A friend of mine recently complained that my blog is not introspective enough for her anymore. She feels that the posts are not as thought provoking as they once were and she is left having to try and find her inspiration in horoscopes and Post Secret. "Now it's just all about your life." I guess my life has lost its luster. The intrigue and excitement traded in for a steady girlfriend. Now my largest daily crusade is trying to find the time to go to the gym and have hours of sex. It is torture.
On the bright side, I still have an incompetent bank. I have held an account with Washington Mutual Bank ("WAMU") for over nine years now. Sure, we got off to a rocky start when they accused me of larceny because they failed to process my opening deposit check correctly and believed that I had tried to defraud them for hundreds of dollars. However, that was all water under the bridge. We had moved on with our respective lives and were now the best of friends. I had cajoled at least two other people into opening accounts with them in the last six months, and they had sent me more free checks, even though my account is so old that it does not actually qualify for free checks. And when I went overseas, no bank treated me better. They gave me a free international 800 number to use and a number to call collect, in case anything happened. They also typically respond to the emails I send to them within 6 to 10 minutes. Always a nice feature to have when you are planning for your trip or trapped in some small Italian town, unable to access your cash because the Italian bank you are using does not give out more than 150 Euros at a time, but they tell you it is because your bank has frozen your account.
Last week, WAMU sent me a little message. "Open a savings account with us and get a 5% APR." Not a bad deal. I already have an online account with HSBC that gives me a little bit of a higher interest rate, but WAMU would be local for me, and I have a longer history with them. There's a connection - I see it when our eyes meet and they tell me they love me. So I decided to apply for a new account. This is when I learned that WAMU had only been plying me with nice words and cheap wine so that they could bend me over and give me the shaft.
As it turns out, WAMU had kept a notation on my account, from back when I first opened the darn thing, saying that I was a bad account holder and had attempted to commit larceny with them. Note that I never actually did anything wrong and that nine years ago they wrote me an apology letter for the incident. No matter, the notation was there and I could not open my account. Not only that, no one could figure out: (A) why the notation was still there after over nine years and (B) how to remove it.
It took me almost two weeks and multiple phone calls to various departments, from which I was often disconnected in the middle of a transfer. After day 8, I was convinced that Sprint's customer service had infiltrated and taken over WAMU's. It was fantastic, but in that bad way that makes you feel like you just did something you are going to regret and are going to need to get tested. At the end of the day, it was not even WAMU that fixed the problem. They had told me it was fixed, but I later learned that nothing had actually been done, despite all their little account notations to the contrary. To top it all off, after they realized that my life was still a living hell and that they were at fault, they told me that there was nothing more that they could do. The customer service woman told me she would completely understand if I wanted to close my accounts and take my business elsewhere. Desperate for some closure to all of this, I went to WAMU's "Early Warning" fraud company and explained to them what was happening. They also saw lots of account notations, but also explained to me quite politely that there was nothing that they could do either, except pass it up the food chain of management again and see if possibly something got done this time. Miraculously, a day later, it was fixed. Two weeks, twenty service reps and hours of painful frustration later, and I could go ahead and give WAMU more of my money.
The thing I find most frustrating in dealing with telephone customer service, today, is the fact that no one speaks English as their primary language, and they are all dumb. I nearly always have to get transferred to a supervisor or some other higher-end department to reach someone who sounds like they might have a glimpse of a thought dancing in their head and that might comprehend the English language beyond, "Thank you. Come again." And it is not the fact that English is not their primary language that is so frustrating (granted, it can be a little frustrating on a phone call - where you have to rely on the English language to convey all that you are thinking and feeling), it's the fact that they are dumb as toast. Reading from their little scripts and annoyed and angered when you ask to speak to a supervisor that might actually be able to understand what you are saying and help you.
I feel like customer service, across the board, has taken a dramatic cut in the corporate model. Almost no company seems to emphasize it anymore because they are all too busy saving money with shipping it overseas. And I get the fact that a lot of customers are dumb and annoying too and that they can approach you with questions that baffle the mind and make you want to sign them up for the first manned space flight to Pluto, but there are also people like me that would rather not waste hours and hours on the phone, having to fight with a company to get them to do their blasted jobs.
Now that Mattel is in the middle of doing its second recall of toys in the past month, I begin to wonder if maybe more companies will begin to question the wisdom of shipping things overseas just so that they can save a buck. I wonder if maybe companies will begin to realize that, "Hey, maybe you really do get what you pay for." And maybe they will begin to emphasize education in their workers, rather than just someone that can fill a seat. Or maybe they are all waiting for the market to force them to take these steps.
On the bright side, I still have an incompetent bank. I have held an account with Washington Mutual Bank ("WAMU") for over nine years now. Sure, we got off to a rocky start when they accused me of larceny because they failed to process my opening deposit check correctly and believed that I had tried to defraud them for hundreds of dollars. However, that was all water under the bridge. We had moved on with our respective lives and were now the best of friends. I had cajoled at least two other people into opening accounts with them in the last six months, and they had sent me more free checks, even though my account is so old that it does not actually qualify for free checks. And when I went overseas, no bank treated me better. They gave me a free international 800 number to use and a number to call collect, in case anything happened. They also typically respond to the emails I send to them within 6 to 10 minutes. Always a nice feature to have when you are planning for your trip or trapped in some small Italian town, unable to access your cash because the Italian bank you are using does not give out more than 150 Euros at a time, but they tell you it is because your bank has frozen your account.
Last week, WAMU sent me a little message. "Open a savings account with us and get a 5% APR." Not a bad deal. I already have an online account with HSBC that gives me a little bit of a higher interest rate, but WAMU would be local for me, and I have a longer history with them. There's a connection - I see it when our eyes meet and they tell me they love me. So I decided to apply for a new account. This is when I learned that WAMU had only been plying me with nice words and cheap wine so that they could bend me over and give me the shaft.
As it turns out, WAMU had kept a notation on my account, from back when I first opened the darn thing, saying that I was a bad account holder and had attempted to commit larceny with them. Note that I never actually did anything wrong and that nine years ago they wrote me an apology letter for the incident. No matter, the notation was there and I could not open my account. Not only that, no one could figure out: (A) why the notation was still there after over nine years and (B) how to remove it.
It took me almost two weeks and multiple phone calls to various departments, from which I was often disconnected in the middle of a transfer. After day 8, I was convinced that Sprint's customer service had infiltrated and taken over WAMU's. It was fantastic, but in that bad way that makes you feel like you just did something you are going to regret and are going to need to get tested. At the end of the day, it was not even WAMU that fixed the problem. They had told me it was fixed, but I later learned that nothing had actually been done, despite all their little account notations to the contrary. To top it all off, after they realized that my life was still a living hell and that they were at fault, they told me that there was nothing more that they could do. The customer service woman told me she would completely understand if I wanted to close my accounts and take my business elsewhere. Desperate for some closure to all of this, I went to WAMU's "Early Warning" fraud company and explained to them what was happening. They also saw lots of account notations, but also explained to me quite politely that there was nothing that they could do either, except pass it up the food chain of management again and see if possibly something got done this time. Miraculously, a day later, it was fixed. Two weeks, twenty service reps and hours of painful frustration later, and I could go ahead and give WAMU more of my money.
The thing I find most frustrating in dealing with telephone customer service, today, is the fact that no one speaks English as their primary language, and they are all dumb. I nearly always have to get transferred to a supervisor or some other higher-end department to reach someone who sounds like they might have a glimpse of a thought dancing in their head and that might comprehend the English language beyond, "Thank you. Come again." And it is not the fact that English is not their primary language that is so frustrating (granted, it can be a little frustrating on a phone call - where you have to rely on the English language to convey all that you are thinking and feeling), it's the fact that they are dumb as toast. Reading from their little scripts and annoyed and angered when you ask to speak to a supervisor that might actually be able to understand what you are saying and help you.
I feel like customer service, across the board, has taken a dramatic cut in the corporate model. Almost no company seems to emphasize it anymore because they are all too busy saving money with shipping it overseas. And I get the fact that a lot of customers are dumb and annoying too and that they can approach you with questions that baffle the mind and make you want to sign them up for the first manned space flight to Pluto, but there are also people like me that would rather not waste hours and hours on the phone, having to fight with a company to get them to do their blasted jobs.
Now that Mattel is in the middle of doing its second recall of toys in the past month, I begin to wonder if maybe more companies will begin to question the wisdom of shipping things overseas just so that they can save a buck. I wonder if maybe companies will begin to realize that, "Hey, maybe you really do get what you pay for." And maybe they will begin to emphasize education in their workers, rather than just someone that can fill a seat. Or maybe they are all waiting for the market to force them to take these steps.
lmao... at least one of us has time to go to the gym and is having hours of sex!!! lol
ReplyDeleteAs for your friend... I dont think I would worry much if your competition in her mind is her horoscope (perhaps ironic for me to be saying! lol)
and they are all dumb and you have hit the nail on the head!
ReplyDeleteWell, what kind of blog does she have, J?
ReplyDeleteAren't blogs our place to say whatever we want? Why should it be more introspective for someone else. Blogging is all about what the blogger wants.
ReplyDeleteIn my head, I commented on this a long time ago. But I agree with Uncommon -- seeing as it's YOUR blog and it's called "Life to Date" (which could be taken multiple ways, but I take it as YOUR life up to now) I think it's your prerogative to write about whatever you want to. Nice friend -- she should be glad you're in a happy time in your life and focus less on how your blog isn't all about what SHE needs anymore.
ReplyDelete