Why Beth At Amazon Chime Is My Hero.

Recently, our office updated all of our Macs to the latest OS, Catalina. We felt like we vetted it out responsibly. We saw there were a few items here and there (most-notable at the time were some plug-ins related to PhotoShop)… but, overall, we felt, “yeah, sure, why not?”

Unlike other Mac OS upgrades that we performed in the past on one or two machines, tested it out, and IMMEDIATELY rolled back to the previous OS version because of issues – the testing of Catalina was surprisingly easy and smooth so we strongly and courageously marched onward with the roll out.

It wasn’t until I (Jay) was holding my first Chime meeting after the rollout that a cold chill went down my back. My Chime screen sharing wasn’t working.

I… use… Chime… for ALL my client meetings. I love Chime. I can’t sing the praises of Chime enough. As a small business owner, it came bundled with our Vonage telephony system and it’s great. It’s affordable, it’s great quality in terms of meetings, has all the bells and whistles I need…

And now it wasn’t working.

And nobody gave a shit.

When I say that, I mean, nobody in my company gave a shit. Don’t get me wrong, they feigned giving a shit in a polite and just-shy-of-convincing way. But it didn’t impact them as much as it did me (meaning, pretty much not at all) and it was obvious there was nothing that could be done about it. It was a Chime/Catalina compatibility issue.

I tell everyone at TimeHoodie that we don’t dictate style. We focus on goals; and try to procure a culture at TimeHoodie that is goal-oriented, detail oriented, and delivers results. If anyone at TimeHoodie wants to internally use Google Hangouts or Skype or WHATEVER – I’m fine with that. And – as a result – most don’t use Chime. Even if they have external meetings with clients, they will usually plug into whatever the client uses (like Zoom, join.me, GoToMeeting, or whatever).

If they can’t use Chime, they’ll jump over to something else and not miss a beat.

I scoured message boards, Google searches, Chime knowledge base and tech support looking for answers. But it was such a new issue, there wasn’t any support. Just discussions about how Catalina moved to 64-bit vs 32-bit and yada, yada – nothing that helped me.

The problem? Following the instructions leads you to this:

This is where Chime should be a choice to select. And as you can see, it’s not.

And I couldn’t find any way to talk to a human at Chime about this. So, I called Vonage… and eventually they got me in contact with somebody that wanted to SELL me Chime… (Yep.)

Then I remembered, Chime asks EVERY time you end a meeting – “how did it go?”

I occasionally, hit the thumbs up and otherwise hit the X and keep moving. But I remembered… there was a little chat icon dude that was there as well.

The answer was in front of me all along!

I hit the chat icon dude:

YES! This is what I needed!

Proceededing to calmly and politely write feedback in hopes that Chime would address my issue was the perfect solution! Instead of doing that, though, I proceeded to rant and spit fire and basically (looking back on it now) wrote what was an embarrassing over-reaction to my frustration at the time…

But that did not deter my future-hero, Beth.

Keep in mind, I wrote this on a Friday. I got an email Monday morning from Beth. She had got my message and sent me the following.

A special build.

Beth sent me a pre-release, special build so I could hold my meetings on Monday.

Because of Beth, the ONLY meeting I ever had to scramble and handle using join.me was the one meeting when I found out about the issue.

I had no less than 8 meetings scheduled that week that needed Chime and 2 were on that exact Monday.

I downloaded my special package, installed, and got this:

There you are… my little amigo, Chime. Where you’re supposed to be.

Thank you, Beth. Thank you for caring, thank you for acting, and thank you for putting up with a poorly-worded and grammatically incorrect email from a frustrated customer.

In the words of Ren Höek, “you’re one of the good ones.”

Beth, the greatest mudskipper of them all.