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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. :-)
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.
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.
yeah they were people making money for zynga.
stock reply would have cost him time(money) without providing any fun.
what would have been really funny though would have been to send them to GoG to request theme park to be added to the lineup.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Explained here
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
When I was a teenager, a local pizza place had a similar phone number to mine, and on every holiday, we'd get middle of the night drunken pizza orders called in to us, from people who refused to believe that they'd called the wrong number. Eventually we'd just tell them "Ok, you got me. It'll be there in 30 minutes or it's free." I once had a long argument with someone about anchovies, and informed him that he couldn't order a pizza with those on it over the phone due to regional by-laws. Eventually he relented and left them out of his order. I still couldn't convince him that he'd accidentally swapped the "5" and the "0" while dialing though.
It may be a fake, but it's damn close to something I'm dealing with. My user name, Quirkz, is also a domain I've had for ages. There's a venue that opened a couple of years ago that calls itself Qirkz. People are constitutionally unable to type a Q without typing a U, so I get tons of email for bookings and confirmations and ads and all sorts of junk. One professor had an entire class full of students try to contact me about summer internships, and then I got a bunch of laughing replies when I responded "No, no! That's the wrong address and I'm sick of this junk."
For a while I tried forwarding requests, including interviews with the BBC, but that felt like a job. Then when I was running an online game I tried a standard response which explained both businesses, hoping maybe a few people would also be curious in what I did, but that didn't seem to help and I don't have the game anymore. Now I just delete the email, but it's still unsatisfying.
I haven't ever really considered intentionally disruptive behavior, mostly because that'd be even more work, and I'm just not quite that malicious (or funny). I really don't know a way out. I'm mostly hoping they'll either eventually rebrand, or somehow the slow trickle of business lost to failed emails will clue them in and make them change.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Happened to a friend of mine a few years ago. His number got mixed up with some guy who did maintenance for a bowling alley. He'd come home and there'd be several frantic messages, telling him that the ball return on lane 6 is jammed. They always called when he was out, so he couldn't tell them it was a wrong number. Not too long after that, the bowling alley closed. Maybe if my friend had fixed their ball return, they could have stayed in business.
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. )
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.
1-800-222-1222 is the US national poison control hotline.
1-800-222-2222 is a sex line.
Which one are you more likely to call if you remember "poison control hotline is a 1800 number with a lot of 2's " ?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Priceless!
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
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".