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.

Blogger Glitches

So I am currently writing (actively) three blogs and occasionally update two others.

All five blogs are run through Blogger's interface. I've gotten used to it, and it has some bells and whistles that I really like.  For example, the ability to schedule a post for the future and have it (magically) appear when that date arrives.

But apparently there is an issue with the scheduling module, because Eric Shoots Things hasn't actually released its scheduled posts for the last two weeks without my direct (and personal) intervention.

I have a hunch it's something to do with the Google+ integration, because it worked before I set that up.  But I'm not a computer programmer or engineer of any sort. I write a lot of words, and the Magic Google Box makes them appear where you can read them.

Or, rather, it's supposed to.

Being Sold To

I really hate being sold to when I'm not looking to buy anything. If I'm in a store, that's one thing. I totally understand that you suspect I'm there to spend money and want to help me spend that money - to a point.

But there are times and places where I do not want to be sold to. At home, for example. And the worst home salespeople aren't the telemarketers. They aren't the door-knockers.  They're the people who tape things to my door. It annoys me so much that I will not give money to anyone who tapes things to my door. Period. I particularly love it when I'm at home and they tape things to my door.

Even setting aside the potential damage the tape can do to the paint job of the door (or doorframe), it gives me a piece of paper that I have to deal with. And, if I'm out of town when they stick it up, it provides a convenient "NOT HOME" flag for the world to see.  Seriously: Does this sort of marketing actually work?

Similarly, I hate coming out to the car and finding something stuck under my windshield wipers.

An even more annoying place to be sold to?  The bank.

I personally bank with a credit union. They're easy to deal with, and, as a non-profit, they don't have exorbitant fees for everything. If I screw up, yes, there are fees, but there are no automatic fees on my account, the interest rates are good, and the people I deal with are really neat.

But I am responsible for my office's daily deposit. Every morning - without fail - the teller at my office's bank asks me if I have my personal account there.

I explain that I don't. That I'm happy with my credit union. And then - every morning - I get the exact same response.  "Well we offer several services which are different from your credit union's." They then proceed to list services which are, indeed, different from those offered by the credit union. Different in that they are inferior. They offer savings at a lower interest rate, loans at higher rates, and higher fees on everything.

It's really annoying.

And that annoyance is made worse by the realization that their corporate office probably requires them to ask us that. Someone in a boardroom somewhere thought it would be a good idea to annoy potential customers who have every day stated that they were happy with their current situation.

It's not that they don't recognize me, either - several of them call me by name when I reach the front of the line. They know I'm not interested. They know I'm going to turn them down. And they still ask, because not asking  could theoretically cost them their job.

I'm actually afraid of what sort of questions they'd ask if I actually banked there. Would they try to sell me a different account? Try to push additional credit cards on me?

It all adds up to an unpleasant and awkward experience that I very much dislike.

NPR Pledge Drives

I grew up listening to NPR. One of my earliest clear memories is of the Star Wars Radio Drama booming from Dad's old stereo. Which gives you some idea of my age, too, I guess.

I was five at the time.

When I was thirteen, I received a clock radio as a Christmas gift, and spent my evening looking for the local classical radio station (yes, I was an odd kid). I thought I'd found it - but what I'd actually found was KUOW, one of two local NPR affiliates.

At the time, they played classical music in the evenings (between about 7 and 10 pm).

When it hit 10 pm, I learned that this was NOT the station I'd thought it was. But I liked it, and I stuck with it.

In fact, I've been listening to KUOW for 23 years, now. And I love it. Don't get me wrong - I don't agree 100% with everything I hear on the station. But I think the dissenting opinion is valuable and important. And NPR does better than most news organizations at presenting a truly balanced perspective.

The problem is that NPR is underfunded. Every three months or so, they have to pause and ask for money - because it's our money that keeps them going.

I don't begrudge them the pledge beaks. They need the money. I just wish the breaks weren't necessary. I wish people would pledge without the nagging. I wish the government would give them more money.

But they don't, and so we suffer through the pledge breaks. Until the goal is met and the pledge breaks go away.

For another three months.

Mornings

I'm really not good with mornings.  Never have been.  I've always been more of a night owl. It's just how I'm wired.

I used to work in a laser tag arena.  We were open from 10am until midnight most days, and I tended to work the late shift. It meant I got home around 2am.

Before that, I worked at a fast food restaurant that was open ten to ten most days. When I opened, I had to be to work by nine for food prep.  After work, I often went to a local restaurant for trivia until roughly 2am. Meaning I was home around 2:30.

It was just my natural routine - one I settled into naturally.

It wasn't long before my boss stopped scheduling me for morning shifts.  "You're just so much better with customers in the evenings," she told me.

Because I was almost non-functional in the morning.  This was partly due to my sleep disorder and partly because I'm just more alert in the evenings.

I'm normally a bit of a cranky grump. Ask anyone who knows me or has worked with me or has read this blog. But having to be up in the morning pushes my grump levels to new heights (or depths, as the case may be).  I'm crabby, incoherent, and less logical than normal (which is really saying something).

It adds up to a bad combination to be around - if I had a choice, I  wouldn't be around me in the mornings.