Three weeks ago: I call my electric company about the electric for the new apartment I'm moving into. For some reason they want the order to be processed through some affiliate. Affiliate says, "Hey, we can probably get you a deal on your internet and other entertainment services too." I'm like, "They're information services, not just entertainment services, and I was planning to see if I could just transfer my phone and internet with [subject ISP here] from the old place to the new place." They're like, "Sure, we can do that. Does such and such date work for you?" Me: "Well things have been so up in the air... ideally, could it be scheduled for that date but able to be changed if it turns out different for us?" Them: "Sure, you can call us at this number with this order number if you need to change that date."
Two weeks ago: Ended up moving on that day, so thought that would work out nicely -- but lo and behold... no phone or internet at the new place. Call the electric company's affiliate to find out what's up and they claim nothing phone or internet related was on that order. Feeling perplexed but, at this point, forgiving, I let them try one more time -- but this time I'm going to check online and verify that they get it right. Turns out that even though I spelled out my email address for them they didn't send me the confirmation email they were supposed to -- but what's truly problematic is that they require the email address to look up the order on their website too, and their site claims it can't find it, so I guess they got my email wrong despite my spelling it out and their website is very specifically intended not to act as a backup if they screw that up.
"Clearly, the electric company's package deal selling affiliate is full of crap," I said to myself. "I should have ignored them all along and just called [subject ISP here] directly."
I call [subject ISP here] and their customer service representative is much less trying to sell me other crap and much more on the ball with understanding something simple like looking up an existing customer and simply moving the location of his service. Unfortunately, they can't get a technician out to do the hardware part for three weeks. I figure that's better than not knowing if I'm even getting what I asked for, and accept; then I go and try to cancel the order with the electric company's smorgasbord affiliate, though given the mistakes they already made I won't know for sure that they didn't try to do anything I don't want until next month's bills arrive.
When I asked to have my service transferred, [subject ISP here] asked me for a current contact number and I gave them my cell phone -- since by the time they'd be able to do the transfer I'd have been long out of the old apartment and therefore unable to use the landline precisely because I need it transferred.
One week ago: I call [subject ISP here] to check if they've had any openings that could move up the schedule for getting my phone and internet back. They're able to move it up a week. That's still two weeks from when I ordered it, which is from what I've heard abnormally long, but eh, maybe it's their busy season.
Along the way I'm asked if my contact number is still the number I gave them three years ago. It is not -- that number is, fortunately, still in use by a relative, but not me. I gave them my current cell phone number for the second time.
Today: My wife calls me at work with her cell phone to tell me that my relative called her because [subject ISP here] was calling the old phone number wanting to confirm that we're still available this afternoon for the work to be done. I call [subject ISP here] and complain about them calling the old number when I had already given them my current number twice. The customer service representative I speak to at this point checks something and says that their main system has my current number but she will update their dispatch center, which I guess is a world of its own or something, and they will call my current number when they are ready to come out and do the work.
I wait for the call for several hours before my wife calls me from the home phone to tell me that they continued calling the old phone and my mother, being of above average intelligence and a very practicality-oriented mind, took it and told them yes as if she were a member of my family, so they came out and set up the phone and internet, then repeatedly called my relatives on the old number until they lied and took the customer satisfaction survey for me because they insisted that was the number I gave them to call (yeah, that was true three %@#%#^ing years ago!)...
You might think at least it's done and it couldn't get any worse, but if so you'd be wrong. I get home planning to get online and verify that what they've given us really is just a transfer of the service we've had. As far as I can tell it seems to be, but my investigation is interrupted by discoveries such as that the technician insisted on installing a second wireless router even though I still have the one that originally came with the service that's now just being transferred -- and that he took some of the DSL filters he figured we didn't need.
Now, let me be clear: Those filters almost certainly came from [subject ISP here] in the first place, and are probably almost literally a dime a dozen. The thing is I wasn't all that clear on whether they were mine to keep. So, I called [subject ISP here] for what was the way-too-many'th time in one year (or maybe one lifetime) to ask how I could tell. After waiting fifteen minutes on hold while the guy who answered my call talked to the dispatch department, he came back and told me "you didn't need them." Because, you know, not that I said this to him, but whatever I don't need is totally free for anyone to take on their own judgement; I'm a proud comrade of [subject home country here]'s socialist utopia, am I not? On pressing the issue (much more politely than that) that I wanted to be sure it was theirs to make that call in the first place, I was told they will look up the serial number and I can call back tomorrow to find out.
At this point I was tired of trying to get through to this guy and I still needed to make sure I wasn't going to be charged for the second modem/router I don't need, so I moved on. Turns out it's my responsibility to drive to one of the stores of [subject ISP here] and return the duplicate router -- nothing I'd care enough to complain about... if it weren't on an already long list of evidence of basic incompetence. Oh, and I put in one last complaint to change my gorram contact number -- this time I was told that it can take up to twenty-four hours for the change to process through the system. (Two things I find "funny" about this in a stupendously dark way: One, either this guy or the guy I talked to before who said they'd call the updated number today was either a liar or a fool, and two, this is one of the same companies touting the ease of handling stuff "automatically" online -- and they *provide* the online -- so it beats me why their system doesn't update until some kind of daily processing works through it.)
A couple hours later it hits me like a shitton of bricks that the very fact that the way to determine whether the little doodad was mine or theirs is to look up a serial number that can't just be checked immediately (remember, I have to call back tomorrow if I want the end result) just about proves that the technician took it on the *assumption*, and not factual knowledge, that it was theirs; I have no real doubt in my mind now, from the facts I have so far, that their technicians are willing to take stuff they suspect belongs to the company without bothering to be sure they aren't taking my stuff.
And that, that, that pisses me off. I don't care that it probably is theirs, that its market value and its intrinsic value and its usefulness to me combined don't measure up to a fraction of the value of the time I've wasted being mad at, let alone actually dealing with, the fact that it was taken. I want to know what other networking doodads I have lying around that they can assume are theirs and take without proof! I want to know that next time it won't be something that somehow does matter -- and that I won't be caught by surprise or fighting it after the fact if it is.
Not to mention, going back to the whole basic incompetency theme, that such issues could be plainly and trivially resolved if they simply labelled anything they give out that they intend to take back later. Like, shittastic duh, Captain Obvious. If it says it's yours and is only being loaned or whatever while it's used for your service, then we wouldn't need serial number lookups. And then the serial number lookup people would be out of a job. You don't want to put them homeless on the street, do you? No? Well then, you'll have to keep track of anything we give you and remember yourself why you need to keep track of it. Who knows how many years later you'll be expected to give us whatever electronic devices happen to be plugged into your wall or your router because they're ours until proven otherwise. No sir, we can't be bothered to make such things easy on you -- it's not like the customer's ever right, you know.
So tomorrow I have to drop off the duplicate router before I have to leave for things I already had planned for the weekend (actually they're other people's plans that would be severely disrupted if I suddenly retracted my participation in them, to be clear), and I'm wondering if I need to bring a lawyer and a notary to verify whatever documentation they give me to prove that I really did turn it in so they don't try to dispute it later. Oh yeah, and I'm thinking I'd better bring my whole stack of network-related hardware that I'm pretty sure most of it I got from [subject ISP here] in the first place and give it back now (remember, it's not like it's actually worth that much) so I don't have to keep track of it for who knows how long, and of course get it documented too. And maybe just cancel my service, turn in both routers, and go to the library or someplace to get on the internet and look for evidence that any of the other ISPs in the area aren't run like fucking madhouses, or whatever passes for comparison shopping these days.
To add final insult to injury, it turns out every time I've called them they've waited half a day and sent me an email to evaluate that customer service representative -- that expires in a few days. So, you know, when they *knew* they wouldn't be able to get me internet access for three weeks, they sent me stuff to give them feedback only if I somehow got internet access before then. Which is just as well, because I would have mistakenly given them good reviews at first; so I guess that last joke is on them.
Anyway, probably the biggest long-term damage here is that this whole debacle has come when I'm already still stressed from moving a couple weeks ago and sleep-deprived due to (as far as I know) unrelated circumstances, and now I'm going to lose more sleep being pissed about this, and I might have to explain to my employer why I'm too groggy to do my job -- nevermind that somehow my employer gets by with other people who don't even hear perfectly simple explanations if they think the concept shouldn't be the way it is, don't learn things they've been taught over and over for a year unless they have to do it every day, etc.... which come to think of it also puts stress on me off and on even when there aren't crazy things going on... and then there's the way I can't seem to get another job because companies in general don't seem to actually want programmers (technically minded problem-solvers who understand what they're working with), they seem to want tech-buzzword-spouting corporate politics-players ("it's not what you know, it's who you know" they say, and I call it "nepotism with less biology"; and "cloooooud! clooouuud!" they say and I call it "stuff we've been able to do for decades that somebody finally figured out how to sell to you zombies") and coders who can promise to churn out thousands of lines of code meeting some irrelevant managerese requirements that somehow don't include actually being correct...
Yeah, I'm just getting less organized and less coherent with this whole rant as it goes on, but... whatever; somebody needs to hear it, and my wife is already too stressed to take any more complaining... and it's too late at night for me to go looking up where I can give these businesses (I mean the internet-related ones from the larger first part of the rant, not my employer) very detailed bad reviews.
(To any potential employer who finds this and somehow connects it to me, like everyone's always warning me is going to happen: If you don't care what I write in an anonymized fashion on unrelated forums only when I'm at my absolute worst, then by all means let me know, because that would make you more reasonable than average and therefore a preferred potential employer for me; if you do care, screw you, I hate shallow idiots like you and don't want to work for you anyway; if you aren't sure whether you should care because you can't even follow a complex sentence, you can stay non-screwed if you get off my gorram planet or at least avoid having any influence on society.)
Author
Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3702708 times)