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Zynga Puts Random Stranger In Customer Support Role
An anonymous reader writes "A server error has meant that for the past few months, a man not associated in any way with social gaming powerhouse Zynga has been getting customer support emails. When Zynga failed to return his messages, he started replying to the customers himself. Hilariously." Sadly (though perhaps some of his correspondents would disagree), the glitch has now been fixed.
Quite a creative reaction to a corporate screwup. :-)
I did that also with a supermarket that had a typo on their phone number that made mine.
"3 kilos of potatoes, water, bread,etc etc.... Ok will be there in 40 minutes thanks"
Instead, it belonged to Eric Mueller, who owns the domain themepark.com, which he uses for his web design firm.
Given Zynga's code of ethics (or lack thereof), I would wager this e-mail found its way into "their" product by way of their mission statement which probably transcends game ideas into directly taking web designs that are, by definition, available to anyone with an HTTP connection. Stay classy, Zynga.
My work here is dung.
I admit that the emails he sent were pretty funny, but, the people asking for help weren't the ones not fixing the email address screwup. He could have easily had a stock response set up to respond to each of these describing Zynga's mistake and unwillingness to fix it.
I could see people not familiar with technology, e.g. my mom, who would think that clicking slowly 5 times was a real thing. Then, regardless of how many times I explained to her that it doesn't work like that, there would have been the one anecdotal instance that it did 'work' that would forever reinforce her belief. *p.s. - the canada day one was the best.
Zynga's lucky he treated the barrage with a sense of humour.
He could have easily gone into "rant mode" about how people got his email address, torn a strip off them, and pissed off their customer base right royally.
No surprise that Zynga screwed up, though. They're kind of famous for doing that -- as well as ripping off other designer's game ideas.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Given Zynga's code of ethics (or lack thereof), I would wager this e-mail found its way into "their" product by way ...
No, it was the email given in the standard Apache 500 Internal Server Error message, as you can see in the article. They put ***@themepark.com as contact address on the fb.themepart.zynga.com server.
It was a configuration mistake, not a stolen site.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
He's more helpful.
I wonder what reaction one should expect from Zynga? Ummm... let try:
1. sues the hell out of Eric Mueller for identity theft?
2. "randomly" assigns Eric Mueller as CEO?
3. Don Mattrick starts throwing brown bears and folding chairs?
Other ideas? C'mon... we're speaking of a dying craporation here... be merry, creative (meh)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
it's obvious they were using themepark as a codename for the project when doing development.
that's pretty fucking zyngalike right there though. "hey, let's make a clone of theme park, you remember, that old bullfrog game?" "yeah that's awesome I'll create the project right now.. what should we call the project.. hmm.. I know, themepark!"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Several years back a new hotel opened in Niagara falls. Their phone number was 1 digit off my grand parents number. They started getting several calls a day, all hours of the day, looking to book rooms. They called the hotel several times and asked them to change their number but they refused and told my grandparents they should change theirs. My grandparents had that number for over 30 years so they refused. Eventually they got sick of being polite and telling people they had the wrong number, so they started "taking bookings". The situation was then quickly resolved when the hotel started having people showing up expecting a room. Hotel changed it's number and life went on. I know it sucked for the people who expected rooms, but they tried to be nice and polite for a few months.
...this story has been doing the rounds in many similar forms since the birth of the Internet
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Given Zynga's ethics of code (or lack thereof)...
ftfy
'nuff said
Explained here
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I have a domain which is _often_ used in error. I get plenty of email from various companies, people and spam. I've had mail come in from Sony and Boeing to name a couple (each company contacted and fixed pretty quickly).
which probably transcends game ideas into directly taking web designs that are, by definition, available to anyone with an HTTP connection. Stay classy, Zynga.
Dang right... stealing Apache error pages.
Wait a minute.... remote visitors can't download httpd.conf... how would Zynga get the ServerAdmin value then?
Are you suggesting they hacked into their servers and got their Apache configuration too, because the Zynga folks don't know how to configure Apache?
Or perhaps some insider from themepark.com provided a server config template, or helped them get their site up?
Dude. It's Zynga. No, I wouldn't put it past them at all to "hack" the server (i.e.: take advantage of poor rights/privileges management to spider the whole fecking site) in order to back-fill their own product, and neither should you. This isn't just some crazy dude ranting about a hypothetical situation... tearing apart existing products, stealing them whole-cloth, and publishing that as original content is kinda their thing.
He's a business owner and he did this in the name of his business. Probably not a good business move but I'm glad he did it because it's pretty funny.
Many years ago a buddy got some new phone lines. One had just been a reservation number for an extremely large restaurant. After a few days of folks trying to make reservations through him he called the restaurant and offered them the number back if they'd pay the transfer fees. They declined. So he started taking reservations. "Four for the Ponderosa Room at 7pm? Under 'Caruthers'? Not a problem; please check in with the Hostess when you arrive." After a week of this he called the restaurant back, and offered them their reservation number back. For just the fees? Oh no, assholes, now it's gonna cost something! He got some nominal amount, just 'cause he was pissed about his time & trouble.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I got a worse one which happened to me personally...
About 10 years ago a local heating/boiler/airco installation company put accidentally my phone-number as the 24/7 support number on their invoices.
(The last digit of mine is a 3, theirs had a 2. Probably a typo by whoever made the design for their logo on the pre-printed invoice-paper.)
So I started getting calls for repair at all hours of the night.
Usually by quite pissed customers, whose heating had broken down on a cold night, who grabbed the latest invoice to look up the number.
So I pick up, still half asleep, and someone yells at me "That @#@$%@ heater is broken again, send someone to XXXXX asap".
Before I can respond they have already broken the connection.
About 1 hour later I get another (very) angry call "Where the bloody *@^%#%&@ is that blasted mechanic @&*#^@#^*&".
Again connection broken before I can get a word in.
Had 4 of these calls the first night. 7 the night after.
Worst thing was that I couldn't disconnect the phone.
I didn't have a cell-phone at the time and my father was in hospital with a critical heart-condition.
Every time that phone rang it could have been the hospital.
I also had on-call duty for my job.
The 2nd night, on one of the calls, I got someone reasonable on the phone who explained to me who they were thinking they where calling.
So I contacted that company the next day.
To their credit they send a new mailing to all their customers that same day, but I kept getting 5 to 10 of such calls per night, for 2 weeks running.
After that it gradually petered out, but I still get one every 3 or 4 months when someone finds the number on an old invoice.
Needless to say I got a cell-phone that same week for real emergencies and an answering machine for the land-line during the night.
(Can't do without the land-line. Still need to do dailup to ancient industrial controllers with 4800 baud modems. )
My Dad's cell phone number is one digit off from the number a big industrial laundry company uses for its field reps to call in and request travel. Unfortunately, the company misprinted some of their brochures for their many offices around the country, and so my Dad gets calls for them. His response is much more polite. He just lets the person know that the number they have is misprinted and gives them the real number. Almost everyone apologizes (feeling embarrassed) and thanks him. While the company has fixed the brochures, a lot of offices still have the old number sitting around, so even now over 5 years later, he still gets the occasional call and handles it with the same manners and decency.
As fun as it might be to exploit something like this for giggles and spite, I think my Dad's solution leaves a lot fewer people with a needlessly bad day, including himself.
I have a very common email address that was somehow not taken. Apparently someone had put my email on a Soda machine in some Canadian Law office and unfortunately for me, the machine took their money.
Some lady from this office must have sent me about twenty emails about the machine 'eating' her Coins. I ignored it at first and finally I had to tell them that the email address they were contacting, was not the correct one. So after I got the lady to get the address on the Soda machine, I proceeded to contact the vender and report the issue. Thankfully I do believe they resolved it, I haven't received anymore emails about Soda machines eating Coinage.
Obviously I wasn't witty like this guy, but it was entertaining to read the incidents of the machine taking their funds without dishing out a beverage.
I worked in a call center where our 800 number was similar to an AOL support number. We would frequently get people calling to cancel and they would refuse to believe that we were not AOL and we were just trying to keep them as billable customers. Oh well...
Patience is a virtue, but haste is my life.
I contributed to the user documentation on an open source project many years ago. We used the software on our systems, so my email address was listed among the contact information for support on our copy of the distribution.
Of course, no one set the correct contact information on their own installations (in hindsight, I should have set the email addresses to null before distributing) and I still get support emails from clueless users to this day.
I used to do something just like that when I worked for Apple. Michael A. Crawford was some manner of really important MIS person. I worked there on two occasions, in 1989-90 as a QA engineer for MacTCP, and in 1995-96 as a "Debug Meister" for the Traditional OS Integration Team.
After a while I grew weary of taking calls from clueless Apple employees who did not think to look at our middle initials in the company directory, so I just started making up random nonsense that sounded plausible. After hanging up I would forget all about it.
No doubt this is why Apple laid off 4,000 people both times I was there.
-- Michael D. Crawford
If you use "Quirkz" in trade, then you have a trademark. It need not be a registered trademark.
The infringing trademark does not have to be identically, only confusingly similar.
However, if you don't defend your trademark, the legal principle of estoppel will lead to you losing it.
You don't have to actually sue them unless they refuse to stop using your mark. Even if you do sue, very likely they will settle by changing their name rather than have to pay civil damages.
That's kinda the point: depending on the specific circumstance, impersonating someone over the mail could thrust you into a world of shit, so the only safe thing to do is avoid it. Good humor is good, but in this case I find the ensuing hilarity does not justify the risk.
The email was sent to a particular address; it was responded to from the address to which it was sent. The respondent nevery laid claim to "Zynga" anywhere in the response.
If there is any misrepresentation going on, it is misrepresentation of the support contact email address by Zynga. You could also argue "theft of services" by Zynga.
Makes me wonder why anyone put that email in at all, when they had no control of themepark.com?
There was the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets calls for the Movie Line, and begins dispensing information himself.
Sorry, there are a billion reasons to pick on Zynga, but using a generic name ? Especially given that it is Zynga. Their stuff is pretty much just generic games anyway. Can't blame a salt company for selling salt named salt, can't blame Zynga for selling a theme park game named theme park.
but I kept getting 5 to 10 of such calls per night, for 2 weeks running.
I think this says more about the quality of their products / services than it does about their screwups.
I once worked in a comic shop that had a toll free number that previously belonged to a different type of business. We'd get the occasional calls for the previous 1-800-DUNGEON and they generally made my day.
I also did tech support for a local ISP, stargate.net and stargate.com was a TS/TV site at the time. We'd field a couple of outraged calls every month from people that couldn't understand that different domains belonged to different companies.
On a personal level, I had someone I didn't know giving out my phone number to places they were opening accounts with (and not paying.) I got tired of the bill collectors calling and not believing that I wasn't this other person and had the number for several years, so I just started to tell them that they'll have to take me to court if they want their money. Don't know how that ended up working out for the guy.
When I had a new landline number assigned to me 15 years back, we found out the hard way it was the old fax number for a business. Nothing like getting half a dozen calls an hour all day and night, each one a series of high pitched whistles and beeps. After complaining to the phone company numerous times, they finally gave us a new number after two weeks. Gee, thanks.
I was a developer on Coasterville. The original code name was "ResortVille", and was pitched as a game for creating elaborate resorts made up of hotels and vacation activities. The creative leads later narrowed the game's scope to a Theme Park fiction. Two of our senior developers had worked on Bullfrog's Theme Park game 20 years ago, so our team chose to codename the title "themepark".
this was probably better support than they'd have got from actual Zynga personnel.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Oswald_rods.mp3
Just imagine the fun you could have, first you could put some really strong Rap Music on and have people holding for a while. While they're holding you could interrupt the music with a political add. When the finally get to talk to tech support you could have them try all sorts of stupid fixes and ask all sorts of idiotic questions......you could then forward their call to the billing department and explain the reason for their problem was a balance $1.03 that must be paid. On and On I would be nice to be on the other side of that call for once. Tom Horn [oldtomhorn.com]
It's the human condition to make fun of the misfortunes of others, as well as make fun of ourselves. If you can't laugh about the world around you, you'll die an unhappy person.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I thought this was how all tech companies handled customer support; most of the answers I have received sounded like this guy's.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
the me park
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Now that is so weird....i've been playing their games from a long now! never knew about this issue :{
http://www.solarmovie.me/