Aidan Finn, IT Pro

A friend of mine, and a man who has influenced many IT careers around the world, is retiring. This week, Mark Minasi was at the Microsoft MVP Summit in Bellevue/Redmond to say farewell to many of his friends from across the globe. I’m taking this opportunity to say “thank you”.

I’m in a position to be able to write this post partly because of Mark. I’ve written before that 5 years into my IT career I found myself at a point where had to reinvent myself. I realised that relying on my employer to educate me was hopeless. I had to educate myself and put in the extra effort. I learned that continuous learning was the key to continued success. A few years later, in 2003, I landed a dream job, with the opportunity to design a Microsoft infrastructure that would span sites across North America, Europe, and Asia. I had a good idea of what I wanted, but I wanted more information, especially because I had decided to base everything on the just-released Windows Server 2003.

I believe in being prepared, so I went to a local book store and picked up two Windows Server 2003 books, including the infamously huge (1800 pages) Mastering Windows Server 2003 by Mark Minasi. I poured over his book for a weekend, pulling the pieces that were relevant and building out a design. A few months later, we went live, and it was gooooood.

There’s always Q&A about new things or problems, so I went online to find a place to ask questions. Mark ran a forum at the time and I joined. At first, I asked questions, but over time, that moved from asking questions to answering questions.

In 2004, my boss asked how I wanted to spend my training budget. I didn’t want to sit in Microsoft training classes because I knew that stuff. Instead, I wanted deeper information. I found a conference called Windows IT Connections that was running in Lake Las Vegas, and I signed up. There I saw great speakers like Jeremy Moskowitz (I bought his GPO book from him there, and it was amazingly detailed), and Mark Minasi. Mark’s sessions were interesting because he delivered information and entertainment all at once. His consulting work lead to more interesting topics, like understanding how AD replication worked in multi-site environments, the process of password changing, account lockouts, etc. These were all things I had to engineer around, and the information was more than one could find anywhere else.

I arrived early for one session, and sat in the fourth row. I was early and minding my own business. Mark came in, got himself set up, and then started to visit with the early birds. He came over to me and said hi. We talked about his one previous visit to Ireland, when he did some training in Galway. I didn’t tell him that I was “joe elway” on his forum – I thought that was being a bit weird.

A few years later, the membership on the forum became more and more friendly. The regulars were getting to know each other and chat about non-IT things. Some even knew each other from attending conferences. I don’t remember exactly how it started, but it was decided to arrange a meetup, which evolved into a mini-conference ran in Mark’s home town of Virginia Beach. That mini-conference saw some great minds attend, and share their knowledge. It was here that I got to know Mark personally, and he became a friend and great influence.

Myself, Mark Minasi, and Nathan Winters, on my “stag” photography trip to the Saltee Islands [Credit: Jimi Vigotty]

Mark had a genuine desire to see the attendees excel in all ways, whether it was at their techie job, or in the community as writers, speakers, etc. He freely shared his knowledge and experience.

One year, Mark taught a class on how to deliver a technical presentation. He talked about the preparation, the delivery, how to speak, etc. In technical audiences, there can sometimes be a difficult person: an ego that must prove itself as the best, a desire to be disruptive, or a hater of what you are saying. Mark shared his technique for dealing with that person – identify them while you are setting up before the presentation, and then go down to visit with them. Disarm the person by being friendly before the presentation … hmm 😊

When I think back to that mini-conference and the forum, the collection of people was impressive. One is leading huge Office 365 migration projects around the world. Another is at the tip of the spear on Microsoft’s global push of Azure Stack. A few of them were the best minds in Active Directory, inside or outside of Microsoft.  Another was a PowerShell guru, another a Small Business Server genius, and many of them became conference/user group speakers, and eventually became Microsoft MVPs.

A few of us discovered that we shared the hobby of photography and we start to go on trips together. We started by doing these trips before/after the conference in Virginia Beach and that became dedicated trips. I started to blog and do presentations. One year, Mark commented on my writing and encourage me to do more. And that became an offer to contribute to his latest Mastering Windows Server book – I was going from reading this series to writing this series! I wrote a number of chapters and my name was in the cover. That was a wow moment in my career. From that came other offers, and then I went to being the lead author on a few books, including the two Hyper-V books.

Mark’s advice on writing was to assume nothing about the reader. Explain the subject at a high level, introduce it, add some advanced content, and then cover the monitoring & troubleshooting. That’s the approach that was used in the Master series of books, and it’s something I adopted for my writing style.

My writing eventually lead to an offer to write for Petri.com. The editor back then came from Windows IT Connections (it’s a small world) and he wanted me to use my style or writing to explain Microsoft’s often confusing messaging in the Hyper-V and Windows Server context, and that migrated into Azure subject matter.

The offers for speaking kept coming, and Mark was always offering advice. He thought I should speak at, what was then, TechEd. There’s a longer story, but I eventually did get into TechEd Europe and the first Microsoft Ignite and, thanks to Mark’s advice over the years, I got great scores. I’ve spoken at many events and webinars. At work, I found myself writing and delivering larger and more complex training, eventually becoming 1-, 2-, and 3-day courses.

For years, Mark has been telling me to start doing my own thing. He reckoned that I should have been travelling Europe and the US, teaching Hyper-V classes. I didn’t really have the confidence that I could make that work but he always told me that I was silly to lack the required confidence. He was certain that people would attend. Last year, my wife said the same thing. Last year, I started Cloud Mechanix, and last month I taught my first Azure training course to a full room in London. Next month, I teach my second class in Amsterdam.

Mark’s influence on me changed my career. He’s always been a supporter, and encouraged me to do more. I know I’m not alone in that either. What he’s done for me lead to me asking him to be one of my groomsmen when I got married and I was honoured when he said yes.

That’s just my story. I’m certain that probably dozens of other people have similar stories of how Mark Minasi has impacted them. Mark has attended the Microsoft MVP Summit this week to say farewell to many friends because he has retired. I’ve seen some of that – people are coming up to say “hi” and “thank you”. I don’t think he can walk down a hallway without someone stopping him – it’s a nod to his impact on so many of us working with Microsoft products.

Mark, if you ever read this, thank you on behalf of me and the many that you have helped or influenced at your classes, the events you have spoken at, or via the books and articles you have written over the last 4 decades.

If you follow me on social media, you might have noticed my escalation (phase 2) against Vodafone Ireland to get my issues resolved or my contract cancelled. I wrote a post, which was a diary of my costs and difficulties in trying to get a normal phone service from the telecoms company; I’d been without mobile data or text services for 10 days (11 including today). I tweeted Vodafone Ireland, to let them know what was to come. This morning, I escalated:

• I posted to the Vodafone Ireland forum on Boards.ie (a huge forum in Ireland), and responded to every relevant article with my story.
• I repeated that process on Vodafone Ireland’s own support forum.
• I replied to every tweet by Vodafone Ireland, including their support tweets – I was about to configure Microsoft Flow to do that for me … that sort of makes this a tech story, right?

By 10:45, things started to happen.

I got the complaint reference number that I’d first asked for on the 19th of Feb (today is the 26th).

By the way, Vodafone blocked me on Twitter straight after that message. That was pointless – I can easily see every message using a second account (I have a few for various things). That was effectively an admission that I had an impact, and would only cause me to escalate.

Armed with the complaint reference number, I opened an official case on the Vodafone site, and then contacted Comreg. They normally have to wait 10 days after a complaint case starts, but after explaining the delay by Vodafone (I have all the screenshots, as you can see in these posts), the regulator offered to backdate the 10 days.

While I was talking to Comreg, a DM arrived in from Vodafone, at 10:54. Apparently some engineers had finished the break they’d started 11 days ago, and were able to look at my case. I rebooted my phone and …. tah dah! … I have data and text services once again.

So what’s the lesson here? Good customer service is cheaper than what a motivated and pissed off customer will do to you. I’d say at least 20,000 people saw what I did, and that stuff will stay on the Internet forever. And that was only phase 2 of my 3-phase plan. I was willing to purchase Google Adwords and advertise on Facebook to do more damage! I’ve bent Vodafone to my will twice, Eircom (now Eir) wrote an apology letter to me once, a debt collector (sent illegally by Eircom for a non-existing contract) apologised to me on the phone, saying I’d never hear from him again, and I made a camera store in the UK apologise and refund me after some dodgy payment practices. Be willing to use the voice that you have, and punish bad customer service. Poor customer service works for bad companies while they save money and you are willing to live with it. When you cost them money by damaging their reputation with the truth, they have to capitulate.

Let me tell you a tale … a tale of a contracted-for and paid-for service mobile phone Internet & SMS/Text data services that Vodafone Ireland is failing to provide me with.

The Outage

This tale of woe starts on Thursday 15^th February. I was on the road to visit a client in Limerick (I live in northern Kildare). I’d pulled into a service station and wanted to check to see what podcasts or audio books I had to listen to on the long drive. And I found that I had no Internet access. It’s not unusual to have blackspots so I ignored the inconvenience. Near the client site, I pulled in and opened my phone to navigate my way there because they had recently moved. And now, in Limerick City, I had no data services, even though I had a full 4G or 3G signal. Hmm! I made my way there anyway, and texted my wife … and the text failed to send. So I had lost all data services: Internet and SMS. Maybe it was a network glitch.

I left 5 hours later and I still had no service. I drove home, verified that I could browse on my wi-fi. I still had no data services when just on the Vodafone Ireland network. I made my first call.

Vodafone Interaction #1 (Day 0)

I got home and called “Customer Care”. I explained the issue clearly and patiently. I rebooted my fairly new iPhone 8 several times as requested. After about half an hour, I was told that either my phone was broken or the SIM needed to be replaced. There was “nothing else” that could be done.

My wife, also with an iPhone and also on Vodafone, came home. We swapped SIMs. My SIM (my Vodafone Ireland account) in her phone wouldn’t work. Her SIM (Vodafone Ireland account) in my phone did work. That meant:

• My phone was fine.
• Either my SIM or my Vodafone Ireland account was at fault.

Replace The SIM (Day 3)

On Sunday 18^th February, I finally had time to visit a Vodafone Ireland store – a 1 hour round trip. I walked in and quickly got a replacement SIM. I got home, swapped the SIM, rebooted and …

The problem was still there. The services that Vodafone Ireland are contracted to offer and paid to do were still not available:

• Data
• Mobile.

Costs that will be invoiced to Vodafone Ireland:

• Mileage: 42 miles * €0.75 = €31.50
• Hourly rate: €350

Vodafone Interaction #2 (Day 3)

Immediately, after that, still on Sunday 18^th February, I called “Customer Care”. I must have spent 45-60 minutes explaining the problem and rebooting the phone as requested. Eventually the agent said there was nothing more he could do for me.

Finally, I thought, my case would be escalated to an engineer. Remember now, this is Sunday. This is when the agent informed me that, yes, my case would be escalated, but an engineer wouldn’t be looking at my problem until Wednesday at the earliest. 3 days!

My problem here is that I needed my phone on Wednesday. My business, Cloud Mechanix, was running a training class in London on Thursday/Friday and I would be travelling on Wednesday. This just was not going to be good enough.

This is when I told the “care” agent that at this time, Vodafone Ireland was no longer offering me the service I had contracted for and paid for. I demanded a release from my contract. I needed a service, and if Vodafone Ireland would not offer me my mobile broadband and texting services, then I would have to get these services that my business needs from elsewhere.

The agent flipped. I repeated myself several times. Eventually I hung up. He called me back. I demanded to speak to a manager, and I was told that was not possible. If you read my previous posts about Vodafone Ireland, then you’ll know the truth about manager callbacks.

By the way, those posts remained on the first page of search results for “Vodafone Ireland Home Broadband” for several years – fixing my technical problem efficiently would have been much cheaper than the SEO damage that I caused this company.

I ended up hanging up again. And he called again, and again, and probably more. I stopped answering.

Workaround (Day 3)

I ended up having to drive 30 minutes, each way, to an Eir store to buy a pay-as-you-go SIM. After unlocking the SIM and paying credit, I had instant text and data services on the Eir network. At least I would have a phone service for my work trip to London.

Costs that will be invoiced to Vodafone Ireland:

• Mileage: 42 miles * €0.75 = €31.50
• Hourly rate: €350
• SIM cost: €20
• PAYG data: €20

Vodafone Interaction #3 (Day 4)

I tweeted my displeasure on Monday 19^th February, making sure that @VodafoneIreland was mentioned. Eventually, they (“Aoife”) asked me to DM my details. I did.

Vodafone Ireland Interaction #4 (Day 4-5)

I waited several hours, and nothing had happened. I warned them that I would be blogging about this, and doing some SEO damage. I also demanded a complaint ID so I could open a case with COMREG, the Irish telecoms regulator. Here was the response, on Tuesday 20^th February:

Sunday 25^th February (Day 10)

The promised contact from the “tech team” didn’t happen. I’ve been to London and back, using my Eir SIM, even though I’ve paid my contracted €60 for this month’s Vodafone Ireland services including:

• Voice
• Data
• Text

Two thirds of those essential services have been unavailable for 10 days now.

So up to now Vodafone Ireland also owes me: €13.01 for services paid that have not been provided. That amount owed back to me increases by ~€1.30 per day for each day that the contracted for and paid for services are not supplied by Vodafone Ireland.

What I Expect

I expect the following:

• An official complaint ID to be provided to me by Vodafone Ireland so I can file a complaint with COMREG.
• The paid-for and contracted-for services to be provided to me immediately, or my contract to be cancelled, at no fault or costs to me, by Vodafone Ireland – an admission of their fault.
• The above costs to me, including my costs to Eir, myhourly rates, and the refunds owed for unprovided services, to be paid in full.

If you work for Vodafone Ireland social media/marketing, then be aware that this will escalate. I’ve done it to you before. I’ve done it to Eircom. I’ll do it to you. It will be cheaper to make me happy than to undo the damage I will incur.

You have until 17:30 on Monday 26^th February to agree to my terms.

Update

I won. I also got a refund via credit to my account.