FLORIDA – It’s worth interrupting my holiday to mention some good old American customer service.

I can’t, apparently, have AT&T’s tailored iPhone payg plan here because I don’t have a US bank account. Which is why I chewed my way through almost $30 of data in my first day here.

Enter Wayne, from AT&T’s call centre. Wayne rides a big Honda, hails from New Mexico but has British ancestry, and went to University late in life, ending up with a degree in British social history.

Wayne also spent almost an hour battling with AT&T’s bureaucracy on my behalf, and ended up bending the rules more than a little to give me an unlimited data bundle I’m not really supposed to have. But hey, willing buyer, willing seller – we’re both happy.

What a world away from the ‘computer says no’ culture we come across so often.

(Less impressed, by the way, with the service recovery at Universal when the ride we’d been queueing for broke.)

from my regular reads, to brighten up your Friday.

1 – Climate change = flooded cities. High-impact, real-world examples like this one are just what’s needed to wake people up to the realities of climate change.

We’ve HSBC and Ogilvy to thank for this one, apparently.

(OK, so the water would be a dirty brown with all sorts of stuff floating on top, but you get the idea.)

via Ryan Peal at my old haunt, H&K’s Collective Conversations.

2 – The size of countries

via Theo.

3 – Matchy-matchy flickr photos. Pick a colour or two and Multicolr from Idée Labs will do the rest.

via Simon Collister.