Our garden is kicking some butt. It gets direct sunlight all day long, and isn't really bothered by bugs or insects; the peppers are big and vibrant, and the gigantic thing growing up our house is a gourd plant. Our tomatoes don't seem to want to do anything this year except grow taller; they maybe have SARS. Who knows.

Ill-structured thoughts ahead.

I find new things each day that I've lost in the "great Sony fuckup of 2003", new details of a forgotten backup that never made it onto CD. Small things, and big things, and important things, and things that make me pissed. Things like a seventy-five page working document that was going to add vigor to SCAD's industrial design department; poof, gone.

Pissed by Sony, pissed by the world.

I was astounded today by my students; sometimes, they show a glimpse of synthesis which shows the teacher becoming the student. Today was not that glimpse, but it was a glimpse of a glimpse - a window of a chance of these kids actually caring. Apathy is truly the problem, not intelligence; they are all smart, very smart. But they don't care; they should. They can out-do us all.

I was astounded also by the Honda Element today. I drove one. I will soon buy one. It looks like a shoebox. It feels like a secret fort.

The internet is shit. Am I even allowed to believe that, being an interaction design professor?

And even though Jakob is usually wrong, this time he's right.

Howard Stringer

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Sony Corporation of America

Dear Mr. Stringer,

I purchased a new Sony VAIO PCG-V505AX laptop from Best Buy on April 29th, 2003; this machine, after tax, cost roughly $1800. Less than two months later, the track pad began to malfunction; it grew progressively worse, and finally, on the 3rd of July, it became totally unusable. I requested and was mailed a box in which to return the machine.

A week later, I received my laptop. Excited, I turned it on; to my dismay, the entire hard drive had been erased. While the track pad problem had been fixed, your technicians had decided to completely wipe the data from my machine (in what I can only assume is a procedural ‘first line of defense’ used on all repairs). The track pad problem was clearly an electrical issue; there was no reason why my hard drive even needed to be turned on, much less reimaged.

I am a college professor; I teach students primarily by using my laptop, and I use my laptop to organize my life. This machine contains the data and information that is critical for me to conduct business and to function in the highly technical environment of academia; I use it to store my email, my calendar, my lectures, and my student work. To have this data lost is catastrophic; while I maintained backups, I certainly did not backup my data daily. I lost several weeks worth of work after having my computer “repaired”; additionally, I lost nearly nine hours of my weekend as I reinstalled the necessary software and restored my backups. Imagine coming home from a hard day at work, opening your front door, and finding all of your belongings packed back in moving boxes; while your personal items are still available, the thought of spending the next few days re-organizing your life is both anxiety ridden and stressful.

Even if the decision to reimage my drive had been absolutely necessary, I can’t understand why your technicians did not think to contact me ahead of time to inform me of this fact; had this been the case, I certainly would have made a decision to delay the repair until I could make absolutely sure that all of my data was safe and that I had enough “free time” to spend setting up my entire machine again. I would expect the Sony technicians to be adequately trained and fairly intelligent; the sort of autonomous decision to contact a consumer, alerting them of the status of a repair, is one that should be a matter of common sense.

I’m curious why, in a business environment where customer loyalty and brand distinction is so critical, Sony would completely disregard the impact a decision like this would have on a consumer. I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth: as a consumer, I feel the Sony brand has been soiled; as an educated intellectual, I feel that your company has rejected the social agreement of trust between a responsible company and an individual. And as an academic, I can only use this as a case study to illustrate the key importance of brand distinction and how fragile brand loyalty can truly be.

Thank you for your time; I anxiously await a response indicating your understanding of the phenomenal impact a procedural error such as this can have on an individual, and the repercussions it lands on a company. As the Savannah College of Art & Design evaluates new technological requirements, I can’t help but wonder why Sony should even be among those considered; if a consumer is given this poor a level of individual attention, what level of service and respect could an entire organization expect to receive?

Most sincerely,

Jon Kolko