business.

I did some actual work, prepared the evening meal ingredients, made sure my kids had showers and music practice, greeted my wife as she returned home, cooked the evening meal, served it, ate it, cleaned up, did some more work, and after all that my phone was still telling me, “We apologise for the continuing delay. We appreciate that your time is important and will ensure that your call is answered as soon as possible.” For the hundredth time.

After two hours, I was ready to give up. I would normally have given up much earlier, but my perverse streak made me want to go for the record. As the phone timer display hit about 2:01:00, my finger was poised over the “Off” button when an actual real human started speaking!

Fortunately, this person spoke in an accent I could understand and was very helpful, so I was able to sort out my business to my satisfaction in a few minutes. Because of that, and because this was a one-off, I will refrain from naming the guilty in this case.

Here’s the phone display immediately after hanging up:

Can you beat that? Anybody who has tried to contact MD Web Hosting in the past three weeks could beat it, I’m sure. (More on that later). What’s your record?

Customer Service 2 – Don McMillan

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My last customer service story was about McDonald’s. This one is about Donald Mc., but there the similarity ends. After I returned from Autodesk University 2006, I decided to buy a DVD from the comedian that Autodesk put on before the Blue Man Group, Don McMillan. As you’re reading a CAD blog, you are probably geeky enough to appreciate this man’s funny engineeroid slant on life. The likelihood is actually 93.6%. (Did you know that 74.7% of statistics quoted on the Internet are made up?)

I wanted to show my wife this funny guy and re-live some of the moments from his show, so I visited his web site and attempted to order the DVD. Unfortunately, his on-line shopping company would not accept orders from Australia, so I dropped him an email. He asked for a US$ money order, but they’re an expensive pain here. I happened to have some cash left over from my trip, so I sent that to him instead. As soon as I informed him that the money was in the mail, he sent off the DVD (which comes with a bonus CD too). My money (it was actually $1.05 too much because of the US$ denominations I had handy) and his DVD crossed in the mail, arriving at about the same time. We trusted each other, and it worked.

I was surprised and delighted to discover that Don had shipped not only the DVD with its bonus CD, but another different bonus CD too! With a hand-written note from Don which was, amusingly, on a Post-It note.

The DVD and both CDs were, as expected, very funny. Top service, top product, thank you Don!

Artist site: www.technicallyfunny.com

Customer Service 1 – McDonald’s

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I have a few customer service stories to share. Most are about bad service, but one is about very good service indeed. This isn’t that story. It’s a rant, but it’s true, and it is offered here for your amusement.

A couple of years ago I took my eldest daughter L to a school friend’s party at a local fast food outlet. (It’s McDonald’s Melville, actually. I see no need to protect the guilty). As second daughter E would have been left out, I took her too. They could play on the playground together. L was being fed at the party, but I was looking after E myself. I don’t particularly like feeding them that kind of stuff, but once in a while doesn’t hurt too much.

The party was from 11:30 to 1:00. I went to order food for E and myself at about 11:55. There were queues (that’s lines to most of you) and I eventually got to the counter at about 12:05. Bear in mind that I had a four year old girl out of sight in the playground while this was going on, and although there were plenty of school mums I knew out there, it was still uncomfortable not having direct supervision. I wanted to get back out there as soon as I could, preferably with E’s food so she didn’t start getting ratty, as she does when she’s hungry.

I ordered E’s chicken nuggets & chips kid’s meal, and my double beef and bacon value meal, without any trimmings. At the same time, a woman who also had a kid at the party ordered some other stuff, including a McOz burger with extra tomato. A couple of minutes later, my tray had some of E’s stuff and my chips sitting on it. After five minutes, it also had some drinks on it. Another five minutes later, the girl said there was a delay on the burger and that she would bring it out to me, and proceeded to hand me the tray.

I put my hand on the skinny little large-surface-area fat-and-salt-magnet excuse for chips (that’s fries to most of you) that they serve at McDonald’s (“Australia’s Favourite Fries!”), and they were of course stone cold. I said, “Excuse me, do you think I could please have some warm chips?” She said “Oh, OK”, as if the idea of food going cold when left out was some kind of novelty she had never come across before, and proceeded to take away my chips and replace them. I then said, “Do you think I could have these replaced, too?”, pointing at E’s chips. Another surprised , “Oh, OK” and those got replaced too. I don’t know what the training is like at McDonald’s, but “Getting a Clue 101” obviously isn’t one of the subjects. I didn’t bother with replacement nuggets, as I just wanted to get out there to feed and supervise my child. Likewise, I also didn’t ask for my now-partly-flat Coke to be replaced. It always comes out of the tap partly flat anyway, so what’s the difference?

So, I informed the girl that I’d be outside in the playground area and took my tray out there. E and I ate our lunches (at least as far as I could), and when we were finished there was still no sign of my burger. The woman who ordered her stuff at the same time was also waiting for her McOz with extra tomato when she finished her lunch with her kids. After a bit more waiting, I eventually decided to go back in and chase up my order. Mrs McOz asked me to follow up hers while I was in there.

I got in there to find it packed out with people waiting, and employees doing their stuff behind the counter and avoiding eye contact. Not wishing to barge in, I waited off to one side, as I could see Manager Woman with her back to me, dishing out chips into bags. I thought she would be done soon, so I waited. And waited. After she had done about 304 bags of chips, she turned around and I managed to attract her attention. I told her politely that I’d been waiting for 25 minutes for my burger, and that there was another woman outside in the same situation. She asked what the orders were for, and then she went into the kitchen to find out what’s going on. She came back out and told me she was going to have fresh ones made and brought out. I told her that I was near the playground, and that Mrs McOz was too. So out I went again.

I could see the drive-through customers being served reasonably quickly, orders coming and going even before I got to place my original order. If I had any sense, I should have abandoned the queue right then, got in my car and driven round and placed the order. So much for hindsight, on with the story.

The kids were playing away happily enough, but by the end of the party at 1:00, it was time to go. Neither missing burger had turned up. However, the clueless girl who took the order did come outside and say the Manager was sorry for the delay, the burgers would be out soon, and if we went inside we could have a free sundae. By this time, neither Mrs McOz nor myself were in the mood to hang around any longer, and certainly weren’t interested in joining the queue in the hope of eventually getting a large cup of lamb lard with added sugar, so we both declined and both requested a refund. Surprisingly politely, given the circumstances.

Another five minutes later, Miss Clueless came out with a $3.95 refund. However, she seemed completely baffled by the concept that there were two people who both needed refunds, despite the fact that she had been told about that 5 minutes earlier, so she couldn’t work out who it was supposed to be for. Eventually, I took the money, politely declined a second offer of lamb lard with added delay, and left with my kids. Mrs McOz was still waiting for her refund when I left. For all I know, one day in the distant future they will discover her skeleton and those of her kids, still sitting on that bench waiting for their $4.25 refund.

If the manager had any sense, given that she had two customers already annoyed by a 25 minute delay, she should have either done the orders herself or stood over the guys in the kitchen for the 2 minutes it takes to assemble a burger, then brought them out herself, with profuse apologies and vouchers for free stuff. The fact that she didn’t do that, and she quite astonishingly allowed the situation to repeat itself immediately after having had it brought to her attention, shows that she was even more clueless than the girl who took the order in the first place and then forgot about it. Some degree of cluelessness isn’t unusual in a 16-year-old girl working in a busy Macdonald’s, but Manager Woman was supposed to be the manager. Well, she managed to get a lot of chips into bags, so maybe that’s all that is required in that position.

Actually, that’s not quite true. She also managed to annoy not only two customers-of-the-moment, but two customers with five kids of Macdonald’s party age between them, who had actually held at least two kids’ parties there in the past, and who never will again. Plus, the other parents saw what was going on and won’t be too keen on going back. They will tell other parents, and so on. Plus, it’s now on a blog. How to lose bulk customers in one easy step.

McDonald’s Melville – The Place Where It Takes Over An Hour To Not Be Served With A Burger. Twice!

As I was leaving, we Hungry Parents had this little exchange:

Steve: “They call it fast food.”
Mrs McOz: “Faster than what?”
Steve: “Faster than starting with a cow and a field of wheat.”