When I was a youngster ....

I have been bitching a lot this last week. But, really, people are just pissing me off! That or I am just on a short fuse lately.

What am I bitching about? Well, I have having lots of problems with customer service folks being mostly unhelpful and, at worst, aggressively rude.

See, I have seven years experience in customer service. I put myself through college doing service work and, after I left school, I worked in sales for several years before I moved into a writing career track. When I was a service rep, I always felt that it was my job to, you know, provide service and be helpful and solve problems and help customers so that they would continue to do business with my employer. This didn't mean the customer was always right and it didn't mean you had to let them treat you like a slave. I did well. I always felt empowered to do the right thing. I never had to run to my manager to solve problems or get permission for anything. As a result, I actually won several awards and had a $10+ rate of pay, which was incredibly high for the field and the location where I was working, especially considering the fact that this was over ten years ago.

But nowadays, all the reps seem to give you are insincere apologies and red tape. For example, my dish has been off my roof for over three weeks now. One week was for the roof. And the roofer was supposed to come and realign the dish and never did. So I called my provider and scheduled an appointment for last Thursday.

They never showed. I called and bitched. They had it scheduled for the wrong date. So I rescheduled for today. I get a call last night saying that the appointment is for Saturday. Um, what? So I explained to her that it was supposed to be Friday and I had already requested vacation time and I basically got the "so sorry. We will be there Saturday." I asked for a refund for the amount of time I have been without service. Refused. I asked her to give me one reason I shouldn't rip the dish off my house and go with cable. No reply. The rep did not one thing to keep me as a customer. I was highly unimpressed.

Of course, I am not likely to go with cable, considering how bad Comcast screwed me over when I moved from MA (so bad I engaged the consumer advocate at the Chicago Tribune and got my problem into the press).

Dammitt! When I am dictator, things will be different!