the watch of time

Does every encounter with a service provider have to be a hassle?

Maybe it has something to do with the depressive atmosphere of January.

This month my spouse spent over a week in phone calls with a telephone provider and credit card company, attempting to get a $999 charge reversed applied in error to her credit card, applied after she simply arranged to transfer ownership of the phone account from one of our adult sons to her own name.

My attempts to lower our land line phone bill took four calls over three days to get rectified.  The original interaction resulted in several errors on the part of the customer service (please add to the oxymoron list!) representative, which a higher level had to rectify so that I was able to receive a borderline satisfactory result; only satisfactory, because of the limitations of what this giant hydra would offer, given they are not a hungry upstart.

I discovered that our natural gas provider has been annually overbilling me for a few years.  This is, hopefully, in the process of being rectified. So far the discussions have been mostly pleasant; we’ll see.  Then we can be limited to the regular list of exorbitant charges.

This morning I received an email from my internet security provider with respect to annual renewal, stating immediate action was required because of expiry today.  Thinking this should be a simple affair, I did so on-line.  Then I noticed this was five days earlier than the original subscription last year, that my operating system was not noted in the correspondence, the suggested discount was not applied, and there was no confirmation of the price in $CDN. (an increasingly big issue these days).  I went on their chat line, and got nowhere.  I tried the tech support site, after changing the password because the one supplied by the company previously was rejected, had to guess at a product description in order to submit the request as none was provided on the renewal form, and am awaiting an email response, the next stage in the drama of supposed help.

Here’s the little cherry on this cake: while I was in the process of writing this posting, we had delivery of the weekly community newspaper; about one minute after my spouse took it from the mailbox, the delivery person came up to the house with another copy; as I attempted to say it wasn’t necessary, she handed another one to me; she wouldn’t take it back – she walked away, saying that we had retrieved it from the mailbox too quickly, and therefore she forgot she had given us one!

How some organizations stay in business is mystifying…