How Cell Phones Fail the Elderly

My elderly (childhood) nanny just bought a pre-paid cell phone and, naturally, I needed to help her set it up and teach her how to use it.  The phone was a great deal, she told me – just $99 for a year of free US and international calling!

Cheapest phone plan ever, right?  This is what the plan really looks like:

• She pre-pays an amount, and the money expires after a length of time.  The length of time depends on how much you pre-pay.
• On the days she uses her cell phone, she’s charged $0.99.
• If she calls another Verizon user (how does she know?), it’s free.  It’s also free on nights and weekends.
• Other US calls cost $0.05 / minute.
• International calling costs $1.49 / minute.

Confused?  Here’s a convenient map (yeah, you’re going to need to zoom in):

Note how there are multiple plans, and she probably didn’t select the one that’s best for her (Basic).  I’m not sure where she went wrong.  Maybe she couldn’t properly evaluate her average talk time, the timing and the density of her calls to evaluate whether the “per day” is offset by the cheaper minute plan and free night time calls?  Crazy!

I declined to get into the complexities of pre-pay expiration, as I’m not sure I understand it myself.  What happens if I buy $20 (which expires after 30 days) and then a week later I buy $50 (which expires in 90 days)?  What expires when?

Lest she might actually wrap her head too soon around all that, her cell phone offers a new source of confusion.  Navigation requires a careful mapping (on very small buttons, despite having purchased the largest phone they had) of on-screen buttons to keypad buttons, while trying to avoid the calendar (who uses calendar on a basic flip phone?), voice daily (oh no the phone is talking to me!), picture messaging, web browser, camera and text messaging (conveniently called “Messages” so as not to be confused with, say, voice messages.)  You try explaining to her that she merely has to map the location of the on-screen buttons to the funny looking dashes and the weird circular button on the phone.

You know what she needs?  A phone.  Preferably one with a dial tone, so that she knows it’s on.  Can someone make a flip phone with a dial tone please?  Or maybe a phone with a nice wizard interface?

Email is actually easier for her – at least I can write down instructions for her.

3 Business Ideas: Experiment Often, Carefully, and Singly

What have you learned in the past year?  Jill Foster of WomenGrowBusiness.com asked me this question and posted my response here: 3 Business Ideas: Experiment Often, Carefully, and Singly.  You can read it there or below where I’ve re-posted it.

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I started CareerCup to solve one part of software engineering interviews: preparation. Candidates who are interviewing with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or other companies are historically under-prepared and consequently struggle to get hired. This hurts not only the candidates, but companies as well who can’t distinguish between bad candidates and poorly prepared candidates.

After launching CareerCup’s first (revenue generating) product in 2008, I spent the past year improving its products and services. In doing so, I’ve learned the following insights:

1. Be careful about your time is spent.
We all want to believe that we’re the best at anything, but sometimes we’re not. And, even if we are, not all jobs are worth our time. I recognize more and more that the old saying “if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself” just isn’t true.

I now have some fantastic people working for me in the Philippines, India and in the US to write, manage customer support, and do development. With their help, I’ve managed to finish a technical interviewing book, software engineering interview video, and a technical recruiting service. I couldn’t do it without them!

2. Experiment often, carefully, and singly.

While I fully encourage people to research ideas thoroughly, research is only going to sell you so much. Sometimes, you just have to make the leap and experiment with an idea. Experiment often.

That said, look closely at how you’re judging the results of an experiment. Are you looking at revenue, or conversions? Depending on your approach to sales, this could be a big difference. Experiment carefully.

When experimenting, only run one experiment at a time. Yes, yes, I know you have a million ideas and you want to dive into all at once, but patience here will pay off. If you run three experiments at once, how will you ever know which one made the difference, and how much? Experiment singly.

And, if you want to be super advanced, look into standard error. A little bit of a statistics can help you understand what’s random and what’s real.

3. Be organized.

I feel like entrepreneurs are inherently disorganized – we’re always in such a rush to jump into things that we can get overwhelmed.

A bit of organization can reduce your stress by clearly outlining what you have to do. It gets rid of the nagging “Oh my god I have so much to do” feeling and lets you react properly. Maybe you’ll realize that you don’t have quite as much work as you thought, or maybe you’ll realize that you simply have to reassign some of the work.

Either way, you’ll feel better.

I maintain a to-do list with what I have to do (I use Remember The Milk, or whatever works for you). For paperwork, little details, filing expenses and such, I let the “forward” button handle that (that is, I forward things to my assistants to handle). And, I try to respond to emails instantly – you’ll have to do it eventually anyway, so the sooner you get it out of the way, the less time for which it’ll be hanging over your head.

Bad Snail Mail, Bad!

It seems like generally a good idea to limit the amount of snail mail you get that has sensitive information on it (social security number, bank account, etc), right? I called my bank today to ask them to stop mailing me copies of my bank statements. I don’t like snail mail in general and with all this identity theft and such, paper bank statements are just begging to be stolen.

My bank said no because apparently, Washington State has a law where banks have to send you a monthly paper statement. You’d think that with Seattle as a center of technology, Washington State would understand that paper bank statements are bad. But no no – it’s law that I have to receive a nice little envelope every month with my bank written in large lettering so that would-be identify theives will know just where to look. What’s up with that?

New Site

I’ve redone my site and switched everything over to ASP.NET. And in the process of doing so, there are probably some bugs. Let me know if you find any.

Registrar Time Searcher

Now open for Fall 2005: The Registrar Time Searcher, which searches for courses by time. Writing an app where you could use this database? Email me.