Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Thats it.. I give up.

They have defeated me... Customer service has caused me to be a broken shell. They win.

In my head it seems like most things I need should be super simple. Apparently I am a mental case, and I have apparently too high of expectations.

Today I called Citibank to dispute a charge from a vendor. You see I ordered a case of hand-wipes of all things a month ago. They haven't shown up. Calling and emailing the vendor produces the sound of wind whistling through canyons. No one responds at all. They don't even respond to me telling them I am canceling the order. So I had to call my credit card company.

Yes... I know you are wondering why I would order a case of hand-wipes. When you are sticking eye drops in a bunnies eye several times a day you want to make sure not adding any bacteria... but I digress.

The call started fairly uneventfully. I explain my problem, and she starts reading straight from her cheat sheet of questions. You could tell - because she hadn't memorized them, and when she would mess up the sentence she would start over from the beginning.

The biggest problem started because the customer service rep who had a pretty thick accent would ask me questions, and I would say " I'm sorry I didn't understand the question". The rep would then say "I need a yes or no answer". She did this like 3 times. What the hell is that about?

It didn't help that I could swear that I was on an outsourced call. The call had a distinct time delay. Because my Aunt works for a call center for Citibank, I just assumed their call centers were somewhere in the midwest. Because of the time delay I would answer a question and it wouldn't have reached her side yet - so we wound up talking on top of each other. Just f-ing annoying.

On a different annoyance some parts were ordered for my car almost two weeks ago.. and I don't know - I would have expected them to call me when they came in. Yeah... I'm just that dumb.

Then finally... the one that makes me happiest. When I had my new inspector out early yesterday morning telling me that because my fireplace was "just dirty enough" he couldn't give me a definite answer on how much damage was there - I was absolutely sure I would get a call from the gal that makes his appointments. I didn't expect to get an appointment this century.. but there was no ambiguity that he was going to make an appointment for me. I wanted the written report of the inspection and he couldn't finalize the inspection until the chimney was cleaned. Which actually really pisses me off because the first guy I called out refused to clean it. Now I have to wait to fuck-all ever to get someone to clean it and finish inspecting it. At least I don't have to worry about those pesky fires I was hoping to have this winter.

3 comments:

  1. I hate dealing with customer service from ANY store/bank/company. It makes me crazy.
    The cable company in our area calls you when they want you to call them. Like, the phone rings, and it's a recording, telling me to phone them. Then they leave a 10 digit #, plus an extension #. PLEASE. I run for the phone, only to get a recording? The last time that I phoned, they told me that I was behind on my payments, even though the payment wasn't due for 14 more days....WTF? Now they're mind readers? They KNOW that I'll be late on a payment? Sorry about the rant......I do feel better now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd love to sympathize with you but I'm too busy waiting for the FUCKING Learning Annex to refund me my money from Sept. I have learned from many websites that they don't refund money in a timely fashion, I guess assuming that you're going to take another class sometime in the future.

    Here's a thought, why would I EVER take another class from people who do not refund your money when they say they're going to?

    It's like that adage, if you love something you tell one or two people, if you hate it, you tell the world.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Life- I'm all about the rant.

    Our cable company does this calling thing too. I found out when we were moving and I was trying not to loose my mind with selling the old house and getting into the new one. The thing is -they would never say on the message that they were from the f-ing billing department. They always made it a nice "Hey Baby, call us sometime" message. So finally after 2 weeks of everyday calls I got pissed because I wanted them to stop telemarketing me. They just wanted me to pay my bill.. and it would have saved us all a lot of time if they just would have fucking said that they first or second call. I'm sure they thought I had moved to skip payment on a service that I had paid religiously for 8 years.

    Suzy... maybe they can make that into a class. How to get your money back from the Learning Annex. They could pretend like it is going to be easy... you can be lulled into a false sense of security. You will probably have as much luck as you are having right now.

    See..... always thought the way things worked is people were more likely to spend their money at places who didn't piss them off. But that is just me.

    ReplyDelete