re: #125 marjoriemoon

Zero used to always get you to the operator, but they’ve got wise to that, too :( Now I get “invalid selection.”

I had a nightmare recently over a mortgage payment that was not applied properly and came up as a late payment. I spent 3 days on the phone, but couldn’t resolve it. I had to find a branch and go the bank. That’s Chase, btw. If you have a choice in banking, never, never, NEVER go with Chase. They are evil.

You have hit three of my biggest gripes.

There used to be a notion in American business that to succeed meant making the best product and that service was provided with a smile - even with an obnoxious customer.

The somewhere the paradigm got shifted to we will squeeze as much short term profit as we can and give the minimum service possible in order to cut costs.

Large companies can do this because of lack of competition. It is always amusing to me how the people who argue Adam Smith as the word of G-d the most readily seem to miss that his model only applies where companies have incentive to do better and not worse. - and then go and support ever larger corporations.

My personal gripe (most recently) comes from having to deal with high speed internet. I have two choices.

Both of those choices know full well that the pain in the ass of switching over to the other’s crappy service is just enough that I am unlikely to switch, having dealt with days on the phone to get simple things fixed with both of them.

In this case, a few days ago, I lost service because the techs disconnected me when connecting someone else.

Now I knew this was the case because everything went down at the same time the tech was leaving, my bills are paid, and none of my actual equipment was damaged.

After about two hours on the phone, (they always are experiencing “greater than normal call volume” ever notice that?) I got through to a human and explained the problem. They said they could send someone in three days to fix it. I said look your guy just unplugged me, he is certainly still in the area since he was here two hours ago and it is fix as simply as putting a plug in a socket.

They explained as if I were a slightly brain damaged five year old how this was as soon as they could fix things and that it could well have been my modem failing and that an “expert” should look at it.

Uhuh. Well there is no point in arguing. Switching to the crappy service of the other would take two weeks to get installed, not three days.

Of course I was correct about the fix BTW.