I’m a really loyal customer when companies do what I want — make products I love and treat me well if I buy a lot of them. I have a love-hate relationship with Eddie Bauer. And I suspect, not knowing anything in particular about Eddie Bauer Holdings Inc. (other than that its assets were sold at auction in August for $286M to Golden Gate Capital), that most of my hate comes from the fact that Eddie Bauer doesn’t know how to use technology on behalf of its customers.

I’ve been a loyal customer of Eddie Bauer for at least the last decade. I buy the company’s shirts religiously: The LT size fits my torso perfectly. Eddie Bauer Wrinkle Resistant shirts really do resist wrinkles over a long period and many washings. But they still pass as dress shirts (rather than stiff upgrades from the polyester of yore). So every shirt I currently use for work is an Eddie Bauer. (I even experimented and bought a shirt from Old Navy, but it doesn’t fit right, it gets wrinkled even though it’s not supposed to, and it doesn’t feel like real cloth.) I’ve also more recently started buying Eddie Bauer’s pants too, since they fit and have the same wrinkle-resistant and fabric qualities. (TMI, I know, but I still get my shorts and socks from Nordstrom, which does know how to use technology but doesn’t make my kind of shirts and pants!)

I just went to eddiebauer.com, logged into my account and clicked on my order history: Two orders are recorded, one each from September and October of this year. What kind of order history is that? I’ve got at least 20 shirts hanging in my closet, about half of which I ordered from the web site. (Maybe customer records were not part of the bankruptcy sale to Golden Gate Capital?)

Okay, whatever: Now I want to buy two pairs of pants like the one that I’m wearing way too much because it’s the only pair I have that’s exactly what I want. I look at the labels in the pants. Size. Care. Brand. But no indication of what the model or SKU of the pant is. I go to eddiebauer.com and look at the men’s pants. There are Wrinkle Resistant pants called Dress Performance Kahkis and other pants called Casual Performance Chinos. Do I already own a Kahki or a Chino? I don’t know! The pant doesn’t tell me. The web site doesn’t tell me. So I order blind (which was the October order — I wrong wrong and returned the order, none the wiser).

Okay, I’ll go to the goddamn store, of which there are two in San Francisco, two more in the suburbs, and three outlet stores in those outlet malls in the distant burbs. The fun begins. I don’t have a product name to use with the store staff. (Yeah, I should have brought the pants with me.) I do have something called an Eddie Bauer Friends card, but the irony is that the store staff can’t look up my account to see what I’ve bought either! If I do find a shirt or pant that I like but isn’t in the right size, they can’t look up inventory in another store or online and have it shipped to me.

I could be behind on this, since I haven’t tried actually asking for help in an Eddie Bauer store in the last few months, so maybe they’ve fixed these problems. But I’m a regular visitor to the store at the San Francisco Center store as well as an occasional visitor to the outlet stores in San Rafael, Fairfield and Santa Fe, NM. I even pop into Eddie Bauer stores in malls in other cities, when I see one. The reason I bother going to the stores: I’ve discovered that, in the stores (but not online), I can find unique shirts with great patterns that are sometimes in my size. You have to look at the shelves underneath the main dress-shirt display, but I’ve found this works in every store I’ve stopped into around the country, whether in a mall or in an outlet.

In fact, I’ve turned this into a kind of game: Whack The Shirt. I’ve gotten a few really sweet shirts out of the game. (I just love the black one with slight white pinstripes.) But I’m getting tired of playing the game. Why, I wonder, can’t Eddie Bauer’s inventory system keep track of every shirt they put into it. My favorite wine store, K&L Wines, keeps track of every bottle of wine they have, including which store (four in all) and warehouse (three) each bottle is in and how many are left. They can guarantee delivery of what they are selling.

Eddie Bauer’s systems are so bad that they can’t tell you what you’ve bought, they can’t help you buy more, and they find new ways to frustrate loyal customers! The word about the bankruptcy was that the company couldn’t work out of its heavy debt load. I’d be willing to lay odds that they ended up taking that debt in the first place because their IT department couldn’t build flexible systems that delivered products to customers efficiently and happily! (But whatever you do, Eddie, please don’t go out of business and make me go buy shirts from someone else.)

That’s the word that Twitter chose to use when it locked me out of my own account. To wit: “Locked out! We’ve temporarily locked your account after too many failed attempts to sign in. Please chillax for a few, then try again.”

Here is the (urban) dictionary definition of the word, “chillax“.

I did “chill out” and waited another 24 hours. I got the same message just now, which means that my main home computer appears to be permanently locked out of Twitter. In the interim, I sent a plea to one of the investors in the company in an attempt to get my account unlocked. Here is the official response of the company, forwarded by the investor: “Sounds like he changed his password but didn’t change it on a 3rd party app attempting to access Twitter. Since lockouts are IP-based, the hacker would have to be inside his home. *grin*. He should shut all his Twitter-accessing things down, give it an hour and a half or so, and then try again. :)”

Sounds like? Actually, my third party apps (on iPhone and Blackberry) are working just fine, able to update with new tweets and show me the tweet stream. (I changed the password instantly on all my third party apps, since I’m not an idiot.) This condition only exists on the Firefox browser on the computer inside my home (as was so grinningly observed by the Twitter employee), where I have not tried repeatedly to log into my Twitter account (since I’m only here at night). Now that I have changed my password, Twitter is recording multiple failed attempts to log into my account, attempts made by the hacker. *grin*

From the perspective of my 30 years of experience watching companies from a distance, this all looks and feels to me like Twitter is a company that considers its users a nuisance and customer service a real pain in the ass.

Twitter does actually have a problem right now with having its DM (Direct Message) feature hijacked. (I know that other users are reporting the same problem.) When the DM feature is hijacked, the user community recommends that the user change his/her password to prevent further phishing messages being sent out via the DM channel. But, once you do change your password, whoever had previously hijacked it continues to try to use the account (since it’s just a software robot sending the messages) and creates a condition of multiple failed attempts to log into your account. Twitter blocks your account both from yourself and the hacker.

The Twitter employee’s assumption (without any investigation into the situation) that the hacker would have to be inside my house is totally incorrect. Regardless of all the business model and valuation issues that surround Twitter, I certainly hope the company adopts a different attitude toward its users. It’s tempting when you have a lot of users who don’t pay for the service they use to view those users as non-economic or a cost center. But that’s a lousy attitude to have if you really want to build a business with long term value.

I got this email from a good friend, whom I’d prefer not to identify publicly. But I thought his sentiment was relevant to our current times so we decided to share it with you posthaste.

“Yesterday I ran into an old friend. As his hedge fund has tanked, he has lost 20 pounds (skinny to start with), is taking Valium every night to sleep, has night sweats and heart palpitations.

“He runs his own firm. He is the boss. But he is not a warrior. He is seeing disaster at every turn, rather than openings where he can attack. He is questioning himself and doubting his own fighting instincts, consumed with how his actions might be viewed, rather than taking swift and deliberate action. He is coddling wimps, instead of cutting loose those hindering his attack. He is acting like a frightened mother, not an inspired and powerful leader. Worst of all, he’s turned his fear and anger internally, against himself. When he needs to be strongest, he consumes himself with worry and purposeless actions.

“In the great heat and confusion of battle, you see men cower, become smaller, or retreat into some psychological refuge. Then you see the few who rise up out of the smoke and fire like an avenging spirit, usually with a mad gleam in their eyes and a slight determined smile, taking great pleasure in engaging a worthy enemy.”