May 2009 Archives

If you have an old (first generation) AirPort Base station that you need to reset, there are instructions on Apple's support site.

However, you'll also need a copy of the AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow.

Of course, this ends up not being enough, as there appears to be an endian issue when running the reset procedure on Intel Macs. A workaround would be to force the application to run under Rosetta, but the checkbox to do that in the 'Get Info' window was disabled when I looked. Fortunately one can use the command line program 'arch' to force execution of the ppc version of the application.

`arch -ppc /Applications/Utilities/AirPort\ Admin\ Utility\ for\ Graphite\ and\ Snow.app/Contents/MacOS/AirPort\ Admin\ Utility\ for\ Graphite\ and\ Snow`

Since there are plenty of cheap base stations available (often with significantly better features and faster wireless and wired support), there are probably very few people who are even bothering to use these old base stations anymore. However, there are a few cases where they are still useful, and that beats sending them to the recycler (or throwing them away).

I own a house.

In order to make this possible, I have a mortgage.

Banks like to sell mortgages. So, through no choice of my own, my mortgage is owned by Chase Bank [aside: Chase probably only owns the contract to service the loan, but that's not really important in this case].

Since I have an 'existing business relationship' with them, they can call me (via phone numbers that are on the National Do Not Call List). Additionally, it's very unlikely that they have all of the 'opt out of offers' paperwork I signed when I first got my mortgage.

Which is all just setup for something stupid.

Yesterday, I get a call from a local number that I don't recognize. The caller leaves a message saying that there is an "urgent, but not critical" issue with my account at Chase, and that I need to call back at the local number.

First, I do some looking, and with a little effort, I am able to verify that the number is indeed a number for Chase bank (for a local branch, though, not for the mortgage division, and importantly not the number that is on my mortgage statements). If the bank actually cared about my not being vulnerable to scams, they would have asked me to call a number that I already knew was them (i.e. the number that is printed on the mortgage statement).

Since Chase has been sending me junk mail for a while trying to get me to open a checking account with them (no thanks), I was somewhat suspicious that there wasn't an issue with my account as much as they were trying to sell me something.

With some hope that this wasn't the case (and because if there really is an issue with my mortgage, I need to know about it), I called the number today. I was put on hold for about a minute while the person I spoke to "looked up the details of my account". When the person came back to the line, she tried to schedule me for an in person meeting with an account rep. for tomorrow morning (i.e. she tried to get me to come in to the bank where someone would hard-sell their checking account). I asked if she could remove me from further 'offer' calls, and she said she would (while throwing in a "but you are missing out because since you have a mortgage with us, you are eligible for $100 if you open a new checking account with us").

I can appreciate them wanting me to open a new account (or accounts) with them, and I don't find it entirely unreasonable that they called me about it. I have two problems with what happened, though:

1. Chase should stop conditioning customers to accept that a person calling them is "from the bank" just because the caller says so.
2. Leaving a message saying that there is an "issue" with an existing account is not an acceptable way to generate sales leads.