(UPDATE: Lenovo hooked me up with two top-of-the-line x201 ThinkPad laptops and honored their initial 50% off coupon and restored my trust and amazement!  All’s well that ends well — the social media and customer support team at Lenovo actually responded the same day this post went up and solved the problem before the weekend!  Here’s the full story: Lenovo Stepped Up and Completely Restored My Brand Loyalty)

The two ThinkPad X301s that my CEO and I ordered three weeks ago and were promised to us this week will never come. The Lenovo customer service rep told us that they discontinued that model – and that they don’t know if they have the components to fulfill the orders. Was that half-off offer a bait-and-switch?

The only option offered was to order other models with non-comparable configurations, and not at the 50% off that sold us on buying the x301s in the first place. When he made the offer, he was unwilling or unable to offer us a generous win-win-win solution. He surely did not inspire brand loyalty to the extent that I am writing this now. Luckily, I have a platform like this. What if I didn’t?

Funny thing is, we could have been waiting for weeks. Mark and I never received an email or a call to that effect; rather, we just sort of wondered where our new laptops had gone. There was no explicit communication explaining what was going on. We didn’t receive an email or call alerting us. This wasn’t simply a delay, this was a failure to deliver at all.

When it comes to buying new gear for us two, we’re both frugal and loyal to Lenovo ThinkPads. I have been using the same Lenovo X61 ThinkPad since 2007 and Mark has been running his x61 tablet since not long after. Even when we pick up backup netbooks, we choose Lenovos. Both Mark and I have Lenovo S10s. We’re a Lenovo shop.

We had been holding back on buying new laptops until Mark received a promotional email from Lenovo offering a half-off deal on the x301 ThinkPad — so he bought two of them for the price of one fully-loaded laptop. Everything went through just fine. Everything was paid for and Abraham Harrison LLC’s Visa card was charged. There were no red flags at all — the order was wired to China and we were promised two bouncing baby x301s in a few weeks.

I wanted to get the ThinkPads before moving so I checked out the status on their order website. While the information was very terse, it states, “If no ship date is given above, there may be an issue with your order. If you would like more information on the status, please call.” There was a ship date for the custom skins we ordered for the laptops with our AH logo on them, but there was no ship date for the laptops, onto which the skins will have been affixed.

When Mark called today he was told that they could not source the parts. They were phasing the x301s out and would be unable to provision the two laptops at all, most probably, Mark was told. Then he was asked if he would like to order a couple x201 ThinkPads.

“Fine,” Mark said, then added, “if you’ll extend the same half-off deal you offered to me in your promotional.”

“Sorry sir,” the customer service person answered, “I won’t be able to do that, but I would be happy to order you two x201s at the regular price.”

Since Mark ordered the x301 ThinkPads immediately after the half-price coupon code was offered, this sort of feels like both a terrible solution for failing to fulfill an order and what feels like a bait-and-switch:

Offer a discontinued laptop for half price fully knowing that fulfillment would be impossible while holding your customer’s money for three weeks while failing to alert the customer in a timely and assertive manner, then offering them an opportunity to buy a different model or two for full price — not even a stiff discount or other appeasement for our time, the use of our money for weeks, and for severely souring — or even terminating — our fierce devotion to the IBM ThinkPad brand, the Lenovo ThinkPad brand, the Lenovo Netbook brand, and just about everything else.

What did I have before my x61? Well, I had an IBM x24 ThinkPad. I even have a ThinkPad T40 somewhere. What will I have after my x61 ThinkPad? I thought I was going to have a brand spanking new Lenovo x301 ThinkPad but who knows? Mark and I are still trying to sort out what our next move is going to be.

This is a case study on now not to handle a screw-up. A case study on how to destroy long-term, loyal customer relationships. Both Mark and I are loyal time and vocal Lenovo customer since 2002, This is a case study on not honoring promises. Lenovo should either not offer something they can’t deliver, or offer a generous mea-culpa alternative to make good on their error and maintain/build the client relationship. They did neither.

My company has only bought Lenovo since it’s founding. Our loyalty, customer-ship, and brand advocacy will die with this incident if Lenovo proves itself unworthy of the high regard we’ve always held them in. We’re also not a bank. We don’t appreciate the fact that Lenovo charged our card immediately and have held our money for 3 weeks — no apology or recompense offered. Unacceptable.

The ball is in your court, Lenovo. What are you going to do? Are you going to honor your word? Are you going to honor your promises? What will you do to maintain my trust, my devotion, and my commitment to the ThinkPad brand of laptops and the Lenovo brand of products?

Tasty China is surely the best, the boldest, and the most delicious and succulent Chinese food I have every had, globally — though I have yet to visit China.  And celebrity chef, Peter Chang, is back! You have to go.  Also, it is BYOB so bring your beer, wine, and accouterments along with and you’re bound to have fun!  Reminder: one cannot buy alcohol in Georgia on Sundays so plan accordingly.

The success and majesty and frank deliciousness has everything to do with the presence — and return — of the famous and transient Chef Peter Chang, known for his culinary wanderlust.  Well, he is back and better than every in a super-modest scruffy strip mall in Marietta, Georgia, nearby to Atlanta.

Tasty China is well worth the visit not only from greater Atlanta but also the region, the south, the north, the United States, or glob ally. It is so hot and spicy it makes me cry but also with happiness too.

Thanks to Liz Marvel for constantly making visits to Atlanta and Tasty China something of an annual habit — she has her birthday feast there every year and so I get to eat there at least annually.

Oh, and if you noticed, I didn’t speak any specifics on food.  Well, I don’t know my Chinese food at all and let Liz and her husband Eric order for me.

Tasty China
585 Franklin Rd SE
Marietta, GA 30067
(770) 419-9849
www.tastychina.net

Some reviews so you can make up your mind as to what to order:

• Tasty China review on CitySearch
• Tasty China review on Yelp
• Tasty China on Google Maps
• Tasty China on Yahoo! Local
• Review on ChowHound: “Atlanta, Marietta, Tasty China. Full Report”
• Tasty China on UrbanSpoon
• Review on Take Thou Food: “tasty china (marietta, ga)“
• Mouthfuls forum review
• Tasty China on Zagats
• Review on FoodieBuddha.com: “ALL HAIL PHUONG: Tasty China Restaurant Review – Marietta, GA“
• Tasty China on TripAdvisor
• Tasty China on BooRah
• Review on Atlanta Restaurant Blog: Tasty China, Marietta, GA Restaurant Review
• Tasty China on Creative Loafing
• Review on Adventurous Tastes: Restaurant Review: Peter Chang back at Tasty China (for now at least!)
• Review on Creative Loafing: Review: Tasty China
• AccessAtlanta: On the trail of Peter Chang
• Chef Peter Chang on Wikipedia
• Review on Southern Foodie:  Tasty China

The following chart is interesting in light of all this talk about how China has ascending to the second largest economy, knocking Japan out of the number two spot. The US is still number one. I thought it would be interesting to see how we in the US rate city-by-city in terms of earning. If I can find a chart that compares personal net earnings country-by-country, I will post that chart in a follow up.

This chart obviously does not include all US cities, since I am pretty sure that Washington, DC, San Francisco, CA, and other cities are doing better than Delhi and Jakarta.

However, we all know that China isn’t a 1st world country and is still a developing economy. We also know that there are still peasants and subsistence farmers — so China is just powerful based on the size of its economy and not the wealth of its people. I wondered.

What people like to bandy around is the per-capita GDP, which is simply, as far as I can tell, the GDP divided by the population, which does not reflect the wealth of the population, just the efficiency of the country… sort of like taking the gross weight of a sports car and dividing it by the peak horsepower of the car, thereby coming up with a power-to-weight ratio.

That’s a great number for a car, since it allows light cars with smaller engines to be able to compete with huge sedans with enormous engines — it sort of flattens the playing field and allows apples and oranges to compete.

However, for people, is it a good number? While I love this city-by-city comparison — as the US only exists in

I wasn’t intending on blogging this as there is honor amongst thieves.

However, I just got pissed off there were so many copies of the exact same auto DM that I got sick and tired of deleting them.

The screenie that you see to your right is just all of them that I can catch on my wee little laptop before you couldn’t read it any more.

There are many that I already deleted and quite a few that are below.

I don’t want to count them all. I don’t want to sink any more time than I am now.

Here’s what the Tweet auto DM says, again and again (click on the image if you want a better look):

hagenpr Thanks for following me on Twitter! Check out www.hagenpr.com. Bernhard

So, Hagen PR AKA @hagenpr on Twitter, what happened? Also, how come no mea maxima culpa?

There are so many auto DMs! Unconscionable!

Anyway, let’s see if there’s anyone else complaining about this on Google… nope.

I guess I am the only one. Can you find any?

Oh, Bernhard Hagen of Hagen PR, why did you forsake me?

Twitter Bio:

Hagen PR – Public Relations in Europe and China; twitters about the company, the client’s activities as well as business and industry news.

I am sure you and your PR firm rock. We at Abraham Harrison love Europe and my CEO and I speak German.

Why don’t you schedule a meeting with my CEO, Mark Harrison, in Austria or Berlin, and you can maybe buy him a beer on my behalf and we can put this all behind us.

From the Hagen PR website:

Today’s business communication is international. And so is our approach: We support ambitious companies with high-level public relations services in Europe and China. From strategy development to the press release – we boost your PR efforts.

I personally recommend avoiding auto DMs — nobody appreciates it and nobody likes them.

If you don’t know, a Twitter DM refers to a private direct message.

None of these ever feel authentic, honest, or intimate — especially if there are possibly hundreds of the same copy of the same message, which I daresay you and you team did not lovingly write by hand.

Pop Mark an email and set up a meeting and we’ll call it even.

Via Marketing Conversation

Fear of China and Russia? Fear of foreigners and the Islamic world?  Fear of commies and socialists who want to eat our American way of life the same way they’ll rape our women and eat out babies? Jesus!  Listen to yourselves!

With regards China, I guess I might be the only American who isn’t a China-worrier as I grew up in Hawaii, a place where Chinese culture is pretty well woven deeply into the fabric as much more more than US culture. Red gift envelopes and noodle bowls were more normal than anything else.

With regards Russia, I was scared shitless of the Soviet Union during the 80s; however, when I explored Russia a little bit, and the former Soviet Union, in terms of Russia, Estonia, Slovakia, etc, — and even deep into the heart of Russia as a flew to Nepal in 1990, including landing to refuel on a military airfield, I know that I was afraid of a paper tiger.  Yes, there were Nukes but there were no marauding hordes of blood-thirsty killers with The Communist Manifesto in one hand and a Death Wish For Liberty in the other.

To be honest, Russia has never been a prosperous nation and it only collapsed under the unsustainable weight of building, growing, and maintaining a strong and power defense and offense all at the cost of everything else. When I got there, Russia looked a lot like the front yard of that house that has 5 cars in the yard but only one ran, the rest were for parts.  With cracked sidewalks and a mottled burnt lawn — the country was largely not very Tony aside from a couple-few neighborhoods?

Beware the country that cannot feed and care for her own people and consider them to be parasitic entitled blood-suckers and I will show you a country that is sure to implode under its own vacuum.

Call me naive but none of what anyone has said with regards to our loss of liberty, our freedom, our American way of life, our our privacy has been ever forcibly taken from us by external forces — they have only been either willing relinquished by us in service of security and safety or they have been eroded by our own Federal and State governments, especially from January 20, 2001 – January 20, 2009.

So, before we start getting all McCarthy all over the place, we need to follow the money and see that the majority of the dangers and threats we experience and fear are not coming from a red menace or fr0m Islam, they’re coming from the debilitating fear, paranoia, and infighting that we’re having within our own borders.

It is seriously easier and simpler to blame others — Islam, illegal immigrants, Russia, China, European Socialism, or terrorism than it is to get our own house in order.  If we don’t get our house in order soon, we’re more likely to have a domestic United States civil war than we are going to have a foreign invasion of our sovereign shores.

I would say we’ll have some sort of civil unrest by nationwide members of the tea party before we as a nation ever become an Islamic Theocratic Socialist state.  If I were a betting man, I would say in 2012-2015 to start.

This Rosetta Stone Language Journeys blog post, Learning German – Round 2, is a continuation of a previous post, part one, Failing with Language Classes, and deals with my General tendency to dance around learning something hard by obsessing about it, learning about it, and buying lots and lots of books and texts and stories and dictionaries instead of actually becoming a true bouncing baby German-speaker — collecting German instead of learning German:

I arrived in Berlin, terrified of sounding like a toddler and a moron while trying to speak German.  So, I just didn’t — I spoke English.  After a while in Berlin, I signed up for another language course, again starting at the beginning. This time it was serious: three hours a day, five days a week, for four months.

I was pretty religious with attendance and the course was completely immersive based on necessity, not just as a learning strategy — English was not the lingua franca of this school.  I had classmates who were from Iran, Yemen, Turkey, China, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Brazil.

Again, my story was a sob story. The moment I left class, I didn’t prioritize the hours of homework, the mandated flash cards, the rote memorization of verb conjugations and noun gender — I had a business to run and I had a social life — with Berliners who were happy to practice their flawless English.

Eventually, I realized I had been fetishing German learning more than I have been trying to learn German.  After three years of German language grazing, I have half-a-dozen German-English dictionaries, another four packs of German vocabulary flash cards, and an assortment of German workbooks, verb books, grammar books and the whole lot.  It was almost like I got confused — I was collecting German instead of learning German — like buying classical CDs instead of learning how to play the viola.

Here’s the full text of An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg that all members of Facebook just received tonight.  Very interesting.  The cessation of “regional networks” is going to suck but this has been a long time coming.  We’ll see how it works.  I hope we can keep our Abraham Harrison Facebook network because we at AHLLC love it:

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

Well, I don’t know. I think it is always BAD to take what you give. I heard someone mention how she’s allowed to ADD to her Thanksgiving dinner by her family but she’s not allowed to remove any.

I think that Facebook should be willing to add to the tools offered but I daresay that there are a lot of people who don’t have college and don’t have clubs and don’t have things they’re connected to (anymore) and their region/city (hey, Brooklyn) is all they care about.

Other than that, I have not cared about regions in forever.

We at Abraham Harrison LLC are pretty happy about the response we have received from bloggers, on Twitter, and online to a recent outreach we did on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce and Baird’s CMC in support of their new study, The Conversation Behind Closed Doors — Inside the Boardroom: How Corporate America Really Views Africa (be sure to read the full executive summary here in HTML and PDF). Long story short: thanks so much for all of your support, bloggers and writers!  We so appreciate your support!

• China in Africa
• Josh Dippold
• MidwestUSA-China Report
• PaulRJones
• Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources
• Ghana Business News
• here there and Everywhere
• MG ModernGhana.com
• Abraham Harrison
• The CSR Digest
• The Development Agenda
• Executive Insight
• Robert Steven Duncan
• Latin America And Brazil – On Economics And Politics
• Nathan’s Economic Edge
• ModernGhana.Com
• Experience Not Logic
• Enterprise Resilience Management Blog
• The US Export Council
• Compassion in Politics
• International Trade Group
• Sustainable Living with Sustainable Energy
• BiofuelsDigest
• ODE
• The ReDress Consultancy – South Africa
• Lusakatimes
• The ROOTs Cause
• Research Recap
• The Ghanaian Journal
• Geostrategy: window on the world
• Dodgeblogium
• Biofuels Digest
• Sociolingo’s Africa
• SustainabiliTank
• CR Vision: Guest Blogger
• Novakeo
• Nathan’s Economic Edge
• So You Think You Can Invest
• B.C. Policy Perspectives
• Zambian Economist
• Bricks and Mortar
• ForeignPolicy.com
• Standard Chartered Bank Tanzania
• MonaH
• Arvind Devalia
• Lola Adesioye
• Novakeo
• Robert W Fuller
• iFashionToYou
• jratemo
• csrdigest
• Ory Okolloh
• Josh Dippold
• Nana Kwabena Owusu
• Alexander Ainslie
• Alexander U Conrad
• ResearchRecap
• Jacqueline Sibanda
• Jennifer Gilman
• PaulRJones
• Nana Kwabena Owusu
• A DC Observer
• financi4lguru
• Marketing Conv
• Phillip J Rhoades
• NigeriaDotCom
• Steve Virgin
• Corporate Foreign Policy
• The Ghanaian Journal
• TheMispricing
• Social Agenda
• SustainabiliTank
• Sociolingo’s Africa
• The Newspaceman
• Tom Collins’ World Wide Web Log

Our client, Jerry White, co-founder of Survivor Corps, just guest-blogged over at the Anderson Cooper 360 blog, How to stop the violence: Feel the pain, check it out:

The morning papers and nightly news are filled with reminders the world can be an unpredictably dangerous place. Earthquakes in China, cyclones in Myanmar, tornados in the heartland, war in the Middle East and gang violence in our cities. There are fundamentally three types of threats to human survival and security: disasters, disease or violence. The third is the most disturbing—deliberate victimization and cruelty.

We are at war, and the number of people engaged in violence is growing daily. At the moment, there are 39 armed conflicts raging, and more than 80 percent of those injured and killed are civilians, not soldiers. To stop this man-made epidemic, we must work together. No one survives alone.

I’ve wrestled with the issues of how to overcome crisis and suffering throughout my life. When I was 20, I stepped on a landmine while hiking in northern Israel. I lost my leg, and spent months recovering in an Israeli hospital, learning firsthand what it takes to overcome. I wrote about what I have learned about survivorship and resilience in I Will Not Be Broken: 5 Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis.

There are five basic steps a person must undergo in order to complete the cycle of recovery from trauma. First, we must face facts: this awful thing has happened and we can’t turn back the clock. Second, we must choose life. It is still worth living, but we must actively choose and hope for a better future. Third, we must reach out – isolation will kill us; we need each other. Fourth, we must get moving – no one else can do our physical or emotional rehab for us. Finally, we must give back. Turning around to help those who are struggling alongside us will boost our serotonin levels and complete the cycle of our own healing. Givers, not takers, end up thriving.

It’s hard to read the papers and watch the news at times… tempting to turn the channel. But empathy is key to our personal and global survival. Only by recognizing the pain in ourselves do we begin to see others in pain as our brothers and sisters. As we work through our own pain, we find it satisfying, and even healing, to reach out and help others, replacing the cycle of violence and suffering with one of growth and peace.

–Jerry White, cofounder of Survivor Corps – a worldwide network of people helping each other overcome the effects of war and violence—and author of I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis. All net proceeds from sales of I Will Not Be Broken benefit Survivor Corps programs to help survivors recover worldwide.

Via Engadget China