Do you like that? I’m not sure it was John Wilkes who said it, but it certainly was someone in the late 18th century.
He tells me:
I Googled the phrase “We value your business” and got 191,000,000 hits from the search. Even for Google, this is a large number.
He comments:
When you actually do get a human on the line, it’s like the company has serious Attention Deficit and Disorder issues, which is why the ginormous phone company pictured in the cartoon is called ad&d – note that any resemblance to a real phone company is purely coincidental.
And it’s not just the phone companies. Take the credit card companies. When I call them, they ask me to enter my sixteen digit account number. Then, minutes later, when a human picks up the phone, what is the first thing they ask me? They say, “please tell me your sixteen digit account number.”
What happened to the one I just keyed into the phone? Apparently the phone system ate it.
Not long ago I bought a house and called a major phone company (let’s just say their name rhymed with ad&d) to get phone service. I wasn’t asking for anything fancy, just a plain old land line
They told me that they really preferred not to actually set up the service themselves (although they would for about $128) and that I should call their outsourced company called White Picket Fence or something like that if I wanted to actually get a phone installed at a lesser rate.
– and they wanted to fob me off to some other company with a meaningless name.
I wasn’t doing a home improvement project, I just wanted a plain old land line attached to a plain old black desk phone (with the curly cord that gets all snagged and bunched up). And, they wouldn’t even transfer me. They gave me the phone number to dial myself.
Awesome customer service, don’t you think. Anyhow, I did actually call White Picket Fence and the whole transaction went downhill from there – but I’ll spare you at this point.
The Chelsea Library of which I am an avid patron, went high-tech/big cock-up about a year ago.
