apropos of nothing, here's a help desk / customer service story which cheered me up..

I use OED online on a regular basis, for double-checking the wwftd and help in finding citations. since their site relaunch, I'd not been able to link to bibliographic information on the latter, but I just assumed they hadn't fully implemented all the features. so finally, after three(3) months of use, I decided to ask about this:

Saturday, March 05, 2011
To: Customer Support
Subject: OED Content Comment

I am not able to use links within citations, as in the previous online version, to reach bibliography details. the links all seem to look like this:

javascript:void(0)

is this something that is incorrectly set up by me, by my proxy (i.e., my subscribing library), or is this something you've yet to implement?

-tsuwm

a couple days later I received a reply..

Monday, March 07, 2011 10:05 AM

Subject: RE: OED Content Comment

Thank you for contacting us.

We believe your subscribing institution may need to change a configuration in their proxy settings.

We ask that you please have them contact us so we may assist further, or please provide the name of the institution so that we may reach out to them directly.

We thank you for bringing this to our attention and look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,
Customer Support - Online Products
Oxford University Press

I quickly replied with contact information for tech support at Hennepin County Library (HCL), and seven(7!) minutes later I received this reply..

Monday, March 7, 2011 10:41 AM

Thank you for your reply.

We will reach out to your library administrator directly in order to fix this error.

We thank you for bringing it to our attention!

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Sincerely,
Customer Support - Online Products
Oxford University Press

now, things were really rolling!

Monday, March 07, 2011 10:49 AM

To: Techhelp
Subject: FW: OED Content Comment

Dear Hennepin County Library,

We received the e-mail below from one of your patrons and believe you may need to update your institution's EZproxy configuration to allow a certain type of HTTP header to pass to allow full functionality in the Oxford English Dictionary.

[details]

When the above has been changed, it is recommended that the EZproxy should be restarted for the changes to take effect.

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Sincerely,
Customer Support - Online Products
Oxford University Press

then, I was copied on this, from HCL to OED..

Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 3:55 PM
Subject: RE: WO # 105213 - Public - Mike Fischer - Oxford English Dictionary

This change has been made.

Glenn Peterson
Techhelp, HCL

I wrote to thank the tech..

March 07, 2011 5:00 PM

Glenn, thanks for your prompt attention on this; and I've thanked Laurie as well.

You may (or may not) recall I initially notified you regarding the OED relaunch.

am I the onliest person using this wonderful resource!?

-tsuwm

I also thanked OED Customer Support..

Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 5:56 PM
To: Customer Support
Subject: Re: OED Content Comment

This has already been fixed!
thanks for your prompt attention.
the Thesaurus link now works for me too.

BTW, I think the new OED online is (now) totally cool!!

-tsuwm

I have received replies to both..

Tuesday, March 08, 2011 9:33 AM

Thank you so much for the positive feedback! We’ve passed it on to our editors.
Please be in touch any time we can be of assistance.

Sincerely,
Customer Support - Online Products
Oxford University Press

and..

Tuesday, March 08, 2011 9:58 AM
Mike, there were 359 uses of the OED online last month and I’m guessing they weren’t all you ;-)

Thanks for alerting us to this issue. With nearly 100 subscription offerings we’re not able to routinely test access.

Glenn Peterson
Techhelp, HCL
____

this all was so much more positive then the usual Help Desk runaround. but I'm not convinced that those 359 uses weren't all me..