Just when life seems serenely complacent something invariably comes along to throw a wrench into my spiritual works.
Since last week I've been harrassed at home by a renegade robo-phone which attack-dials my number, seemingly in six hour increments, around the clock. It scared the crap out of me at 3:30 in the morning last Friday. I've since turned the ringer off on the extension in the bedroom. But it still calls.
Naturally there are no human beings at the phone company over the weekend (and it was foolish of me to have ever thought otherwise) so it was a pointless effort to reach one until they all came in, hungry and hung-over, on Monday. It was then that I found out that in order to do this properly I would have to await the phantom robo-dialer again and, as soon as it had called and hung up, I was to press *57 which would, apparently, register the offender's number with the phone company for later tracing.
It would also, it seems, cost me a buck. I like that. You could be getting threatening calls from your crazy ex and, in order to get the phone company to cooperate with the police, YOU would have to plunk down a dollar of your hard-earned cash, in advance.
Now there's service! N'est pas?
Well, the phantom struck again last night. I was on my cellphone at the time (why do I still have two phones, I wonder?), so I struggled with yakking into the cellphone at the same time I was trying to press the (star)57 thingie. I hope I managed it.
I called the phone company this morning to report to them that I'd captured the culprit, red-handed, and registered the number, according to specifications.
They told me to wait another 48 hours to "make sure" they'd taken care of it.
Why is it that I seriously doubt that this will take care of it?
And why do I live in an age where "customer service" is just a load of corporate bullshit?
5 comments:
I used to get weird calls like that, too. They might still be happening for all I know. I turn the ringer off on the phone and check for voice mail a couple of times a day.
But I've hated phones since I grew out of that "I have to spend 3 hours on the phone with my best friend talking about nothing" phase. I was about 16 at the time.
So was your customer service representative talking from Joisey or from Bombay?
Ahh, but Aerten, I MUST use the telephone. In fact, it's a requirement to "use the phone" in recovery programs. Otherwise I would instantly succumb to the temptation to sit at home and isolate (people with addictive tendencies do that).
And Bev, the customer rep was in the US (probably in a prison somewhere), because in order to put a TRACE on a line, even at the request of a customer, the order must originate in the US of A. Apparently Bushy wasn't able to get that moved to some offshore, CIA-run, hellhole.
Yet.
even if you Did somehow get one of the handful of remaining customer service reps left behind here in the USA, the answer to your question (why does customer service suck) IS that mega-ginormous corporations have been given Huge tax breaks to ship jobs like mine to Bangalore.
(can you tell I'm still bitter about that?)
Oh, I totally get needing to be "in contact" with other human beings (or aliens pretending to be human beings, as the case may be)... I just like Instant Messenger better. I wonder if it has anything to do with the hearing loss I've been experiencing over the past 20 or so years. Hmmmm.
And Alan, I want those mega-ginormous corporations to bring CS jobs back to the US. I can understand 98% of US accents (and imitate about 85% of them)... but I literally cry with frustration when trying to communicate with people in Bangalore. Sigh.
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