“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”  — Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.

(HT: The ROWE blog)

I saw a company policy somewhere once that stated:

“All information taken off the internet should be considered suspect until confirmed by information from another source. There is no quality control process on the internet; a considerable amount of information is outdated or inaccurate, and in some instances may be deliberately misleading.”

Default-negative views like this are life killers.

This is funny, from a recent issue of Wired. I had no idea that nutraloaf existed:

Could science build a completely nutritious space food? Sure, but it’d be a lot like nutraloaf, a substance served to prisoners in solitary in some states.

It’s so unpalatable that it’s the subject of several lawsuits.

The ingredients are ordinary enough, and Vermont’s version of the recipe (this makes three 1,000 calorie loafs) is balanced for fat, protein, carbs, and vitamins. So how could such a harmony of food and science constitute cruel and unusual punishment? Because it tastes like cardboard, smells like rotten eggs, and looks like baked vomit.

By the way, the ingredients are: whole wheat bread, canned spinach, great northern beans, powdered skim milk, potato flakes, tomato paste, nondairy cheese, raw carrots, seedless raisins, and vegetable oil.

AT&T has a plan where you can save something like $5 per month on your cell bill if enough people in your company have AT&T for their wireless and enroll in the savings program. Something like that.

So I went on to sign up for the savings the other day, and AT&T charged me $36. They charged me $36 to enroll in a program designed to save money. They charged me a fee in order to get the discount.

???

A discount program should, at the very least, produce good-will in the customer. This program does the opposite. Now, AT&T is very close to earning a place on my list of things that should not exist.

We’ve all experienced it: you call your credit card company or some other such company, and are prompted to enter your account number into the keypad. Then, when a real person comes on, they ask you for your account number again.

This is a poor customer experience. Why ask the first time if they are simply going to ask again? I can understand that, for security reasons, they might want the live person to get the number from you. But what possible benefit can it be to them to have you key it into the pad initially if they are only going to ask for it again later?

That’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure the companies have lots of good reasons. But, there are good reasons behind every poor customer experience. We need to get beyond allowing “good reasons” to complicate the customer’s life. And if we say “what’s the big deal with requiring the customer to do another 30 second action,” we aren’t truly thinking of the customer first.

We ended up taking the stairs.

Normally when I’m on a plane I read the whole time. But today I had to get up at 4:30 to catch an early flight out and decided to sleep.

This was not the best decision I could have made. The space is already pretty small, obviously. Then my seat wouldn’t go back for some reason, though of course the person in front of me was able to put their seat back.

I found it impossible to figure out a decent position to rest my head, and wavered in and out of sleep for pretty much the entire flight.

I think there were a couple of other times when I tried to sleep on a plane, never with much success. Has anyone ever been succesful at getting decent sleep on an airplane? Alternatively, how do you make the most of the time when you fly?