People, Conversations, and Dangerous Things
Why medium collapse is bad for communication
Google and Facebook have been working on some interesting projects lately that try to group and otherwise organize people's communication based on the way each company feels people conceptualize their communication. Though email threads weren't new, even back in 2004 when Gmail came out, "conversations" that included sent messages were a unique [citation needed] addition. So, message organization 1: conversations.
Then Google came out with Wave, which obviously didn't last long and wasn't the revolution Google was hoping for. I believe this was because email and instant messaging have traditionally come with different expectations about normative behavior, and the choice of one or the other can be a strong signaling mechanism. Formality, expected length of response, how long is acceptable before responding, and even implied tie strength all play a role in media choice [citation needed]. Google Wave collapsed these two media into one, eliminating the communicative power embedded in media choice alone, confusing users in the process. This is message organization 2: conversations on steroids. Everything is still threaded more or less by conversation, but it becomes less dependent on media choice.
Recently, Facebook began rolling out its new messaging system. This system does two interesting things. First, rather than thread by conversation, it threads by recipient, much the way the SMS app on the iPhone does. Second, while not as unique from a design standpoint, it goes farther than Wave did in its attempt to almost completely abstract the message away from the medium. Their whole pitch was basically that it would let you send a message to a person, without having to think about what medium you were using. In theory, this sounds great, but they forgot that, like I said, different media do actually have different affordances, and media choice can be an almost active participant in a conversation. To write a long-form email, a quick hello, or a social coordination message (SMS-style) all in the same interface just doesn't make sense to me, especially when the sender can't know what kind of device the recipient will be using.
In a small concession to this awkwardness that I think speaks volumes about the way people really use different communication channels, Facebook did add two checkboxes in the messaging interface:
One lets the sender decide whether or not to send the message to the recipient's mobile phone, and the other essentially changes it from IM/SMS mode (press return/enter to send) to long-form mode (press return/enter to insert a line break). These completely change the nature of the medium, and I'm not convinced they should ever have been combined in the first place.
Assuming a conversation/people dichotomy for message organization, how does usage context play a role? Is the conversation model more appropriate in a task-oriented environment, which email often is, and is the person-no-matter-the-medium model more appropriate to social contexts? Maybe. But I'm going to stop here.
And of course, I need to bump George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind to the top of my reading list now.
On Architects and Mediated Architects
There seems to have been a recent uptick in the amount of discussion about the relationship between traditional architecture and information architecture, specifically in what the two fields have to learn from each other, both as practice and theoretical discourse. (The basics are laid out in Brett Ingram's piece in the November+December 2009 issue of interactions.)
The latter came to my attention first, when I was exposed to — and impressed by — the extent to which architecture (at least within the ivory tower) rests on solid philosophical grounding, whereas IA seems almost purely practice. Where, I wondered, are these conversations happening in the Information world. Of course, architecture has a few thousand years on IA as a discipline, but interaction design philosophy is starting to happen.
After taking a class with Malcolm McCullough, a champion of the architecture–interaction design relationship, and attending a bunch of the UM Taubman College’s Future of (Design|Urbanism|Technology|History) conference series, it became clear to me that architecture is looking to interaction design, user experience design, and information architecture for inspiration, particularly with regard to ethnographic methodologies, user-centered design, and technology. But, at least from my vantage point, there seems to be relatively little flowing the other direction.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this void in information discourse. IA Dan Klyn has been wondering something similar, and doing something about it, at least by writing and spurring conversation. The discussion that ensued in response to the above-linked post on the architecture forum Archinect is an interesting, if somewhat semantic, discussion of who and what is an architect.
So in a display of bad academic form (but hey, this is a blog…), I’m going to not track down original sources and just trust Archinect user namhenderson, who reports that IA Jesse James Garret posits that the act of user experience design is not medium specific; interaction designers and architects simply use different materials. (Based on the discussion at Archinect, I’d love to see some more discussion of what an IA’s materials are and how the separation of IA from UI widget design and visual design impacts this and the process.)
I’m going to take it one small step further: traditional architects are Architects, and information architects (and user experience designers) are Mediated Architects. And as Malcolm will tell you, buildings are becoming (thanks to technology) or are being recognized as (thanks to environmental awareness) information mediators in and of themselves, a trend that will likely blur the line that currently distinguishes the design of unmediated physical experiences from the design of purely digitally mediated ones.
Still, this seems to be a realization that is being more readily acknowledged in the academic worlds of traditional architecture and ubicomp than in the practice of architecture or information architecture. Hopefully, that’s only because embedded and building-scale digital technologies are relatively new, so neither practice has much experience working with these new materials, materials that can, and must, belong simultaneously to Architects and Mediated Architects.
So you want to compete at CHI?
My former teammate Debra Lauterbach recently wrote a great blog post with suggestions for potential CHI Student Design Competition participants. I agree with everything Debra said, but I wanted to weigh in with my own thoughts, reflections, and ideas, as well.
Trust the process
I was fortunate enough to have taken SI 682, the course that can provide a framework for the CHI competition, in my first semester at SI, and concurrently with SI 501, the Contextual Inquiry class. While I don’t want to bias anyone who has yet to take 501, I was really glad to have been exposed to the Contextual Inquiry process first in 682 (682’s schedule runs faster than 501’s). I might not be allowed to say this out loud, what with PEP credits and all, but by choosing to do a CHI project, you are probably opting to work without a client. As a more independently and entrepreneurially minded person, I appreciated this, especially because it gave me an opportunity to experience Contextual Inquiry on a more student-directed project; in SI 501, it felt like forcing a project with little to no intrinsic merit into the CI process just for the sake of doing the process. When applied appropriately — and by taking appropriate liberties — the process can be very revealing, as was the case for our project. Our solution was drawn directly from, and involved a symbiotic relationship between, two of our personas. Our personas were developed directly from our affinity diagram. And our affinity diagram was synthesized directly from our interviews.
Design what matters
As Debra described in her post, the Student Design Competition is not an interface design competition, but that doesn’t mean you can focus entirely on research and concept/service design. The visual design of your poster and presentation matter — a lot. While the judges and their interests change every year, there will almost certainly be someone who cares about visual design. In 2009, the then-coordinator of the SDC, Jon Kolko, gathered all 10 semifinalists teams together in a huddle and tore us collectively to shreds for having, on whole, poorly designed posters. Which leads me to my next point:
Check out the judges
If you make it to the semifinals, once they’re announced, look up each of the judges and make a note of their interests. It doesn’t take much time, but when we found out that one of our judges was very process oriented, we knew to include process material on our poster, and we knew what to engage him on during the poster session.
Narrow the scope
Local is big; diversity is big. Before you even begin your research, narrow the problem space you’ll be investigating. We narrowed “local” to “stuff that is already in your local community that people are buying and importing new anyway.” This broad space led to thoughts around borrowing, and finally led us to thrift shops, as Debra describes. Diversity can mean a lot of different things, so instead of trying to “jump to solutions”, come up with a short list of what diversity can mean, then focus your research from there. Solutions will emerge from your research.
Engage with the community; make it relevant
Southeast Michigan provides many fascinating case studies in diversity: U of M took its admissions policy to the Supreme Court; de facto segregation between Detroit and the suburbs is still prevalent; Detroit’s per capita annual income is under $15,000, while two adjacent counties are among the nations 100 wealthiest; Dearborn is the heart of the American Arab and Muslim communities, the latter of which in particular is experiencing huge growing pains and assimilation questions. Once you’ve decided what aspect of diversity you’ll be looking at, get out there and talk to people: activists, non-profits, and regular folks on the street. Being engaged and relevant will make your project so much more compelling.
Have a solution that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable
A mobile app that establishes trust between total strangers to the point that they will be willing to walk together in the dark? Getting people to look for items at thrift stores for you? Sounds crazy, no? But these are the solutions arrived at by the previous two winning teams. They are original, non-obvious, and decidedly push the boundaries of what seems sociologically feasable. This is what excites the judges — or at least is what excites me. But to pull it off, you have to demonstrate that it can work, which nicely segues to the penultimate point:
User testing ≠ sociological feasibility testing
And you should do both! You will end up doing some user testing, but it’s more for the class than for the competition. Sociological feasability testing is what you really need to back up your work. For us, that meant two things: spending a day in area thrift shops looking for items people were asking for in existing venues like craigslist and Freecycle, and tracking down representatives of our personas and determininng whether they would play the roles we wanted them to. Last year’s team went through a similar exercise, spending many hours in a cold, dark Diag getting reactions to their system.
If you can confidently tell a judge that your hair-brained scheme at least has a good change of working, and you can point to existing academic research and your own legwork to prove it, you’re probably in pretty good shape.
Get going!
Getting to the point where you’re in good shape is a lot of work, so start now. As a first-semester student, I was expecting things to ramp up slowly. Fortunately, I had a couple second-year students on my team to snap me out of it. I distinctly remember getting an email from Debra fairly early on suggesting that we have two or three interviews done — by Wednesday. It freaked me out a bit, but certainly got me moving. It’s an exciting pace at which to work, and 100% worth it.
Good luck!
A return to girltalk?
Several friends-who-are-girls of mine have recently starting talking on Twitter about listing (the closest one can get to "friending") each other on the online dating site OkCupid. This struck me as odd, especially as a guy, but a bit of further consideration has led me to this hypothesis:
As close ties have become weaker and fewer [1] [2] and the concept of friendship more explicitly and publicly articulated [3], I can't help but wonder if opportunities for "girl talk" have become fewer. Girls listing their real-life girlfriends on OkCupid provides a way to articulate those ties and provide a social object [4] (the profile) around which to engage in conversation about boys and dating in general.
As not-a-girl, I can't speak first hand to any of this, so comments/discussion are welcome.
- Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. 2001 [↩]
- Akst, Daniel. America: Land of Loners?". In The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010 [↩]
- Larsen, M.C. Understanding Social Networking : On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. 2007. [↩]
- Engeström, Jyri. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack... and other social objects. 2008. [↩]
Why?: A few thoughts on Adam Greenfield's Everyware
Sections one through three are posited on the assumption that everyware is, in fact, something that we (“we” the citizens and consumers in the First World) actually want. I am not convinced, so I was very relieved to read the second half of the book, in which Greenfield recognizes the many potential pitfalls of ubiquitous computing, pitfalls that I believe will prevent (hopefully!) an everyware at anything near the scale he seems to want.
There is nothing more irritating than a computer trying to predict what I want. (Those icons are on the desktop for a reason, whether I use them or not. And when I’m ready to make a list, I’ll let you know.) Yet most of his examples until the end involve rooms that predict your lighting and temperature preferences and other such uselessness. But today, each of these “manual” actions represents a decision, a choice that helps us shape our daily lives. In much the same way Twitter informs through awareness of the routine, our lives are shaped by the performance of the routine. Everyware threatens to deny us the everyday decisions and circumstances that make life interesting. As Malcolm McCullough once said, “I have an active role in programming the thermalscape of my domestic scene.” Likewise, though only acknowledged briefly in a footnote, everyware also has the potential to deny us the serendipitous interactions that break up everyday monotony at least, and open opportunities at most.
Not until the end of the book, perhaps feeling a little defensive after enumerating many flaws and potential hazards of everyware, does Greenfield provide useful examples of ubiquitous computing. I hope that whatever comes of this, it does not annoy, does not surveil, and does not further alienate the “users”.
How is the weather?: data, observation, and the generation gap
This past weekend, my parents were out of town, and unforeseen circumstances made it necessary for me to spend a lot of time (all but overnight really — although night starts pretty early…) with my maternal grandmother, better known as Bubby.
For those of you who may not know, I’m a bit of a weather nerd, so when a tornado watch went up Friday afternoon, I was pretty excited. After taking Bubby out to dinner, I put on a movie (Fiddler on the Roof, just to be stereotypical), but, of course, I had to keep abreast of any potentially severe weather conditions. Out of this came my favorite interaction of the whole weekend.
As we were watching the movie, I pulled out my iPhone to check the latest watch/warning/advisory and mesoscale discussion issues from the Storm Prediction Center, the latest statements from the local National Weather Service office, and, of course, radar. I explained to Bubby that I was checking the weather, at which point she simply looked out the window, listened to a peal of thunder, and shrugged her shoulders, saying, “It’s bad,” as if to say What do you want to do about it?.
And that, to me, is representative of the difference between my data-driven generation and previous generations. On one hand, having data can be both insightful and actionable. But on the other hand, is our reliance on sensors, data, and computer modeling enabling our detachment from the observable world? What has been gained — and what has been lost — by my getting weather data that was collected by ground-based and satellite sensors, sent to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, run through computer models, and sent over fiber optic cables to servers that let me retrieve aggregate and interpreted data on my phone, when looking out the window can clearly tell us that the weather is bad?
Even today, the NWS recognizes the fallibility of sensors, relying on storm reports from thousands of trained weather spotters, most of whom use amateur radio, a technology that probably deserves its own blog post for its incredible power despite — and because — it does not rely on any large communications infrastructure.
To be sure, forecasting saves many lives. But was forecasting of acute severe weather events really that bad before humans had even urbanized? I heard it said on the BBC the other day that at one time, some people could tell what species a tree belonged to just by listening to the wind rustling its leaves. I bet those people knew when a storm was coming, too.
On mediascapes and landscapes: filtering, public space, and serendipity
It is often argued that centrally and corporately controlled mass media limit serendipitous discovery, but on further inspection, in appears to be more a matter of degree. In "The Daily Me", the first chapter of his book Republic.com, Cass Sunstein lays out a continuum from the completely uncurated to the individually filtered, with the mass media, offering curated content ranging from general interest to esoteric, situated somewhat centrally. He makes a rather compelling analogy between serendipitous encounters with content, when unfiltered by the consumer, and serendipitous encounters with people, situations, and environments in public space. I suggest that, just as public space is designed to afford particular types of interaction, so, too, are our mediascapes designed, with producers and editors playing the roles of urban planner and architect.
The design of public space serves to provide the initial conditions to a complex system of interaction that, if well designed, encourages the emergence of some set of behaviors or norms. Although the environment is designed and certain types of interaction may be preferred by the designer, behavior itself is still dictated by the collective behavior of individual agents; the role of the designer is merely to provide an environment that is more or less conducive to serendipitous interaction. Individuals can choose to frequent some places while avoiding others based on preference, but by virtue of its complex nature, public space must afford some degree of serendipity.
Like an individual navigating public space, an individual may choose to frequent some media outlets while avoiding others, usually because of a preference for a choice made by one producer or editor over that made by another. In deciding which individual pieces of content to publish, producers are creating an environment that offers a greater degree of uniformity or variety, offering a greater or lesser amount of exposure to content that readers or viewers may not have chosen for themselves in an individually filtered environment.
Just as urban planners an architects make decisions that impact the interaction within the spaces they design, through the decisions they make as filters, producers and editors can choose the extent to which the media environments they design afford serendipitous content discovery.
Another small-world internet story
A long time ago
In a signal processing course I took back in my Electrical Engineering days, we were given an audio clip of then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's translator issuing the following phrase:
But we too, as you know, don't kill flies with our nostrils.
NPR's Talk of the Nation did a segment around that time on phrases that don't translate well, and I submitted the audio clip. It got read on the air a few days later.
This past weekend
This past weekend I went skiing in northern Michigan with some friends from school. Among them was a winter-admit student who is just starting this semester.
Today
I randomly decided to search for that old Khrushchev phrase to see if there was any more info about it out on the internet. Searching for the exact phrase in quotation marks returned only one result: a tumblr page on which someone had posted the quote.
It turns out that tumblr page belongs to the girl I met this weekend. This is not the first time such a thing has happened to me, but it's still crazy.
On Interruptions: Theory and Practice
This past week, I was given the assignment of conducing a brief lit review of HCI research on interruptibility. I was asked to comment and critique the work, and give my own suggestions for future directions for research.
Part I: Gone
I’ve traditionally been a pretty interruptible person: I get Growl notifications when I receive new emails and tweets, I get push notifications on my phone of Twitter mentions and direct messages, and my phone is always on me, subjecting me to potential phone calls and SMS messages. On top of that, I have a work-to-“reward surfing” ratio that is probably approaching 1.25-to-1 (although I haven’t done any work to confirm this with Slife or RescueTime). It’s pretty bad.
Partly so I could finish the paper in a reasonable amount of time, partly as an experiment in uninterruptibility, and partly to prove to myself that I wasn’t addicted to the constant stimulation of communications and information technology (“I could quit if I wanted to…I just don’t want to.”), I decided to take myself entirely off the networked communications grid for a large block of time.
I had toyed with this tactic before, abstaining from email and Twitter for 30 or 60 minutes at a time, but addictive behavior suffers from a slippery slope problem, so I inevitably was able to rationalize leaving Mail.app open in the background, convinced its interruptions would be negligible, which is, of course, a fantasy.
And so: my phone was in airplane mode in my bag; everything but the Airport, volume, keyboard (I use Dvorak), and Dropbox menu extras were gone, including the clock; Growl was stopped; the hot corner for Dashboard was disabled; the only apps I had running were Preview (gotta read), Pages (gotta write), and Safari (gotta find what to read); browsing was allowed for the sole purpose of finding and downloading academic papers, which meant primarily the university and ACM libraries. The goal was to block out any external information not directly related to the completion of the paper. I still kept approximate time, but the old fashioned way: by the clock tower.
And so I read and wrote, from 8:15 to 17:15. (Ok, I had lunch.) And the incredible thing was: it wasn’t that hard! By setting explicit rules up front rather than allowing myself to decide when I’d “earned” a break, I was able to stick to it because I gave myself no option, no opportunity to start sliding down that slippery slope. If the temptation to check something arose — which was surprisingly infrequently — I was able to refrain because I knew how angry I would be with myself later.
Another observation about this experience is that by not subjecting the mind to a constant bombardment of information, it is able to stay calmer and quieter, which, as I know because of the sabbath, can be incredibly refreshing.
Summary: it is possible to disappear for a day, it is a very productive tactic, and it feels very rewarding.
Part II: Supply-Side Interruptions
I read four studies on interruptibility (three from ACM/SIGCHI, one from ASIS&T). I also read two essays on the subject: a wonderful work by David Kirsh aptly titled A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload, and the classic chapter from Yoshiro Miyata and Don Norman, Psychological Issues in Support of Multiple Activities. [1]
I came to the following rather disheartening conclusion: the current vein of HCI research into interruptibility and notification ignores a substantial body of work, including some by the very authors I take issue with, that suggests that in order to be truly productive, people need uninterrupted blocks of time that are at least 15 minutes long; some say up to two hours. Yet the systems they are devising and testing, the aim of which is to delay interrupting notifications until appropriate “break points”, delay on the order of just 90 seconds. While there is some evidence to suggest that this might be helpful, I feel the real issue lies elsewhere, and is being ignored by the HCI community.
The demands that social norms have placed on users have led them to believe they are more capable of handling interruptions than they really are, and they expect their computing environments to satisfy that belief. Under the current interruption regime, people are never given a chance to engage in Miyata and Norman’s task-driven processing (a state in which a person is so engrossed in an activity that they essentially block out all external stimuli); an entire generation has been groomed to be entirely interrupt driven (a state in which a person is very sensitive to external stimuli, i.e., easily distractible), and until interruptions start coming at a much slower rate, people will continue to suffer from an inability to complete tasks uninterrupted.
While I can appreciate what the current work is trying to accomplish — making interruption more manageable and palatable — there is a failure to recognize that there are two sides to the HCI equation: human and computer. It is unquestionably easier to engineer computers than it is to engineer humans, yet the human mind has adapted, albeit for the worse, to the demands placed on it by computers, and those of us in the HCI field must take more drastic action to begin to reverse the chaotic, interrupt-driven, anxiety-laden demands placed on all of us by increasingly pervasive networked computing.
What is needed is a paradigm shift from purely technical solutions to the problem of interruption to one that also helps get at the root, social cause of the issue. Just because I can check my email while in the shower does not mean that I should, that I should want to, or that I should be expected to. This last point, social expectation, is what drives technical innovation. Perhaps it is time to push back the other way.
- References available upon request. [↩]
In Pursuit of Consumerism
or, How I Got My iPhone
On January 9, 2009, Phil Schiller (Apple’s VP of Worldwide Marketing) revealed to New York Times technology columnist David Pogue that Apple’s product timeline was settling into an annual cycle that included updated iPhones in June. For nearly a year-and-a-half, the maximum available storage capacity had been stagnant at 16 GB. The day the original iPhone was introduced, I had decided that I would get one as soon as it hit 32 GB. Now there could be little doubt: a 32 GB iPhone would become available in June or July of 2009.
Fast forward to May. The Apple rumor mill is swirling with speculation about the imminent, but still unannounced, iPhone, and the general consensus is that it will be revealed at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference; the keynote speech — complete with product unveilings — is to be delivered June 8th.
The Great Switch
Since we first got mobile phones in the mid-to-late 1990s, my family had been with Verizon. Generally, we had been happy with the coverage, and had relatively few complaints, with two major exceptions: one is that they have a poor selection of phones, and those that they do support come laden with their proprietary firmware that cripples Bluetooth functionality forcing customers to pay ungodly sums of money to transfer photos (or other media) to and from their phones. The other is their lack of iPhone. (That Verizon turned down the iPhone when first approached by Apple is not surprising considering their history of wanting complete control over their phones' software.) The iPhone is, of course, only available in the United States on AT&T. Therefore, I would have to switch all five lines of my family's plan to AT&T.
The fine print
Over two years had passed since the last time any phones on our account had been upgraded. The exception was my sister, who had broken her phone in November of 2007. At that time, I told her to make sure that when she got a new phone, that she did not sign any contracts because I wanted to go month-to-month in anticipation of the iPhone. Evidently, the Verizon people who sold her a new phone were sneaky, because while she insists that she did not accept a two-year agreement, her phone was in fact under contract until November of 2009.
I would have none of it! A new iPhone was coming out in June, and I was going to get it in June!
That's when I started googling (I believe "proper verbs" can be lowercase) around for ways to finagle my way out of a Verizon contract without having to pay an Early Termination Fee (ETF). I found several options of somewhat dubious moral quality (having someone claim that you died, etc.) before I finally hit the jackpot, thanks to Ely Rosenstock.
The gist of it is that a Verizon contract stipulates that they have the right to change their prices during your contract, but that if any of those changes have a "material adverse effect" on you (i.e. it'll cost you more than it did before), you have the right to cancel your contract with no ETF, provided you do so within 60 days of being notified of the change. Luckily for me, about 55 days earlier there had been a note on the bill informing us that the Federal Universal Service Charge (FUSC) would be increasing by some nominal amount. But a material adverse effect is a material adverse effect no matter how small, so with just a few days left, I gave them a call.
Actually, before calling Verizon, I figured I'd give AT&T a quick call to find out how number porting would work, especially since I suspected it might not be a straight-forward cancelation because I would be exercising the ETF loophole. This is where I learned how a number port works:
To switch from Provider A to Provider B, you give Provider B your Provider A account information so Provider B can call Provider A and them to both port the number and close the account.
I thanked Patricia, my AT&T sales representative, for the information, and told her that I wasn't quite ready to make the switch yet because I had to work everything out with my family (remember, I'm switching four phones in addition to mine) and Verizon. Seeing a sale slip through her fingers, Patricia told me that it was my lucky day because if I switched that day, and that day only, she could waive the activation fee on all five lines (a $36 x 5 = $180 value). That sure got me moving, and she agreed to call me back at 22:00 Eastern to finish the sale.
Following Ely's detailed instructions, I called up Verizon. I had a really great rep. in the cancellation department named Phyllis. (Seriously, really great.) She put me on hold for maybe 10 minutes while she consulted with her supervisor, and when she came back she said that as long as the number port was complete and the account closed by June 1, I would not have to pay the ETF.
Patricia called me back right on time. I went through the process of opening an account and ordering five free phones. The only things I paid for were two car chargers for my parents and two-day shipping, which I bought to make sure I'd be able to activate them easily by the 1st.
Activation
A big box from AT&T arrived at my dad's office on Thursday the 28th. My parents came to Ann Arbor to have dinner with me that evening, so I took my new, but temporary, Sony Ericsson W350a (which I got because it has iSync support), and tried to activate it right away. I first tried the online activation system, but for reasons that remain a mystery to me, I was unable to activate successfully. Once again, this time from Skype in anticipation of my number being cut off during the call, I called customer service. A helpful — but somewhat less knowledgeable — woman took care of porting my phone number and activating my new phone. Not all was well in the netherworld that lies betwixt Verizon and AT&T, however.
My number had made the transition to AT&T, but the other four lines on the account were stuck in purgatory: calling any of those numbers resulted in a recorded message from Verizon stating that the number was no longer active. This meant that AT&T had instructed Verizon to close the account, which they are supposed to do only once all lines had been activated on AT&T's network. Consequently, each of the other phones had to be activated on AT&T in order to remain an active line. Since my parents were not planning to activate that night, the process had to be accelerated somewhat. I know not whether it was the fault of the rep. who took care of my activation or if it was a systemic problem. I suspect the former.
My mom called me in a panic, saying that the AT&T customer service call center was closed for the night, and would not reopen until the next morning. This was, in fact, a serious issue because my parents' land line is a VoIP line through Vonage, which relies on both power from DTE Energy and data from Brighthouse, making failure a not-too-unlikely prospect. Fortunately, Vonage offers automatic failover to another line, in this case my mom's mobile. Because of her aging parents, it is necessary that she be reachable twenty-four hours a day, so a night without an active mobile phone was not an option.
After calling several numbers and listening to several recorded messages, I finally discovered the AT&T after-hours emergency service number which, incredibly, does not have an automated call screening system; a human answered my call right away. He was able to connect me with the automated, over-the-phone activation system. My mom's phone was all set within ten minutes. The next day I called the automated activation system myself and took care of the other three phones. Finally, we were settled in to our new wireless provider. All that was left was to wait for the new iPhone to be released — or so I thought….
This opportunity may self-destruct in 30 days
I'd first heard rumblings that I might not qualify for full upgrade pricing if the new iPhone was not released within my 30 day "buyer's remorse" period when I went to see the (quite good) Disney-Pixar movie Up. A friend of a friend told me that he knew people who, when the 3G came out, were unable to get it at the cheapest (i.e. most highly subsidized) price because they were too far into their AT&T contracts, but not far enough in to warrant an upgrade. This concerned me because, though rumors were plentiful, Apple had yet to make any official announcements, and I was taking a bigger gamble than I thought.
I called Patricia, my AT&T sales rep, to double-check that as long as I re-up my two-year contract, I will be able to get the new iPhone, whenever it comes out, at the fully subsidized price. She assured me that it would be no problem. I am not sure she was right, but fortunately, it didn’t matter.
The Announcement
On June 8, Phil Schiller gave the keynote address at WWDC 2009. I won't give a full review of the address, but suffice it to say that with about fifteen minutes to go of the two-hour talk and no word of new iPhone hardware, I was getting very nervous. Finally, with ten minutes remaining, Phil announced — in classic Steve form, but without his inimitable[1] style — that there would, indeed, be a 32 GB iPhone, and that it would be available in eleven days, on June 19. Worry and anticipation could now be replaced by excitement and anticipation.
I thought it prudent to spend those ten days making sure everything was in order; it's a good thing I did. As soon as the availablility date was annouced, I tweeted, "I will be getting an iPhone on June 19", and no corporation was going to make a liar out of me.
Some eligibility is more equal than others
When I got home from work that day (if I waited even that long), I checked my upgrade eligibility at both Apple’s and AT&T’s websites. Both said that I would have to pay the full, unsubsidized price of $699, which I was definitely not about to do.
The following morning, I called AT&T customer service on my way to work. The representative I spoke with was very friendly, but very uninformed (and quite possibly less intelligent). I explained that I was in my 30-day buyer’s remorse period, and would be returning my current (i.e. stopgap) phone for the iPhone the day it was released. I explained that I was hoping to pre-order the phone, and wanted her to change my eligibility status in the computer system so I could do so. She told me, correctly, I later learned, that she could not do that. She went on to say, however, that Apple handled all matters of eligibility with regard to the iPhone. This made no sense to me, but I took her word for it.
The next day, I stopped at the Apple store on my way home from work. I explained to one of the guys working the floor that I had spoken with AT&T and was told that it was Apple who handled iPhone eligibility. He said that my instinct was right, and that Apple has absolutely nothing to do with upgrade eligibility in AT&T’s system. This made much more sense to me. I called AT&T back, hoping that this time I would win the game of call center roulette.
I spoke to a guy who told me that as long as I had my temporary phone, I would not be eligible for an upgrade. In other words, what I would have to do is return my phone, which would change my eligibility, and buy an iPhone. Since I wanted to pre-order, I would have to be without a phone for a week. If I wanted a phone during the time between when I returned my temporary phone and had an iPhone in my hands, I would have to borrow a GSM phone from a friend.
That day, AT&T revealed that all new pre-orders would not be filled until the first or second week of July. This limited my options further, because it meant I had to pre-order from Apple.
The next day, I went to the Ann Arbor AT&T store, where Rodger was able to confirm what I had been told on the phone. He had the additional suggestion of buying an off-the-shelf pre-paid phone from Best Buy or Wal-Mart for not much more than $20 and dropping in my existing SIM card. At that point, I remembered (I don’t know why it escaped me until then) that my sister, who was out of the country for several months, had a phone sitting in a box at my parents’ house (35 miles away in Farmington Hills) that I could easily borrow for a week.
On Sunday the 14th, I went home. With only six days remaining until I would have an iPhone, I immediately swapped the SIMs, cleared what had been my phone for the last two-and-a-half weeks, synced my sister’s phone with my computer so I would have my contacts, and went to return my phone to the local AT&T store.
The saleswoman thoughtfully wanted to make sure that I had upgrade eligibility before walking out of the store. Several times she tried performing a procedure that I came to know was called reversing an upgrade, but to no avail. Unsure why it didn’t work, she added a note to the account, but I left with two phones, and without eligibility.
The clock was ticking.
Back in Ann Arbor on Monday, I decided to try again. This time, it was Kyle who helped me. After much back-and-forth between several employees, assistant managers, and the manager, it was finally determined that reversing an upgrade is exactly that: reversing an upgrade. New service is not considered an upgrade; therefore, there was no upgrade to reverse, and there was no way I could get iPhone eligibility before the fast-approaching Friday release date. I went ahead and returned my phone anyway, just to get half of the exchange process out of the way before what I was anticipating would be a busy Friday morning at whatever store I ended up.
Now I had one, and only one, option for getting an iPhone on June 19th: wait in line at an AT&T corporate store. No pre-ordering. No Apple store.
On Thursday evening I was back in Farmington Hills for a rehearsal, so I decided to spend the night there. My dad and I would wake up early to get in line, then, hopefully, both get iPhones. On the way home from rehearsal, I made a quick stop at the AT&T store just to double-check that everything was squared away. It was. I also made sure that pre-sales and regular sales worked the way I hoped. Again, they did.
The store would have two separate stocks of iPhones: one for those who pre-ordered, the other for anyone who had not. The doors would be opening at 7:00 am. Customers who had pre-ordered would be allowed in first. Not until 10:00 am (or no one in line had pre-ordered, whichever came first) would other customers be served. That meant that the only way I could absolutely guarantee that I would have a phone was by being the very first non–pre-orderer in line.
The line, if you could call it that
The store is situated in the heart of suburbia in a corner building shared with Old Navy and Potbelly. Determined — perhaps overly so — to be the very first person in line, I arrived at 2:30 am, just as the cleaning crew was leaving Potbelly. I backed into a parking spot and settled in for the wait with a book, some lentil soup, and a jar of water. I slid over to the passenger seat to read, while my dad was resting at home; it would be up to me to let him know when he should come out.
I couldn’t have been there for more than an hour when two Farmington Hills police cars pulled up. Evidently, someone thought it suspicious that someone would pull into a parking lot in the middle of the night, back into a space, and sit in the car as if they were waiting for something. I politely explained the situation, that I was first in line for the new iPhone. They doubtlessly thought I was odd (an accurate assessment, I admit), but they let me be. They probably had a good chuckle about it as they were driving away. At least it’s nice to know the neighbors are vigilant.
Much to my surprise, suburbia does not sleep at night. It was particularly interesting to watch the near-constant flow of trucks, most of which were carrying food, lumber in and out of parking lots and loading docks. It was a small glimpse into one of the many hidden components of our society that make it tick.
Around 4:30, the thunderstorms started to roll in. I was expecting them, but the lightning was impressive indeed. Still the only one in the parking lot, it was becoming apparent that no one else would be braving the rain, even from the relative comfort of a car. Shortly after 5:00, I went home to use the bathroom and to see if my dad wanted to come back for the final stretch.
I pulled back into my parking space shortly after 5:30. This time, there was a single other car in the parking lot, which I quickly realized belonged to the store manager. In half-hour intervals, more employees would pull in, each bearing some sort of refreshment: bagels, coffee, ice, juice for the line that they, too, were anticipating. Each time, I was hoping that someone would join me. I watched as the first two employees took down the 3G poster and replaced it with that for the 3GS. I watched as the cleaning lady (who drives a late-model Cadillac) vacuumed and dusted the store. I watched as the manager replaced the floor model 3G iPhones with the 3GS iPhones. Still, I was the only one in line.
It was not until 6:45, fifteen minutes before the store opened, that a family of five pulled up in their SUV. Finally, someone else in line!
They, like most people who showed up right at seven, had placed pre-orders. Only the guy directly behind me hadn’t pre-ordered. Luckily, few people braved the weather, so it didn’t take more than twenty minutes before I was allowed in. While Chelsea was helping me through the transaction, my dad came in to join me. (I had called him.)
The store employees were just as surprised as I was at the meager turnout. The previous year, they said, the line had been wrapped around the corner. The bad weather must have kept people at home.
Finally, I could relax. I had my iPhone. Mission accomplished.
[1] I first heard this word from Professor Mick McQuaid, in describing the desirability of his classes as a result of his teaching style. He was right.