| 0 |
Subject: warning about officepools
Posted by: CH
- [488421816] Tue, Feb 25, 2003, 14:30
Any hockey fans out there should know how
officepools treated our league y2k this
season. Sometime early Feb 20th, there was
a technical problem on officepools part and
they lost our stats.
It took a few emails to prompt them to do
anything (ie acknowledge us), 4 days later on
Feb 24th, they blamed us for the problem (our
pool is too big apparently - I do not recall any
size guidelines in the initial user agreement -
and our pool is no larger than the ones they
successfully handled in years past) deleted
the remains of our pool and left us in a pretty
bad place. 3/4 of the way through the season
without relaible stats or a stats server.
We are picking up the pieces using another
stat server.
Beware of officepools. If your pool vanishes
through their error, they will abandon you in
mid-season. |
| 1 | The Left Wings
ID: 6142019
Tue, Feb 25, 2003, 21:00
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Is "Officepools" a website?
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| 2 | C.SuperFreaks
ID: 511301516
Tue, Feb 25, 2003, 21:20
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i've been using www.offiecpools.com for 3 yrs and i have yet to have any issues with them.
For 20 bucks cdn it's a bargain to have someone else manage your pool and provide so many input and output parameters is well worth the investment (especially if you are running a 30-50 user league). However it's always a good practice to have yourself a backup. Nothing is foolproof and problems do happen.
I still think officepools.com is awesome. The daily stats and info that accompany each and every roto league on the site is second to none.
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| 3 | izbiztuh
ID: 3810172818
Wed, Feb 26, 2003, 13:01
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I second that emotion CH .
almost feels like the time I told a woman I loved her and she said ''whoa , we are going in different directions here ''
y2k used o'pools for reg season and playoffs , thats 40+ bucks a year that I suppose they dont mind losing .
could be a blessing in disguise as we found a nice replacement at www.poolexpert.com
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| 4 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Tue, Mar 11, 2003, 00:36
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This is colin from officepools.com, and a number of new customers have arrived at my site due to this post (and love it, which is great) however the post is indeed very dishonest. Here is my final email to this customer, verbatim - and believe me I left out all their prior emails to their benefit. My final reply, verbatim (copied from the last email) is as follows - note also that I worked on the pool through my weekend!
========>
I agree - I've refunded and removed
your pool. It seems your pool was
crushed under it's own weight - a pool
with 10 participants normally has about
150 transactions, yours has 2,500! And
where a pool of 10 is normally about
5,000 bytes (5k) in transactions, yours
is 141,000 (ie 141k)!!!
In looking at the pool over the weekend
to figure out exactly what this thing was
with 10 participants and 2,500 transactions -
I looked for past emails from that pool, and
found that I'd received many emails expressing
unhapiness with our service, surprisingly
enough including the most recent help
email last week complaining about the "poor
setup" of officepools.com when in reality it just
doesn't match the setup of your pool. This
would explain why when I went through
my emails there were more emails from this
one pool alone than thousands of others
combined - many with complaints from your
poolies about our services. In fact at one
point the pool admin even asked participants
to start emailing me individually.
I think most people understand that we can
offer a pool for $20 because of the ultra-easy
setup and mainteance facilities provided to the
end user, and most go out of their way not to
email knowing that this is how we keep the
price so low. If all pools emailed as much as
yours did, and used the number of transactions
yours did, we'd have to have a staff of hundreds
of customer support representatives, about 10
unix servers, and charge somewhere in the
neighborhood of $500 per pool.
So I think your suggestion quoted below is best:
> Please either solve out problem or admit
> you cannot and refund our money
you can put the money toward a pool service that
better suits your pool, and we can drop the single
most expensive pool we currently run, or have ever
run in terms of customer support and server
resources - hell, your pool has more data than
pools with hundreds of teams, and emails more
than thousands of other pools combined! Obviously
your pool is not a good fit for our service.
Thank you for helping me resolve this problem to
everyone's satisfaction - you will see the reversal
of payment on your next credit card statement, or
if that one is already in the mail, the one after that...
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| 5 | Pancho Villa
Donor
ID: 1210812
Tue, Mar 11, 2003, 22:27
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Good for you Colin. I've used your site for a while for many drafts and pools and have never encountered a problem that I feel merits public complaints or recognition. Can't go wrong for 20 bucks (even though I liked it more when it was free...LOL) Keep up the awesome site and good work.
P.S. I like the new early update and guru additions. Very cool.
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| 6 | izbiztuh
ID: 3810172818
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 12:12
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Colin , I know for a fact that there are at least a handful of pools similar to ours in which you consider being too big / too many transactions .
I dont remember anything which indicated a limit of transactions on the website . Suddenly there is ? Would have loved to know that we were such a pain for you to deal with earlier .
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| 7 | CH
ID: 488421816
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 13:23
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Officepools set the terms of service for using
their product. We agreed to them.
Midway through the game they lost our pool
and changed the terms of service and threw
us out.
Not a way a reputable company should be run.
And its OUR fault because OUR pool was too
big. Maybe it would make sense to specify
some limit on pool size in your terms of
service.
I apologize in advance to any other pools who
are using officepools who may find that next
year officepools cannot offer the service they
have had this year or that the price for it has
increased significantly.
There are other stat servers out there. I've only
been trying a new one for a few weeks so I do
not feel safe to offer a testimonial for it yet.
Shame is one week before officepools
screwed us over, I would have been prepared
to offer them a testimonial. No longer. If
something goes wrong with your pool, they
have no patience for you (at least they had
none for us).
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| 8 | Dec
ID: 27226613
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 16:03
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2500 transactions for a pool of 10 players look like a lot. What where you doing, Weekly draft?
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| 9 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 16:04
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Colin here again. izbiztuh - Please provide more details on your assertion - quoted thus: "Colin, I know for a fact that there are at least a handful of pools similar to ours in which you consider being too big / too many transactions" - I know of no such pools, and I'm the webmaster! But I guess you have inside info. I would love to hear about the clients you know of that I don't! Our largest pools are all junior league fundraisers, with 900+ teams at 30 picks each, thereby with overall transactions of 18,000 plus additional trades (all for $20 cdn). In fact I let one french pool break the 1,000 team barrier by 50 teams! The only problem with your pool was that 2,500 transactions were crammed into 10 teams (and that y'all felt compelled to email me more than thousands of other pools combined). Please provide Pool ID's and or other details about these pools you claim exist or were cancelled for this reason? Or make them up, because there were none.
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| 10 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 16:10
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Whoops, sorry - need to correct my math on my post above, the largest pools are 900+ teams at 30 picks actually add up to 27,000 transactions, not 18,000 as stated. Wow!
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| 11 | KrazyKoalaBears
Donor
ID: 3515208
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 16:38
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Colin, from someone who runs a sports web site himself ( Kafenatid.net ), maybe it would help if you could explain what the problem was with so many transactions per team. I currently run fantasy games that rack up a lot of "transactions" for each user, but have never experienced any problems like what was stated above. For instance, I run a Hockey Pick'ems game that has over 16,000 rows in the database of picks (1.1 MB of size), 1,019 of which are just for me alone. I also host the TSN Hockey Sortables, which currently has 162,973 rows of player pricing information (a whopping 3.8 MB of size) and still don't have problems accessing that information (you can see an example by clicking into a players details through the Hockey Sortables). I guess my overall question is, what's the big deal with 141 kb? I will be the first to admit that I've never used OfficePools, nor do I know how the backend is setup, but a web app causing these kinds of problems over 141 kb just seems a bit odd from my standpoint. As for the e-mails, I would guess that it's a result of their pool no longer being available. If you pay for something, and it's no longer there, you generally start questioning where it's at. Part of running a business is dealing with customer service issues, no matter how large or small they may be. If you're getting a larger number of e-mails from one particular league, then it seems to me that it would be worth the investment in time to find out how to fix their problem to a.) prevent further e-mails and b.) prevent the league from being wiped out, thus leaving your customers happy and coming back next year. Again, I'm a complete outsider on all of this, but it's not making sense to me why the problem would exist in the first place and I'm just being inquisitive.
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| 12 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 16:59
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No problem KrazyKoalaBears - 141k is not the problem, nor is (normally) 2,500 transactions - it's just that those were all crammed into 10 teams somehow, as trades (mostly) which carry data forward in an additive fashion, so the load is additive (ie new transactions don't replace earlier ones, but rather add to the burden - keeping dates upon dates and trades upon trades in only 10 teams/slots). The emails they sent (as you can see from my verbatim email above) were definitely not as a result of the pool disappearing, they were all sent beforehand - I found all those emails while I was working on their pool over that weekend when I did a search for all emails in my deleted basket from their particular Pool ID - in other words, they were chronic emailers (complainers) long before the pool was gone. I was looking over those emails just to figure out what the hell this pool was all about. I freely admit the fact that they were chronic emailers long before there was any problem limited my recovery efforts after saturday/sunday (especially when they emailed again monday demanding I fix or refund it, I took them up on that offer immediately) - there's no way we can run pools for $20 if we get that many emails per pool (most pools never ever email, there's no need to). I strongly suspect there's a corrupted character in their file somewhere - probably something as simple as that, and that the overall weight of the pool may not be the problem - however finding that one character/line/transaction in a pool that appears to make so little sense is like finding a needle in a haystack. I may work on it again this weekend just out of curiosity - if I can get it running agiain I'd love to see what it looks like through the officepools interface to see exactly what they were doing! I figure I can play higher/lower - ie cut the pool data in half, load it, see if the error is in there - then cut that in half, etc - ie a binary search for the error transaction until I find it - oh boy! The probem is that cutting up the data like that causes other unrelated problems and I have to diagnose each one to figure out if it was related to the original problem, or the slicing and dicing. I repeat: oh boy! Hopefully that's it, but I may do all that just to find it is simply the additive weight, in which case it will be a waste of yet another weekend - but I guess it's all worth it for their $20 (which I've since refunded) - however for users of this (cool) forum that I only just discovered from new users coming to officepools as a result of this post, it might be fun...
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| 13 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 17:36
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PS - just want to add that most if not all emails from the individual poolies of this pool were courteous and thankful for the service, and it appears they were asked to start emailing me individually by the pool administrator(s), likely due to my policy of not adding nhl players who hadn't played at least one game the previous season (except for rookies in the most recent draft). This policy was made clear in the first few days of October, so it's every pool's choice to continue on at that point. In fact, this was the nature of the most recent complaint from the pool admin just before the pool went down (when there was no problem whatsoever) ie that new players that had just played would not be added and online until the next reconciliation, and that he would have to use the 'time travel' function to add them in then, possibly making an adjustment (there are generally 2 reconciliations per week so the wait is generally 2-3 days). The poolies were probably unaware that I'd already explained that policy to their admin, and that they (combined) were emailing un-necessarily - they probably had no idea. I think my courteous verbatim response above and immediate refund speak for itself, especially since the refund was demanded while I was still working on the pool, so enough said. Nonetheless, my curiosity is piqued and I will give it a shot this weekend as per my response to KrazyKoalaBears. I'm still waiting on these other Pool ID's or information quoted by izbiztuh above - although the wait for nonexistant pools could be a long one...
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| 14 | izbiztuh
ID: 0125910
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 18:46
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Well , I dont want to get these other pools/leagues in trouble by mentioning the login info .
there are a few other guru's that are in the other pool/league I am referring to and they know that I'm not feeding you a lie when I tell you that its likely just as busy with transactions as my pool/league was .
I'm not sure where you are getting 10 teams from .My pool had 35 teams in it with 25 players per team . We did our roster moves in your system on sundays around noonish . Some Sundays there would be 30 or so transactions , some less than 10.
note , of the 35 teams , 5 were used as a salary cap indicator for our league , so those 5 never had transactions .
so 2500 transactions divided by 30 teams over late /mid sept up to feb 15th or so . I find that sort of high .Does that include the initial entering of all players for each team which would be close to 1,000 right there ?
as far as emailing you in september with regards to adding some players , whats the problem ? I'm a hockey nerd and I knew that these guys were gonna be playing. When some of the people in my pool kept asking me why so and so wasnt on their team yet via the o'pools d'base I said that I contacted you and you didnt update it as of yet .
You should know that theres alot of pride involved in hockey pools , so its no wonder some of my gm's emailed you as they wanted their teams full and ready for opening day .
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| 15 | CH
ID: 5023618
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 20:20
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Just to put Colin's email in context I thought I would post the conversation (minus the posts where he failed to respond) that led up to his email.
My message:
> Its lunchtime on Monday and I am yet to hear anything from you to show
that
> you have done anything to look into our problem.
>
> Please do something ASAP. Help us recover this pool.
>
> I am quite dismayed with this customer service. After 2 emails on Friday
> you eventually respond with a blowoff message that says we will look into
it
> on Monday. And Monday is here and thus far nothing has happened.
>
> Please either solve out problem or admit you cannot and refund our money.
> And please keep us better informed with any progress that you may have
made
> (if you have done anything whatsoever). 30 dedicated GMs do not
appreciate
> being left in limbo for over 4 days while you do nothing to recover our
> pool.
>
> Please help us and please be far more responsive in the future to any
> legitimate problems that may come up.
>
>
Colin's previous response:
> >
> >Strange - doesn't work for me either, even
> >with a refresh. I'll look into it on monday
> >and see if I can figure out what's happened
> >
> >
> >
My message before this
> >Subject: Lost pool!!!!!
> >
> >
> > > Hello
> > >
> > > I am admin to a pool ID y2kfhl user password: deleted admin password
:
> >also deleted
> > >
> > > Mysteriously it seems to have dissapeared last night.
> > >
> > > I log on as a user and it says this pool has not had any teams entered
> >as
> >of yet - although it has and we have been following it all season
> > >
> > > I log in as admin. It goes through loading league very quickly then
> >hangs
> >on loading league.
> > >
> > > What happened?????
> > >
> > > This is my 2nd email to you. The first was written this morning. I
> >have
> >in the past liked your service. It was reliable and when I emailed you
> >were
> >responsive ... until now....
> > >
> > > This may or may not be related. Yesterday I have to time travel to
add
> >Nikos Dimitrokos to a team in the pool. After doing so everything
worked.
> >I set the end date to April 30th as usual. I saw the early update on the
> >mirror server last night before going to bed, but this morning it appears
> >everything is gone.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> > >
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| 16 | CH
ID: 5023618
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 20:41
|
Messages 12 and 13 would have been nice if Colin sent them directly to us instead of dumping us mid-season. That would be good customer service. It would have helped us reach an understanding.
I did some work to try to figure out how Colin's figure for our number of transactions could be true.
Our pool had 35 teams with 25 players each. 875 transactions entering these players. Now when you enter a player it automatically assumes his position as either forward, defence or goalie depending on which he is listed as. I imagine that it counts as another transaction to change the player's position to a custom position - as some of our players had. 300 players would have had custom positions. So thats 1175 transactions and we have merely entered the pool. Now we updated transactions every week on Sunday (once a week). There were 18 Sundays until officepools lost our pool and kicked us out. In order to make up the remaining transactions, if each team once a week made 2 transactions we would be almost there. Now two transactions could actually be only one transaction in many cases. Lets say you relaplace a player (1 transaction) in a custome position (this would have to be changed every time a player was added). So it wouldn't take much to get to the number of transactions Colin quotes.
Now the problem as Colin appears to be telling us in this thread (as opposed to in the email he sent us) is that something unexpected did happen to our pool. Since we had more transactions than most, its not too suprising that it might happen to our pool and not another. Although this is proof that the either the officepools software or hardware is not error free. How it is handled when one happens tells a lot about the company and how important they view their customers.
In our case, they saw that we email them a lot, so they dumped us. Which is about the worst thing you can do to a pool in mid-season. We were relying on them to calculate our stats and were suddenly left with nothing.
I always assumed that our emails HELPED the people at officepools. I assumed that getting feedback from some of their more dedicated customers would help them to see how their customers viewed them and thus give them ideas where they could improve. I suppose that was incorrect - although this thread will hopefully do the same and lead officepools to improvement - I'm offering them the same advice here for free.
From what I can understand, the business model Colin has in mind is one where you enter your pool pay him money and then do not bug him at all. There are many pools where this model works well. They are the simplest ones. In some pools things get more complicated. I would have no problem paying more money to run one of these pools, but again Colin set the terms of service, we agreed to them and then he dumped us, blaming us for having too big a pool.
We have landed on our feet. We recalculated our pool on the server www.poolexpert.com They have so far been a pleasure to work with. When I emailed them they promptly sent a cheerful response instead of often not responding at all or responding with a terse response as is customary with Colin.
Customer service is important. The customer is always right. That is the one place officepools lacks.
In closing, Izbiztah is correct that there are other large pools on officepools. We both know of them (and some of the people reading this message likely participate in them), but I wont do Colin's work for him to find those pools so that he can try to figure out how to charge them more in the future or dump them because they are too big.
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| 17 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 22:09
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This does not make sense - the original quote from izbiztuh was, and I'll quote it again =>
"Colin , I know for a fact that there are at least a handful of pools similar to ours in which you consider being too big / too many transactions"
So now you're saying that you don't want to get these pools in trouble - meaning that these pools are still operating on officepools with no difficulty? My point exactly!!! Otherwise, what trouble could they be in?
Alternatively, when you say (again in the quote) that "I [Colin] consider being too big / too many transactions" - does that mean I stated as such, or merely that you figure they have the same number of transactions as your pool? As I've stated above, there are many pools with tens of thousands of transactions that dwarf your pool of 2,500 transactions - no argument there, and obviously still operating perfectly. My point exactly!!!
You are right, obviously there is a potential bug somewhere, or file corruption (which happens about 5-10 times per year, always fixed until this one) - so our failure rate is (so far) 1 unfixable one since 1996, and only unfixable in this case because they demanded a refund while I was still working on it Monday morning. And yes, I did say I'd get back to them Monday, and they emailed for a refund that very Monday before I emailed them back - their own posted email shows it!!! Let me quote the relevant part of the very email they posted:
> Its lunchtime on Monday and I am yet to
> hear anything from you to show that
> you have done anything to look into our
> problem.
> I am quite dismayed with this customer
> service. After 2 emails on Friday
> you eventually respond with a blowoff
> message that says we will look into it
> on Monday. And Monday is here and thus far
> nothing has happened.
> Please either solve out problem or admit
> you cannot and refund our money.
This pretty much makes my point - they emailed Monday while I was hacking away at it, after having worked on it over the weekend no less!!! I'm surprised I did work over the weekend, given the complaints already registered to me (which they didn't post). To make it worse, they had emailed (by their own admission) on "lunchtime monday" - I am on PST, and that email was (in my time) 10:04am, hell I hadn't even finished my first coffee of the day and was still answering the rest of the morning's emails!!! (mostly lost passwords, playoff inquiries, etc - most never email, and apologise profusely when they have to, realizing the economic model in play).
It's amazing what people expect for $20.
However, I would like to commend the honest post made by CH above in attempting to account for the number of transactions - each player "pick" is a transaction, and then if the position is later changed is another - plus each trade is a transaction, and each trade adjustment (not every point, just every save operation). I'm not sure if the positional changes would be separated out in each case as separate transactions though quite honestly, I think it depends how/when they're done if I recall correctly.
I again appreciate the honesty of the CH post above in saying "From what I can understand, the business model Colin has in mind is one where you enter your pool pay him money and then do not bug him at all. There are many pools where this model works well. They are the simplest ones" - while that is an extreme overstatement trying to make me look bad, it is to some degree true - virtually all our users understand that continuous emails make our service more expensive and go to great lengths to avoid emailing. For the record, there are massively complex pools that work just fine, but none with so many transactions in so few teams that I know of, but they probably do exist (I wouldn't know if they've never emailed) - lending more evidence to the possibility that the only problem with this pool is a file corruption which I would have eventually fixed, maybe on Monday as promised, had they not copped a 'tude and demanded a refund in their bazillionth email of the year that very monday morning at 10:04am, whilst I was still drinking my first coffee of the day.
So it seems we're in agreement on more than it would seem, and there's little more to be said. I appreciate the airing of grievences in a mostly professional courteous manner, and I also really like this forum - very simple to use, and you can see all the posts on one page (unlike those other tree-type discussion groups) - this is very cool. Due to what I figure are quite a few new pools having arrived on officepools I will contribute $100 to this page if they take visa, from the officepools.com account (I don't have paypal though)
I guess then I won't bother trying to resurrect this pool any more to satisfy everyone's curiosity this weekend, unless anyone truly cares - I know I don't...
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| 18 | KrazyKoalaBears
Donor
ID: 266182910
Wed, Mar 12, 2003, 22:42
|
Colin, about the donation. Registering for a PayPal account is quite simple and can be done with any email you choose (like a business one for business purposes). Once you have done that, you can proceed with your Visa payment just like most other online payment methods.
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| 19 | Colin
ID: 421112416
Thu, Mar 13, 2003, 02:58
|
Regarding paypal, I surfed this site a bit more and found that cheques are acceptable, so I'll cut one at the end of our next billing cycle - it then travels to downtown Vancouver where the investment group cosigns it, then is mailed, so should arrive mid-april (if the moderators are reading this). Not much I know, but it all adds up - our users pay only $20 each but it adds up too.
I am signing off this discussion now and won't respond further to members of this pool no matter what is said, so they can say what they want from here on in with impunity! I have other things to do, daily officepools work plus a full time job to boot, and this pool has taken up waaaay more than enough of my time.
Nice board though, simple and linear with apparantly a good group of hockey fans, it's been kinda fun! (I especially like the slogan "without you it's just rotogr" - seems like the "u" could be a graphical smile in the face of a comically-drawn user, with the smile disappearing on the next frame? Maybe gotlogos.com could do it, no big loss if they don't do a good job at those prices, but sometimes they do a surprisingly good job)
B-bye now...
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| 20 | izbiztuh
ID: 3810172818
Thu, Mar 13, 2003, 06:17
|
Colin , I think if your initial response to us would have been along the lines of .
you know what fellas , there must be a glitch that occured and trying to find it would be like finding a needle in a haystack . I am sorry that this occured and therfore I shall offer you a refund .
or , sorry fellas , I have big plans this weekend and will take a look at your pool monday morning to tackle the problem .
like I said before , we thought we were good clients as we use your service for reg season and the playoffs .we had no idea we were such a burden as we were using your service via the guidlines you provide .
my point regarding the other pool I'm in which more than likely has as many transactions as mine did is this .....
Since we were such a burden to your system , wouldnt they be too ? and .....shouldnt they be aware that you feel this way ?
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| 21 | Andy
ID: 2120148
Fri, Mar 14, 2003, 09:00
|
I'm sorry, but cancelling a pool mid-season is a breach of contract that is not simply a matter of refunding the purchase price. If the issue was money, I would have gladly paid you more to get through the season. What you did Colin showed a great deal of immaturity. The fact of the matter is that you knew the makeup of our league, as we had used you in two prior years if memory serves me.
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| 22 | CH
ID: 488421816
Fri, Mar 14, 2003, 11:09
|
What bothers me about all of this ordeal is the
fact that Colin does not treat us with respect.
The fact that what actually happened
(assuming its the truth) was never explained
until he posts on a message board weeks
later.
All I knew is our pool dissapeared.
I emailed Friday morning as soon as I knew.
It was probably around 6 or 7 AM Pacific Time
(Colin is in Pacific Time so might as well
quote times in that time zone even though its
not my own) that it was sent. What action was
taken? As far as I can tell none whatsoever.
Its not clear the email was even read.
I emailed again Friday evening (3 or 4 PM
Pacific time). Some time later he sent the
short three line response shown in message
15.
I'm not impressed. It takes two tries to get an
answer that sounds like we will look into it
(maybe). But not for a few days. Meanwhile I
worry that everything may be gone.
I notice now that Colin is posting on message
boards at almost 3 AM ET (or midnight
Pacific). See message 19. I'm sure if he
worked as hard in fixing our pool as he did
trying to do damage control after the fact
(staying up until midnight writing about it),
everything would have been fixed quickly (if in
fact Colin's report of what happened is true).
But he does nothing Friday. Or Saturday. Or
Sunday. Or as far as I could tell Monday.
It was 1 PM eastern on Monday and I had
heard nothing whatsoever besides that terse
3 line response Friday. Is anything
happening? I have no idea. But I doubt it. I
ranted a bit. I basically said to please fix
things. If in fact things are not fixable. Tell us
and refund our money. But most important tell
us what the hell is going on. This is the point
where Colin has failed all along.
How does he respond? By throwing us out
completely. All he had to do was write back
and say I am working on it. I have done blah. I
expect it may take X amount of time.
As well he appears to have lied to us. His
response in post 4 tells us our pool is too
large. When KKB asks Colin about this point,
he backs off this point. In a later message he
claims there are many pools larger than ours.
So attempt to blame us for being too big is
debunked.
Now blame us for emailing too often instead.
I do not know how many times Colin was
emailed (I do not have complete records).
Maybe 15-20 times including this stuff about
the lost pool. The majority were at the
beginning of the season saying please add
so and so (people like Dennis Seidenberg
and Jamie MacLennan who were going to be
playing in the NHL to your player database).
Or further messages saying player X (for
example Nikos Dimitrakos) HAS played a
couple games but is not yet in your database.
Please add him. And this is apparently
grounds for Colin dropping us?
Colin asks what do we expect for $20? I will
tell you what I expect regardless of price. I
expect that he calculates our pool
successfully. He failed. In event of problems,
I expect that he keeps us up to date with what
is being done to fix them. Colin claims he
looked at our problem over the weekend (not
sure exactly what that entails - maybe he gave
it a sideways glance or maybe he actually put
some time into it). If he sent an email to tell
us that and give us an update on his progress
that would have solved a lot of this problem.
The problem with officepools is customer
service. If you have a problem, they don't
appear willing to help. This is a case that
clearly proves this point.
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