SG Cordray Pondering the Universe

I received an email this morning from customer service at BellSouth. Nice of them to take almost a week to get back to me. Not that there is much more they could say to me at this point. I think the last person I talked to said it all. I was informed that I would have to pay a deposit to get my phone service back once I terminated it.

However, I think someone is getting a little wiser, which makes one wonder if perhaps I’m not the only person in the US who has cancelled their phone service recently. The email this morning was all apologectic about the inconvenience to me and informing me a credit has been issued on my account. The credit probably won’t pay all of my last bill but who cares? I know it won’t pay the deposit to get my service turned back on. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to pay such a deposit but back then it was a pretty big chunk of money. Factor in inflation and it’s probably going to be an outrageous amount now.

The question that begs answering is: Why would I want to get that service again when poor service caused termination in the first place? Until the point where I terminated my account, I was dissatisfied with their services through customer service and I was extremely sick of the unwanted telemarketing calls trying to sell me additional services by quoting a price that magically doubled by the time you get your first bill with those services on it. This last escapade into the realms of phone companies was really just the “final straw”.

What led to this dissatisfaction was a series of events that started a little over two years ago when I succumbed to one of their telemarketing pitches offering me enhanced services and wireless service as well. They quoted me a price that sounded extremely reasonable. However, when we got our first bill, the reality was quite different from what was promised but the biggest problem was we couldn’t cancel anything for two years. We were stuck with it.

Moving households entails a lot of changes and those companies with whom you have contracts can hold you hostage. This was the case with the phone service. I called to have my service changed to the new address which they assured me would take place on the day I specified. It did really so I can’t fault them there… However, I had no phone service in my house. For 3 days I could not get it through Customer Services’ heads that I had no dial tone from any phone jack in the house. They kept repeating that service was on to the house and telling me I could hook up a phone through the outside jack… What is this? A return to Green Acres? For those of you who are too young to remember that show, it was a series in which a bigtime lawyer move to the country to become a farmer. His phone was installed on the outside of his house (this was before there was such a thing as phone jacks and phones were hardwired directly into the lines). This happened in late October. As anybody who lives in this part of the States knows, October is a typically rainy month here. Can you imagine?

After 3 days of arguing with them, I called the wireless phone company to split my bill because something had to give. The wireless company slapped me with a month in advance bill in addition to my regular bill. I had already paid that month in advance through BellSouth. So here we go again…

Both the phone and wireless companies were supposed to send me their copies of my billing history in consideration of the fact that I was in the middle of moving to a new residence. Some consideration. BellSouth never sent anything. The wireless company sent me printouts of my minutes usage for each month and tried to charge me $90 for that printout. There was nothing referencing my payment history on any of it. At this point, in regards to the wireless company, I just said forget it and started counting the remaining time left on contract. I canceled my service with them one month after the contract expired. That’s another rant so I’ll leave them be for another time.

I continued to use my BellSouth account although a much unhappier camper. The services we were using were more for our business concerns than personal use and it was not working out like we were assured it would. We researched VOIP for our business and decided that Vonage was offering a service that was more in line with our needs and budget. I haven’t been sorry for the switch to them for our business phones. However, since those services we were using with BellSouth were for the business it was redundant to keep them. It was during the cancellation of those services that this last experience happened which resulted in complete termination of my home service.

Now, phone service is no longer a matter of a technician coming to your house and hooking up phone lines. It’s only a matter of flipping switches. Remember the problem I had with my phone service during the move? The reason there was a problem was an inside line had been cut and being a main line into the house, it effectively deadened every jack in every room. It took one smart technician coming in after several really dumb ones to figure out what the problem was. I hope that man gets a raise and a promotion. I digress again, which I have a tendancy to do.

So, as you’ve read before, I canceled some of the services I was using. During the cancellation of those, you know what happened. They cut off my tone service which effectively cut off my dialing priveliges as cordless phones don’t have a way of changing to pulse dialing. After several phone calls using up cell phone minutes or tying up my business lines, I got absolutely nowhere except to be told that I didn’t give them enough time to fix it. I ask you: How long does it take to flip the switch to turn the tone service back on? I was without full phone service for two days.

What it all boils down to is customer service. It is the single most neglected area troubling big business today. They have gotten so big and so complacent they don’t care anymore about the customers to whom they are providing services. Big business thinks we can’t do without them. Customer service personnel are among the most underpaid employees in the work force. And no one cares that customer service employees are at the forefront in relations between the business and its customers.

Indeed, I think the general population has become apathetic at the general decline in service quality. The general population forgets that it is the Economy rather than the businesses. Without us, there would be no economy. We determine how much junk we will put up with to obtain a particular service or good.

Yes, I know I’m only one person and they probably don’t care about one person who took a stand against substandard service but somebody has to start the revolution, right? I’m tired of being told I need this or that or the other thing and being promised things that never materialize. How about you?

I’m no one particularly special. For my day job, I run a web hosting and other web services business. You can find out all about those here: http://www.totalweb-inc.com and http://www.jc-hosting.com so I won’t elaborate here.

For the rest of the time I’m awake I write both fiction and nonfiction. I have several projects going at once. One of these days, I’ll finish one of them.

I have a lot of varied interests much like everyone else. Given my lack of spare time my hobbies are being sorely neglected. My top two hobbies aside from writing are painting and sewing. My business interests allow me to work with computer graphics which are a pretty good creative medium as well. One of the plans I have for this site is putting up some of my old computer artwork, family pics, and the like. I run another site called designers-edge which has some free graphics on it but every time I move the site to an updated server the gallery in which they are stored messes up so I’m looking for a more reliable script to use for those.

Politics irritate me to no end and I often find myself on the wrong side, socially. But that’s life, right? Once in awhile I’ll do the dumb thing and say what I think in regards to political issues which typically leads to being attacked by someone or someones because I hit upon a sore spot with them. While I understand most of the time why war happens I’m really a pacifist at heart so I don’t like to argue with people over beliefs. Most have their own reasons for believing the way they do and if they are comfortable then so am I. Sometimes there just aren’t any right or wrong answers except on an individual level.

I’m apt to change my mind if someone presents a good argument why I should. However, if arguments spend most of their time in the feeling zone with namecalling or very little facts, I’m just as apt to ignore them.

I allow comments on every post I’ve made including this one. “They” do say that others know you better than you know yourself so have at it.

According to the Myers-Briggs I’m an INTJ which would explain why facts will sway me more than feelings much of the time. Given that I’m typically a quiet person not likely to put myself forward very often it does seem to fit. In fact, I’m really quite shy and serious most of the time. JamesC has taught me to laugh and laugh a lot but sometimes even he shakes his head at me when something meant as a joke gets a serious response. The people who know, love, and understand me also know that I really do have a sense of humor and can appreciate a good joke… unless I’m in serious mode and didn’t understand that it was a joke.

As this site gets underway I may add more here but I think it’s quite long enough at the moment. No one has to register to comment but it would be nice if you’d share a name with us, be it a real one or screen name, and where you are located.

To BellSouth:

This is in the nature of a complaint. For the last 2+ years your customer service has gone from bad to worse.

I completely canceled my service with you so whether I hit that yes button below or not won’t affect my service. It took me 40 minutes to cancel my service. I make $25/hour and you wasted 40 minutes of one of them. That’s $16.67 you wasted today. Yesterday you wasted about the same amount of time. The day before you wasted 20 minutes minutes of my time. By my reckoning, you owe me $41.68 since I can’t deal with customer service except during business hours… and that’s only in the last 3 days.

I think if everyone in the country billed you for wasted time, perhaps somebody would wise up and do better. It would be something if your nonpayment for wasted time were to show up on your credit report like a nonpayment would show up on your customers’ reports.

However, to solve my wasted time, I just canceled my service. A problem that never should have occurred in the first place and I’m told that I should give you time to fix it? When I was first told it would be fixed in a couple of hours, then I was told it would be fixed at midnight, then as midnight came and went, it still wasn’t fixed? While I do without and continue to be charged for the service? And if I had kindly waited and it wasn’t fixed today does that mean I would be without during the Holidays while still being charged for the service?

Shall I elaborate or is this enough? A lot of my time wasted over the last few years.

Don’t worry, I’ll pay my last bill… although I will probably take my own time doing it so it might be very late… I don’t want to waste anymore of my paid time dealing with you. I’m bad for paying late. I noticed that about myself. When the service is crappy I don’t always worry about paying it on time. If it’s a crappy service and it gets terminated, well, so what?

You know those Vonage commercials on TV? The ones that talk about people doing stupid things? I think I made the smart move today cancelling service with you.

Have a nice holiday and don’t think about all the customers to whom you’ve done great disservices over the last few years.

I had to submit to such a worthy cause although I had written very little in the last 20 odd years and I’ve never been published. The piece I submitted was written especially for the anthology. I had nothing prepared for such a work, of course. I did mention that I hadn’t written anything noteworthy in decades, didn’t I?

I wrote the essay in about two hours. From there I shared it with my friend who had urged me to submit to the project. After a flurry of emails; she was critiquing mine while I was critiquing hers, I “slept on it”. The next day, I went through the motions of bringing up my email program, hitting the new message command, copying and pasting the essay into the body of the message, and titling the email Stories of Strength submissions. I even apologized that it was so near the deadline and for not knowing about it sooner. Then I sat and stared at the email for hours. My hand would not move the mouse to click that little send button.

I knew deep down that I wasn’t worthy. With all the well known successful writers contributing works why should I think mine would be accepted? It was then I remembered why I had written the essay in the first place: Not to get my name in a book or to show off my writing skill but to show support for a project that had at its heart a desire to help people when they felt there was nothing left to count on. I wanted the group at Absolute Write to know I supported their efforts. I hit the send button with that thought in mind. It didn’t matter if it was accepted or not. It was and remains a message of support.

You see, I have family “down there” on the Gulf Coast. All my in-laws live along the Coast from Destin FL to Beaumont TX. It was a devastating and worrying time for my husband and me. Given the scope of the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, our limited funds were going to help family members in crisis. Right after the Katrina calamity, along came Hurricane Rita which affected the last remaining in-law who was previously unscathed. Her house was destroyed. I was tapped out for cash but still managed to donate a little. It was precious little and I wanted to do more. I could support the Stories of Strength project. Cash was not something I had in great supply but I have a body that can move wherever I tell it to go and a car that takes very little gas. I could work to help the project thereby stretching my limited resources.

Knowing my offering wouldn’t be accepted anyway, I put it out of my mind and started working on ways to help get the word out about the anthology. The project took a total of 2 months from the call for submissions to being available for purchase. Time was a critical factor in more ways than one. The holiday season had arrived and everywhere in the news we were hearing about donation fatigue. Indeed this morning on Channel 5 news there was a short segment about how some of the local charities are suffering from a lack of funds due to donation fatigue and Christmas around the corner. For me it is a nail biting time with this project being so close to my heart. My doctor was not happy with me last checkup but she will have to understand that sometimes some things have a greater need.

“Stories of Strength” is an anthology of essays, poems, and short fiction compiled by Jenna Glatzer, owner of AbsoluteWrite.com and author of the authorized biography: “Celine Dion: For Keeps”. The anthology is published through printer: http://www.lulu.com for speed to publication. It features stories by Orson Scott Card, Wil Wheaton, and Christian writer, Robin Lee Hatcher. Writers from all over the world contributed to the book. 100% of the proceeds for this project go to charities for disaster relief. In one month’s time since the book has been available, more than $2000 has been raised for disaster relief through Lulu. The numbers haven’t come in from other online bookstores or Ingram Distributors. I do know, at the time of this writing, “Stories of Strength” has a sales rank on Amazon.com of 169,232 and a rank of 69,969 on Barnes and Noble which is very good for a Print on Demand book that is only a month on the market.

We feel helpless when matters are out of our control and this is a year for events beyond human influence. Mother Nature has walloped us, not only in our own backyards but all over the world: Tsunamis followed by hurricanes followed by earthquakes followed by floods followed by tornadoes in a seemingly never ending stream of disasters. It has truly been a banner year for experiencing the worst of nature. We have given and given and still there is the need for more. We look at the tiny faces of those who count on us for home, security, and love wondering how we can let them down when they live for this time of year with their childhood fantasies of glorious Christmas treasures under their tree. For the adults and teens in your life, you can give something that does both. “Stories of Strength” makes a great gift for co-workers, family members, and anyone you think might need something tangible to remind them that we all possess some measure of strength although it may differ from individual to individual. The anthology can be purchased directly from here: http://www.lulu.com/content/172091 or at any online or local bookstore through their ordering systems.

Oh, by the way, my essay is on page 138, “Heart of the Mountain”. Another Nashville writer, Yvonne Oots, has her essay, “Merlin”, included on page 159.