"Hello, How Can I Annoy You Today?"

Well, my dear father wrote a Pet Peeves post a few days ago, and these are some of my favorites among his blogs. As he said, we tend to grouse about the same things, so here I go:

The state of customer service in this country is deplorable. As I type, I have my cell phone pinned painfully between my ear and shoulder waiting for whatever moron at the cable company is going to pick up my call. According to their recording they are experiencing a "higher than normal call volume." My ass. That is standard for "we don't give a rat's hiny about you are or your petty question so we have one idiot answering calls and he/she smokes a cigarette after each one." Somehow I can't imagine that there is a huge call volume at 8:oopm on a Wednesday night. Had we just had a storm or power outage I might believe that load of bull, but tonight I don't.

Let me back up. First of all, I hate our cable company. They provide our cable, phone and Internet. Why not change companies, you ask? We live in the middle of a small town that has only one cable provider, something I believe is called a monopoly because we have no other choice. Bastards. The cable box was not working this morning (more accurately, it was dead) and so I exchanged it for a new one today. I got it home, and after several calls with automated advice, hooked it up. Well, I've got a picture, but no sound. All the cable company ever suggests is "restarting the system and checking the connections", all of which I've done. If I have to go back, or worse yet, wait for a service call, someone at the cable company will not be very happy. ---

2 days later: So, as it turns out, we had to program the cable box for us to get sound, something the lady snapping her gum at the service counter might have mentioned. Malcolm, my husband who never sleeps, called the Customer Service Dept at around 2 in the morning and they walked him through it. Well that's one problem solved.

This is just one example of poor service. Another is credit card companies. I'd rather scrub my toilet than have to call any credit card company. This is largely because the people who answer the phone barely speak English and all I can picture is them feeding my card number to the Al-Queda operative sitting next to them.

And then there's retail workers. The people who work in stores are, for the most part, completely uninterested in helping customers. They are far more interested in yapping with their co-workers and texting on their cell phones. When I was a kid, we had a little department store near our house called Garbers. It was a small department store; it was not part of a chain and it was tiny compared to the other department stores, such as Macys or A&S. However, if you needed a nice shirt or a gift for someone you could run to Garbers and have a very pleasant experience. The salespeople were mostly older women, or what I perceived as "older" when I was 10. They were all dressed nicely and smiled and kept their departments neat. My mother liked to shop at Garbers. She would often visit their gift department for a family member's birthday present. I recall that the gift department was right near the candy counter, and I would look longingly at the bins of multi-colored Swedish fish and the small boxes of fruit-shaped marzipan. I love a good candy counter. (Sidenote: My great Aunt Lou worked at the candy counter in A&S and would bring me bags of the Swedish fish and the boxes of marzipan when she visited. For some reason, I thought it was called "marcy-pon".) But I digress...back to Garbers. If my mother picked out a gift for someone, the saleperson would actually wrap the gift with a pretty bow for FREE. It was just part of the service. If you want something wrapped now, you must pay for it, or at some places you can wrap it yourself at the table with the giant roll of generic paper, although the tape is usually missing.

Anyway, I doubt things will ever get better in this area. So, I will continue to do most of my shopping on-line, where I can actually open a little chat window and get a customer support person to help me; I don't have to talk to anyone and they usually fix my problem. That's all I want: some one to fix my problem without my blood pressure rising to dangerous levels. And I really don't think that's too much to ask.