Customer Service

Whatever happened to the philosophy, 'The customer is always right'? Granted, most customers fall under 'always have their knickers in a knot' or just plain assholes; but the state at which customer service exists today is appalling, to say the least.

How many times have we had to contend with 'please hold' and then be subjected to torture bordering on the Chinese kind; where terrible music is dripped down your ears excruciatingly slow? Or, 'We can release your information to you only if we receive the original document, notarized and signed by you in blood, attesting to hand over your first born.' All this, in addition to having to spell out your unhelpfully l-o-n-g name in letters and mnemonics that dimwits can process.

There was an episode on one of my favorite radio shows that sometimes features regular civic dilemmas such as dealing with infuriating customer service; where the guest speaker was a woman traumatized by years' worth of contending with atrocious service, not to mention harassment, from her phone company. She had had to put up with suggestions that she write out the claim that she was being charged for calls she hadn't made, and fax it to the claims department-a place that apparently lacked any other means of communication, even a telephone. A phone company, with an office somewhere in the middle of goodness knows where, with no telephones. When the guest expressed her incredulity at such a thing; she was assured that her mental picture of a bunch of dark, brooding employees seated in a circle around a fax machine, waiting for claims to come through with a sound like a death knell, was, indeed, accurate.
Sometimes I wonder if this pathetic land has indeed stopped in the age of the Salem Witch trials.

Another tack these Neanderthals take is intimidating you with technical jargon. Take my recent tussle with a computer repair service, for instance: on an ill-fated day, I decided to take my virus-infected work computer in for some diagnostics and repairs at a reputedly decent chain. I was assured, with the gleaming smiles of a Friday afternoon (another 3 hours and to go conquer the Spartans on the new X-Box Gramps got for Xmas-sweet!!); that the job will be done in 3-4 days. I had misjudged, from my colleague's experience with them-by whatever loop in the cosmos, she had not only had her computer worked on and ready to go in the exact time frame they'd stated, she'd actually had excellent customer service. (Of course, I should have known that the fabric of the cosmos might just be funked at the branch that I chose to go to.)

4 days became 5, then 6, and it has now been 12 whole days, and the wasteful pieces of ectoplasm still have the temerity to throw around phrases like 'we are still running tests to identify whether it's a Trojan Horse or a Worm', thinking that'd put me off. Not to be outdone, I told them that I didn't care whether another Greek tragedy was about to take place beneath the recesses of my computer; I bloody well expected it to be clean and running, with an anti-virus installed to boot, by now!

Seriously: I'm no programming expert; and couldn't detect a 'Trojan Horse' to save my own life, but I do know that it does not take anyone; leave alone a computer Geek (no more cryptic messages as to the name of the useless chain now!), 12 days of bungling to figure out what the hell was wrong. I figured, from the furtive shuffling of their humongous egos while they spared a few minutes to speak with me, and from the hours of holding they had me do, that they haven't even got down to my comp. yet. I chewed this little pipsqueak's ear out today, losing it once and for all, telling her that she had no business being in customer service if she was going to give me lip about, well, anything, leave alone my inquiries on the status of my computer-for whose service I have already shelled out an exorbitant sum of my hard-earned money!! I also added that I understood how she was here because she was no good for anything else, but that was hardly my problem.

Harsh? You bet! Years' worth of haggling, and dealing with sub-human creatures with egos bigger than their unjustifiable paychecks have erased any human sentimentality for the useless lumps, and noone ever called me PC anyway. I still don't have my comp., but then, I haven't really gone in person and flaunted my scene-making skills. Yet.