July 10, 2008 by Dan Siegel.

Here’s the transcript of my ongoing support problems with eFax:

Welcome to chat.The session has been accepted.{Gary G.} Hello, Daniel. Welcome to j2 Global online support. I am Gary, your Online Live Support Representative. How are you doing today?  {Daniel Siegel} I am very unhappy with eFax.  {Gary G.} How may I assist you?  {Daniel Siegel} I suppose that, in light of your tech support department’s complete inability to assist me, my best option (the only one?) is to cancel my account.  {Gary G.} I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. Please provide me your Fax number as well as the PIN for verification.  {Daniel Siegel} 610-471-0570  {Daniel Siegel} I just hung up with your tech support person - Nathan - who suddenly could not hear me when I asked to be elevated to level 2 tech support. Your support is beyond terrible.  {Gary G.} Please provide me with the PIN for verification.  {Daniel Siegel} XXXX  {Gary G.} Thank you for providing your information. Please give me a moment while I go through your records. In the meantime, please type the number corresponding to your reason for cancellation:1) Moving to another provider2) Bought a Fax machine3) Business or role changed4) Short term project completed5) Financial reasons6) Problems with Faxing or Billing7) Dissatisfied with Quality of service Too Costly  {Daniel Siegel} I want to receive a copy of the transcript of this session.And why do your support people all use phony names? I’ve now met Lloyd, Nathan and Patrick from India? 7 - YOUR SERVICE NOW STINKS! AND THE LACK OF TECH SUPPORT IS ABOMINABLE! And no one seems to care.  {Gary G.} I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.  {Daniel Siegel} Where are you based?  {Gary G.} May I know the exact issue you are facing so that I may help you with the same?  {Gary G.} We are headquartered at Los Angeles, California.  {Daniel Siegel} I cannot receive faxes from local phone numbers, the same problem I have had since Monday. I spoke with Level 2 support (finally!!!) on Tuesday, but it did not resolve the problem, and no one has responded to my email.  {Daniel Siegel} No, where are YOU located?  {Gary G.} We are headquartered at Los Angeles, California.  {Daniel Siegel} That is not responsive. Thus, I presume you are in India too.  {Gary G.} Daniel, as per our records you have already been charged monthly fee for this month. As you have plenty of days left for your billing cycle to get over, I suggest you to make use of our service atleast for the period you have paid for and make use of our service for sometime more so that you can receive and send any pending faxes that needs to be done and thereafter you can also inform your friends that you are closing the number.  {Gary G.} If however, you still feel that you do not have any use for our services by the end of your current billing cycle, then you can always contact us back anytime.  {Gary G.} If you wish I will also send you a test fax.{Daniel Siegel} I can’t receive LOCAL faxes. Your attempt won’t help.{Daniel Siegel} Hello? 

{Gary G.} Is the sender of your fax a eFax user?

{Daniel Siegel} And I just called back to your tech support, and guess what, his name is Stuart! {Daniel Siegel} Faxes have been sent from my office’s fax, from my home, from another office ten miles away, and from my computer. None goes through, but faxes work from outside the area.  {Gary G.} If your eFax number is working but a certain caller is unable to reach it, this may indicate a problem with the caller’s local or long-distance phone carrier. Ask the caller to try to complete the call using a different phone carrier (for example, a 10-10-xxx long-distance service).  {Gary G.} If the call can be completed over the alternate carrier, the caller’s usual carrier is mostly likely experiencing a problem. We would not be able to troubleshoot the issue from that point, since the phone carrier can only act on trouble reports from its own customers (in this case, your caller). However, we have provided the form letter below for your caller to use in reporting the problem to his/her carrier. With this information, the carrier should be able to solve the problem. 

{Daniel Siegel} I have called the local carrier - Verizon - and they say it is not their problem. I emailed this to tech support yesterday, and no one replied! 

{Daniel Siegel} I have called the local carrier - Verizon - and they say it is not their problem. I emailed this to tech support yesterday, and no one replied! 

{Daniel Siegel} Also, Stuart just informed me that his name didn’t matter. I explained that I thought it was decietful to use a false name. I find this whole process totally distasteful and will place the entire transcript of this “chat” with eFax on my blog as soon as we conclude. 

{Gary G.} If you wish I will send you a test fax. 

{Daniel Siegel} It won’t help. 

{Gary G.} I suggest you to contact our Customer Support over the phone at 1-323-817-3205 (Available 24*7), as they will be able to assist you better with your issue.  {Gary G.} Please do not select any option or extension when you call. Please wait for our Customer Service representative to attend your call. They would be able to assist you further.  {Gary G.} If you wish I will keep your account active. 

{Daniel Siegel} In other words, you’re blowing me off, too. 

Thankfully, I was transferred to Level Two support from India and spoke with someone named Drew, who I believe really was named Drew. He was helpful at least.

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July 8, 2008 by Dan Siegel.

For three years, I have used eFax service as my virtual fax service, without a hitch. Until yesterday. That’s when a law firm tried three times to fax me an 11 page settlement agreement. Only the cover page went through twice, and a third time 2 pages went through. I then tried to send a fax from my computer, to no avail. So I called tech support (NOT a toll free number by the way) and was transferred to an Indian woman who sent a one page fax, which went through and insisted my problem did not exist.

Today, I tested the fax service again. I tried to send faxes from my office fax machine, my computer and from home. None went through. I called tech support again, and they continue to insist that the service is working and, presumably, it’s just a coincidence that nobody can send me a fax except “Lloyd” from India. I even showed him the three faxes from yesterday and he insisted that even though the cover page said 11 pages were sent (and there was an error page attached to each page) that the senders really only tried to send 1 page.

Now, they are claiming that they are doing “troubleshooting” but the rep refuses to answer the request to speak to a supervisor, refuses to answer any of my questions and is clearly exasperated with my very obvious frustration. The bottom line — if eFax won’t work for you, they won’t care and won’t do anything outside of what the manual tells the automatons to say/do.  And, adding insult to injury, my now 30 minute call isn’t to a toll free number.

 More soon. But, please God, it won’t be by fax. And, of course, this is why I strongly request that everyone stop using faxes and scan and email instead.

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March 27, 2008 by Dan Siegel.

I always say, “Never train on live data” because if something happens, it’s a “problem,” to say the least. Today I failed to abide by my own words. Guess what, something happened. The database with 98,542 records shrunk a bit — to 6 records. So did my stomach.

Having never seen this before, I called Tech Support. The rep hadn’t seen it either. He put me on hold and found out a couple of the other reps had heard of this. What did it mean? That the database had crashed and I needed to restore it from a backup. And, of course, the firm didn’t think there was a backup! Fortunately, I found a copy of the database file, and all was well. Of course, I strongly recommended that the firm backup the data — and when I return for more training, we’ll use my training databases.

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February 21, 2008 by Dan Siegel.

I recently traveled to Los Angeles to give my presentation, “How to Do 90 Minutes of Work in 60,” in conjunction with the meeting of the National Association of Bar Executives and the American Bar Association Midyear Meeting. The presentation went well, but I learned some lessons on my way to LA. Among them: Bring a paper clip and a book.

Before I boarded the plane, I turned on my Kindle, Amazon’s really neat (but expensive)  book reader, audiobook reader, music player, etc. It gave me a black screen and was dead. I removed the battery and reinstalled — still the black screen. Then I realized the Kindle had a reset spot — all I needed was a paper clip. Just try asking for a paper clip at an airport. The workers look at you with astonishment. They don’t have them. My God, I got the impression that they thought I would try to stab the flight crew with a paper clip (now there’s a picture)!

So I boarded the flight, booted up my laptop and worked for about 90 minutes until the battery went to sleep (I didn’t have an airline power adapter — I bought one in LA for the return flight). At that point, all I had was a dead Kindle. No books, no magazines, no nothing. It was not the most fun three hours I had ever spent.

We arrived in LA and I called Kindle support. Amazon has dedicated support for the device. They were very nice and, once I procured a paper clip, verified that the screen (which was still black) was broken even though the device was still receiving a signal from Amazon. They ordered a replacement and assured me I would go to the head of the queue and receive the new one in about a week.

Of course, in the meantime I purchased a book and a puzzle magazine (plus the iGo airline power adapter — at the Rodeo Drive Radio Shack, no less) and had plenty to do on the flight home. The replacement Kindle did come about a week later, as promised.

What did I learn? Don’t rely exclusively on technology for airline entertainment. Also, Amazon’s Kindle support was excellent, even if they could not replace the Kindle overnight. And lastly, when you travel, bring a book AND a paper clip.

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January 3, 2008 by Dan Siegel.

Remember, it’s not if, but when in terms of hard drive crashes. My new Dell computer is an ideal example - new, high tech, etc. And the hard drive died in less than 2 months. Dell immediately shipped a replacement. Fortunately, I use Retrospect for daily complete backups. Once the replacement hard drive was in place, I merely re-installed Retrospect and restored my entire system. It took about 3 hours to recreate the index of files, and about an hour to restore my system. But every program, every document and setting were there, as if I just turned the computer on from the day before. I sighed a huge sigh of relief. So, if you aren’t backing up daily — and with the cheap cost of online backups and/or external hard drives, you should be — you are merely waiting for the crash. It may not happen today, but someday…

 In other words, back up everything all the time. I couldn’t be happier I did.

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July 15, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

Lately, I’m the poster child for backups and restores. Yup, another story. I finally took Ellen Freedman’s advice and installed Copernic at home — it’s a far better desktop search engine than Google. I did it while also ridding my home computer of Norton Anti-Virus (which slowed it to a crawl at times) and installing the easy-to-use CA Internet Suite 2007. Google Desktop Search, however, didn’t want to uninstall and instead, after much frustration, I tried a variety of self-help options (don’t do this at home!) and then rebooted. Windows rebooted, but Explorer (the program that lets you access everything on the computer) was completely unavailable. I had a desktop, nothing else.

So, I embarked on a program to restore the computer. Five hours later, it works. Why? After trying some simple solutions — they simply didn’t work — I began to get creative. First, I had to verify that everything had been backed up properly, then I re-backed up all my documents so that if I had to reinstall Windows XP, I wouldn’t lose all of my and my family’s work. Then I tried restoring just the Registry — not enough. Then I restored all the Windows files and Google Desktop. That worked, but of course my installation of CA Internet Suite had to be redone. And Google Desktop is still there — and won’t go away.

But thanks to my backup, everything went well.

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June 21, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

Thumb drives/flash drives/USB drives, whatever you call them, they are great. They’re small, they hold lots of data, and they make it so easy to transport work from the office to home (and elsewhere) and vice versa. But, like any other drive, they can break or other things can happen.

Like your son decides to delete all of the data on an old thumb drive, but it turns out he did it on the one you use for work. (Of course, this is a hypothetical (sic).)

Anyway, picture your reaction as you walk by and witness your data waving goodbye. And remember, files deleted from thumb drives, just like those on servers, are gone forever; they don’t make it to the recycle bin.

What do you do? Backup your thumb drive! Add it to the list of locations you backup daily (you do, of course, backup daily, right?) and then do it. I do now!

Also, if you do accidentally delete information, there’s a nifty program — Active Undelete — that scans your drive and can restore those “lost” files. It’s only $39.95, and the person in the hypothetical found it very handy. You can buy it from www.active-undelete.com.

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April 8, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

How often does software do what it’s supposed to? And do it for free? It doesn’t happen enough. But one product that works as billed is CCleaner, a great freebie that cleans up all the detritus on your computer. It’s easy to use and really finds the junk. One warning, don’t just accept the defaults for every setting. If you do, it’ll remove your “Recent Files” from Word, etc., and some other settings you may actually like. Otherwise, just proceed apace.

How do you get it? Just go to www.ccleaner.com and download the application. It may even be worth making the donation.

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April 7, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

So, what do I use in my office? That’s the question I’m always asked. I have a lot of answers.

My office is managed with Legal Files, a superb case management program I use (after testing 7 others, including many major names). While I like Time Matters, and recommend and support it, Legal Files is still a slight bit better for my needs. It isn’t perfect, however, and I wish it had Time Matters’ “formattable clipboard” and its “Packages” feature, but overall it wins by a nose.

In addition, I use Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 all the time, and Case Map, Time Map and Live Note have become keys to keeping my law practice going and growing. I don’t love Time Slips or Quick Books, but they work, so I’m not changing. I’m also in the process of integrating Hot Docs with both businesses. On the other hand, I still rely on a host of “non-legal” but key programs. Thus, I also use Word, Word Perfect X3 (the best word processor I’ve ever used), Access, and an array of other more common software.

Let’s start a dialogue — What are your favorites? Let me (and everyone else) know.

That should be fun.

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April 7, 2007 by Dan Siegel.

People who know me know that I love computers and software, and that my technology business, Integrated Technology Services, LLC, is just fun for me. It’s like getting paid to play. But it’s still a business, and after a year and half, it’s still a learning process. What have I learned? Some companies treat you nicer than others. Some of the big companies just want to squeeze out the little guy (like I could possibly kill their businesses) while others embrace the little guy. One example is Lexis-Nexis, a monolith no doubt, but a company that has embraced my business and knows that as I succeed, so does it.

I’m now a Certified Independent Consultant (CIC) for Time Matters and am in the process of becoming a CIC for Hot Docs. The people have generally been really nice, and they are committed to working with me. The same goes (10X over) for the wonderful people at Case Soft (they make Case Map, Time Map, etc., and I support them all). They have always been a pleasure to deal with, even after Lexis-Nexis bought them.

On the other hand, other companies get bought out and the first thing they do is try to eliminate me. One company immediately ended my reseller agreement (I made about $50 commission per license) and raised their prices so high that most of my clients — solos, small and mid-size firms — probably aren’t going to buy their product anymore. Do they care? No. They say the number-crunchers told them what to do.

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