Customer Service?

Phone Customer Service these days is a huge Joke!  You never know what you are going to get or who you are going to get on the phone.  It is so rare that you get a human being on a call to begin with.

Automated answering systems that instruct you to press a number to get to the area you want.  More often than not the choices are never the one you want and its 50/50 for you to get an option to press 0 for an operator.  Press the wrong number and you have to press another to back up or just hang up to start again.

Voice activated automated systems are even worse.  If you have a deep voice the machine can not understand you at all and saying Operator doesn’t work either.  Its almost as frustrating for those without deep voices, because if you don’t say the command just right you have to repeat yourself many times.  God forbid someone walks in the room with you and starts talking so that the system can hear them, because that screws up the system too.

But the most infuriating issue is when you do get a real person on the phone and they have a thick accent, with very broken English.  You can’t understand them unless they talk really slow and you have to keep telling them you can’t understand them.  They are in India or Micronesia or anywhere but in the US.  Bank of America even has an out of country phone service.  It’s infuriating.

I am not blaming the people doing the job.  Hell they need to work too.  The problem is we know these jobs have been shipped out of the US where people need work because they can pay other countries less than an worker here.  Used to be Telecommunications was a minimum wage job and a good starter job, but they are all shipped out because minimum wage is no longer 5.00 an hour (but that’s another topic for another day).

So we lose jobs and have to talk to people we can not understand that are reading from a script because they don’t live here or know our ways. Yes I have yelled at the person on the phone to get me an English speaking person immediately, after several attempts to understand the person on the phone and get the issue fixed.

I am sick of it… What do you think?

Stay tuned for the next Rant!

Cell Phone Mania

Has anyone else noticed that Common Sense seems to have disappeared from day to day life?  This has become and instant gratification world.  If we want it, we want it now and we are going to get it whether we need it or not.

For instance the iPhone.  People have brand new phones, not even a year old, and they are upset because they are locked into a 2 year contract with that phone.  Problem is they want the new one now.  Let alone the cost of using the phones is going up and unlimited plans are going away.  In this day and age of unemployment, foreclosures, and families barely eating, who needs these extravagant indulgences.

I have an Android phone and a Metro PCS account.  I have unlimited text, internet, phone and all kinds of apps I can  download if I want them for about $50 a month.  Great phone, great service and its not killing me to afford it. Yes, I make decent money, but there is so much more to life than the cell phone in my purse.  If I was to lose my job I wouldn’t have to give up my phone and even if I did I am not locked in to a contract that will cost me to get out of.  This is not an ad for Metro PCS, it’s good ole common sense.  I have what I need and I am not living outside of my budget with hidden fee’s and surprises.

This is one example of missing common sense…. What do you think?

Stay Tuned for the next Common Sense Rant!

Detroit Drivers

Believe it or not, Detroit traffic, even at rush hours, is not as bad as San Diego or Los Angeles traffic.  With that said the people here seem to have a problem staying off the bumpers of the cars in front of them, changing lanes without almost clipping the nose of the car in the next lane, and they don’t slow down on ice for God’s sake.  They slow down for rain and piled up snow that the plows can’t keep up with but on ice they still tailgate and cut people off while racing down the road. Oh and they tailgate and cut off truckers too.  I have lived here 6 yrs and can’t remember a day that there wasn’t at least 2 accidents on any given freeway.

When I was getting my license many years ago, my dad told me I was behind the wheel of a guided missile.  The car is metal and heavy, it has fuel in it, and the driver is the guidance system.  People get behind the wheel and not only take their lives in to their hands, they take the lives of the other drivers on the road with them in to their hands.  People don’t have the right to drive like that, but they do every day.

A month or so ago, a man with his two year old son in a full size van died, all because the semi in front of him had to throw on his brakes and slow way down.  The van was following to close and obviously not paying attention.  So a two year old boy loses his life with his dad.  Just this last weekend we had 5 men die in a crash.  Four men who were all related in one vehicle were hit head on by a car coming at them the wrong direction on the freeway.  Both cars burst in to flames.  The driver that was driving the wrong way was drunk, something like 3x the legal limit. The sad part is the drunk was usually the designated driver for his friends. Where was his designated driver?  Last but not least, the weekend two young college girls, on the way to a something special at a book store were also killed. There car looked crushed from all sides. The accident was not their fault.

I guess what I am saying is: Leave a little earlier so you are not rushing, pay attention to all the cars around you on the road, and speed limit is conditional to the road conditions so slow the hell down with snow, ice and heavier traffic. Leave space between you and the car in front of you, don’t slip in to one of those small spaces where you can get caught having to slam on your brakes and pray the next car slows down too.  Use smart defensive driving.  You may be behind the wheel of a guided missile but its not rocket science to drive, just good ole common sense.

In 30+ years of driving in California, I was not in my first accident until moving to Detroit.  A 4 car rear ender, in heavy traffic, in a construction zone. A young driver wasn’t paying attention when we all came to a stop and she hit one car that hit the car behind me.  I heard it and rolled forward watching the car come at me but still kept watch that I didn’t get pushed into the car in front of me.  I had very little damage to the rear bumper but the other three cars had major work to be done.

What do you think? What is traffic like where you live?

Stay tuned for another post soon…..