Lower the Bar, Not the Boom

At the Reno/Tahoe International Airport the other day, I witnessed a guy rip into his phone company in a pretty alarming way.  Right there among the hungry slot machines and folks with kangaroo pouch bellies and roughly two months to live, this guy was screaming into his cell phone about some cock-up or another.  He wasn’t even addressing a person directly; he was berating her voice mail box.  You see, this rep had missed some earth-shattering detail on the guy’s account and then went on vacation, so what’s a sociopath to do but harangue her via message, loud enough for all travelers and degenerate gamblers to hear.

A confession: I’ve been this guy – that guy! – quite recently.  Not in a crowd, mind you, but sitting at my desk I laid into Comcast Business something fierce.  The media giant that everyone seems to hate had recently changed over all voice-mail checking steps and not bothered to tell its longtime customers (at least not this one).  You may well know that for many years, when you called your voice mail box you’d immediately hit star – or asterisk or splotchy guy – to enter the system.  With the change, all one got was that maddening, hateful compu-woman and she was only trained to say “goodbye.”  Wait, what?  Try back, same thing.  Try again, same thing!  When I called to report the chaos, a very young – and remarkably uninterested – customer service agent said it had something to do with an “outage.”  Which is fine except for the fact that it wasn’t at all true.

Nothing was out.  For whatever stupid reason, you now hit the pound sign – or tic tac toe box – to gain access (splotchy guy now ends your call abruptly, and why we need that as opposed to gently hitting the hang-up part of our smartphone or aggressively slamming down the ol’ landline receiver is anyone’s guess).  Phew, at least we can now get in, but good golly was her dismissive attitude and lack of apologetic tone some kind of annoying.  Naturally, I did what any good citizen does in this situation and demanded to speak with the supervisor.  “Hold on,” said she, and on comes a guy who says all the right things… until our call gets disconnected.  Oh boy.  Well, at least in this case it’s the phone company, right?  It’s not as if it was the airline looking for my luggage.  They can look at my number in the system, call me back, and we can tidy things up.  And you surely see where this is going.

Five minutes – nothing.  Ten.  Silence.  I call back, go through the same maze (complete with my impolite “REPRESENTATIVE!!!” responses to the auto-bot in the sky), and get the guy back on the line.  “Why no call back?” I query, temples bulging.  Ready?  He says it’s because they didn’t have a good call-back number for me.  The phone company.  The people who every month without fail hit my work credit card harder than Johnny Manziel hits Vegas strip clubs.  They didn’t know how to find me.  The people who charge me to have a magical way to make – and, whoa, receive – phone calls wasn’t sure how. to. call. me.  Wow.

So I went off.  Really off.  Can’t recall clearly if I had a headache or it was cloudy or if I’d stubbed my captain toe earlier that morning, but something got so deep under my skin with that lame excuse that I just had to let that guy have it, complete with a meaty f-bomb and super-satisfying phone slam down.  And you know what?  It was stupid of me.  What did I accomplish?  Nothing.  Really.

Lots of people are off-the-charts incompetent.  Comcast has some cool technology but otherwise sucks on an otherworldly level and likely always will.  This is, after all, the company that has caller ID show up on your TV screen and yet a customer service department that has to ask what number you’re calling from.  These are simple facts and things aren’t going to change.  But I can change.  There is hope.  I don’t need to be a jerk and reinforce their image of the overbearing, insufferable customer.  Next time I’ll gently end the call and remind myself to expect a very low bar out there… from Xfinity and beyond.