Calling Tech Support

Every now and again at work, I have to call tech support for one or another of the companies we deal with. And it's inevitably a long hold.  Why?  They believe that only customers will call them - people whose money they already have. So they don't believe they need to spend a huge pile of money adequately staffing their phone lines. Because, worst-case, they pay for shipping to themselves and then shipping back to you. And a bit for repairs on the one you shipped to them. All of which, again, is less expensive than an adequate customer service team.

It means I spend a lot of time on hold.

I have never called a single company anywhere at any time that has decent hold music, so I end up listening to a nearly eternal loop of bad eighties music remixes. That is "bad covers of bad music."

And that's only if I'm able to get through the phone tree to reach the hold queue. Too many phone trees have dead ends that will hang up on you.

When you eventually manage to get a human being, they are experts at not giving you any information or feedback. And at causing long conversational pauses to make you uncomfortable enough to just agree to whatever they want.

They don't usually have the power to actually help you, either. Even if your product is actually damaged or defective. For that, you need a supervisor. To get a supervisor, you get to listen to their pathetic pseudo-music again. For hours at a time.

There are vendors who, I swear, only have one customer service representative. And one supervisor. And they take turns answering calls. Instead, the company spends their money on a complicated phone tree with dozens of lines.

It's one reason I buy a lot of Toshiba products - I've never had a problem getting a human being on their phone trees, and their customer service reps seem genuinely able to help.

This endorsement, by the way, was not paid for. It's genuine.  Toshiba's tech support trees are everything I wish everyone else's was.

Because what everyone else has really has to go.

Heat As A Replacement For Flavor

When I was growing up, my dad nearly always had a bottle of Tabasco sitting on the table.  It didn't matter what we were eating, it was nearly always there.  He loved the stuff. I was terrified of it for years.

Now, I'm married to a wonderful woman who happens to be Mexican.  She loves spicy food, too.

Both of them love Thai food in particular.  But I can't go to the restaurant with them, because they usually order at the four-star (or hotter) level, and I just can't eat that.

I know that spice heat has its place. I agree that spicy food can be quite tasty.

But I think that far too many restaurants (and home cooks for that matter) make food spicy to mask the fact that the flavor isn't really there.  Or just because they can.

Heat should be one component of flavor, but it shouldn't be there as a replacement for real flavor.

Every time I eat something that's beyond my spice tolerance, I have to wonder what they're trying to hide with the heat. Is it a lack of flavor? Is there something stale? Maybe something that wasn't good enough to serve by itself, but it'll be undetectable as such if you spice it up?

And I really don't like that mystery.

Selling Agents

I should state this before I get into it: If you are seeing this via my Facebook, you are NOT part of the problem, you are not what I'm disliking here. Otherwise, I wouldn't have accepted your friend request.

I used to work in the title insurance industry.  I worked in the customer service department, and my primary job was creating flyers and postcards for real estate agents.

I'm naturally a very cynical man, but this job made me very cynical in specific directions:  Real Estate Agents in particular.

What I didn't know at that point - and didn't bother to learn - was that there really are two types of agent.  There are Seller's Agents and Buyer's Agents.  The Buyer's Agents are trying to find a home for their clients.  The Seller's Agents are trying to help their clients offload their houses.

The agents would bring me terrible photos of these absolute shitholes and expect me to make it look good - and sometimes I could. But all too often, the house just ... wasn't good. And I couldn't make it look good.

I learned all the lingo.  Even today, when I'm looking at listings, I'm seeing the same terminology that makes me cringe. "This house is convenient to Freeways, Shopping, Transit," for example, means "This house is under the overpass. There is a bus stop right in front of the house, and you can visit the Salvation Army that is less than a block away. You will never sleep due to the road noise because traffic in front of the house is non-stop."

"Step-saver Kitchen," means "You can fit yourself in there. Probably. Provided you don't want to actually move around at all."  "Newly updated," means "We slapped a fresh coat of paint on the interior." "Renovated" means "We gutted it and put walls where walls have no business being." "Remodeled" means "We took the renovation and made it MORE renovated!"

By the end of my years doing that, I could just about write ad copy in my sleep.

The worst part of the job, though, wasn't trying to write ad copy for these "houses."  It wasn't trying to make rat-infested pestholes look appealing. It was dealing with the agents who had accepted the responsibility for selling them.

You know how people view used car salesmen?  I have a dimmer view of most of the seller's agents.

Two days ago, I saw a Form 17 for the first time in close to a decade. It just reminded me of a co-worker at the Title Company who was selling her house. The realtor asked her about crime in the area, and she started to answer.  He stopped her. "If I know," he said, "I have to disclose it."  Here's the secret about the Form 17: You only need to disclose what you know about. If a seller can conceivably play dumb, they often will play dumb.

The form we saw said "Windows to be replaced," and, when we viewed the house again a few days later, some of the windows had been replaced - but not all of them. And they hadn't planned to replace all of them, either.

I know that with the economy being what it is, it's next to impossible to make a living strictly as a Buyer's Agent. The agent we're working with, for example, is awesome.  She's really neat and very enthusiastic. And she does work as a Seller's Agent, too. Mostly for folks she helped into those homes in the first place.

It's the Seller's Agent's job to play along with the seller as much as possible.

And encourage other folks to buy the home by making it look good.

I'm okay with that.  But when the seller's agent starts to suggest ways to fulfill the letter of the rules while leaving the spirit of them behind ... well ... it felt really deceptive, and by the end I really didn't want to be a part of it.

And now I'm not.

And that's probably a good thing.