Saturday, December 16, 2006

I'm Time's Man of the Year!!! - And so are You!

I'd like to congratulate Time for a very timely (forgive the pun) and relevant choice for person of the year. I've never really been a fan, but I think someone over there is definitely on the ball.

Time's Person of the Year

The coincidence in timing of the creation of this blog and Time's choice for "Person of the Year" is pretty amazing.

I started this blog on 12-7-2006 (10 days ago), with simple aspirations - to expose a very funny and mildly disturbing incident to people, with hopes that others would bring forward similar stories and we'd all hopefully gain something from it.

Today the original YouTube posting of the audio of my call has reached the #1 Top Rated for the month for the News and Blogs category with over 360,000 views, 1,700 comments and it has been favorited over 1,100 times.

The orignal putfile.com posting has been viewed over 92,000 times.

This blog has been visited over 220,000 times.

A Google search for verizonmath returns 32,000 hits.

My money has been refunded, verizon's problem has been acknowledged, their policy has supposedly been changed and documented (that remains to be seen), and now many more people are aware of the problem - which will prevent this problem from happening in the future. Also, another great side effect has been that educators are now aware of a deficiency in the teaching of decimals.

Before I go on, I'd just like to ask that anyone with the time and inclination, please put some pressure on Verizon (as you did in my case) to help motivate them to bring Peter's situation the attention it needs to be addressed - I can't belive this has still not been dealt with.

I want to thank everyone who has participated in this discussion and congratulate them for having been part of a new and growing trend. Every individual now has the capacity to bring to light a wrong, expose it to millions of people, and to help make it right.

I think the power of the individual in this new climate will help improve our businesses by ultimately requiring them to provide better customer service, saving people time and therefore improving productivity, and could even help bring peripheral or fundamental problems to light - in this case the sad state of Math education.

Also, it's interesting to realize that this specific process is just one of many that is now possible, where the collective ideas of people around the globe are now able to come together for productive exchange, and produce outputs and outcomes never before possible.

It's a very exciting time!

Thank you all again for all of your supportive comments and feedback. They were very motivational.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're proud of you, man. Great composure and a really great story on how to stick to your cause. Thanks for everything!

Unknown said...

It seems that I can't post pictures here, so this is a link for ya - I don't know if you've seen this or not but I'd like to see Verizon tackle THIS cheque from a Mr. Munroe

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v127/chellekat/1166217802IurSrI6yob_1_1_l.jpg

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Here is the image of that
Cheque

Donna said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MC said...

I am curious as to whether or not asking one of the reps how $1.002 would be read would have cleared anything up... Surely everyone can grasp that 1.002 dollars minus 1.000 dollars is 0.002 dollars. Maybe not. But it's a strategy that was never tried. Who knows?

Unknown said...

What a cop out! They were just too lazy to decide on one person. And if individuals have so much power, why do corporations keep migrating towards digital restrictions management, copy protection, and government tightens their control ever-more over its citizens? I want a recount! lol

Unknown said...

Well Will you are kind of in an awkward position.

You see, if you get your recount you have just supported the times decision proving them correct.

David Gouldin said...

George -

Saw your audio made it to break.com. I'm glad my suggestion worked out for you!

david at benzephyr dot com

Mica said...

This has been used in a few YTMND's as well as being posted on i-am-bored.com

Stupid society....

As an engineering student, I think this is pitiful -_-

Hulio2404 said...

Keep fighting the good fight. This is very, very important and we all have to try to chip in too. You're being far too gracious in portraying this as a customer service problem. Verizon is completely misleading people and then trying to ram rates 100x higher than quoted down people's throats. I just heard the audio for the first time tonight and am in shock at how they conducted themselves. They simply cannot play the stupidity card - they owe a lot of people a lot of money.