CHAPTER ONE
In the checkout line of a national clothing retailer a young woman in her early 20’s is ringing a cash register. Built to the rough physical dimensions of a double-door refrigerator, she is attired in a sleeveless, low-cut top that is three sizes too small and ten years out of style. Her make-up has most certainly been applied with a cement trowel. On her head is a rat’s nest of jet-black hair, violated by random streaks of maroon and fluorescent green. She wears enough cheap jewelry to send an industrial strength metal detector into meltdown. Studs protrude unnaturally from several places on her face. An amorphous blob of tattoos is visible. Absolutely nothing about this woman falls into the realm of subtle.
While putting on a disinterested and utterly mechanical display of waiting on customers, she carries on a conversation with what are assumed to be friends who are milling nearby. Her voice is rough-hewn and loud. Several customers decide they don’t really need their intended purchases and quietly head for the door. Others see their transactions through. Looks of amusement, distress and disbelief battle for supremacy.
Day in and day out we are head-butted with examples – often glaring in their totality – of poorly designed and more poorly executed customer service. From grumpy wait staff to surly salespeople; from bored bank tellers to cashiers with your money in one hand and a cell phone in the other; from call center reps you can’t understand to automated service lines that leave you on hold for days, we are subjected on a continual basis to teeth-gnashing lessons on how not to run a business.
The Nightmare on Register 3 was found in a chain that operates all over the country, so we might assume that she was not a poster child for normal corporate hiring or training efforts. In that regard, sometimes the problems that we as customers encounter are born of dire circumstances or temporary disasters. For example, maybe the entire staff of that store came down with dysentery that day. Maybe aliens kidnapped them all, and the manager had no option but to use Ms. Rocky Horror or close up for the night. Desperate times, and all that.
But sometimes we run into companies that provide horrendous service, not because of anything dire or temporary, but because they can; because if their customers don’t like the service they get, they have few options or alternatives in terms of where else they can take their money. The airline industry as a whole, which seems to take perverse joy in testing just how many ways they can inflict misery on their customers, is a fair example there. The same can be said for enterprises like cable and satellite TV providers, the postal service, one or two nameless but well known software conglomerates, oil companies and the legislative branches of nearly every government on the planet (to name just a few), all of whom enjoy near (if not total) monopolistic protection, and who thus seem to share the common belief that customers exist to serve them, not the other way around.
For the past eight months I’ve been dealing with one such company on an up-close and personal basis. A company that is so big, so well established and so supremely confident of its infallibility and indestructibility that they appear to have lost the incentive to even pretend that they give a rat’s behind what anyone thinks of them. Pick your poison and I’ve seen it from them; administrative ineptitude, technical incompetence, wacko billing practices, ignorance, stupidity, finger-pointing and evasive obfuscations of responsibility. All in all, the kind of bureaucratic bungling one would more commonly associate with the likes of Moe, Larry and/or Curley. Not only does the right hand not have any idea what the left hand is doing in this company, the right hand doesn’t even know it is indeed the right hand.
I was recently in Lake George, NY for a couple of days, and while cruising the local shops and stores, I ran across a ubiquitous presence of t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, coffee mugs and other tourist paraphernalia emblazoned with the following:
DILLIGAF?
Mystified over what it represented, but impressed by the number of display racks on which it resided, and the number of items on which it had been placed, I finally asked a store clerk what it meant. He smilingly explained that it’s an acronym developed by a local guy.
“What does it stand for?” I asked.
“It stands for, Do I Look Like I Give _ __? “ he grinned. I’m betting you can fill in the blanks yourself.
After I quit laughing, I soon realized that what was probably meant to be a bit of tongue in cheek satire was also an apt description of the modus operandi of the company with whom I’ve been running around in circles for months.
Hey guys, this is not the service you agreed to provide me!
Oh really? DILLIGAF?
And while we’re at it, this is also not the price we agreed you would charge!
Yeah? DILLIGAF?
Don’t you people get it? We had a deal. You are not living up to it!
So? BFD! DILLIGAF?
Okay, I embellished that last one. But you get the idea.
Meanwhile, faced with a continuing saga that refuses to be resolved and won’t go away, and given an ongoing display of corporate ineptitude that I can’t even believe is possible, let alone happening, I’ve decided to share my experience with others.
This will not be a quick tale, because as this first page is written, the final outcome remains unknown. It has been underway for over eight months, and every time I dare to hope that the end might be in sight, it is pushed further away by the combined ravages of both galactic incompetence and an undying devotion to the spirit of DILLIGAF? I have no idea how many more twists and turns there are going to be, or whether the mess that this company has created will be resolved in my lifetime.
On that note, perhaps I should introduce you to the name of this company.
You may have heard of it.
It calls itself AT&T.
CHAPTER TWO
My story begins in March of 2009. Ironically, AT&T wasn’t even directly sitting at the table when it all began.
My first step down what quickly became a very slippery slope began with a company called Total Communications, Inc. – TCI for short – out of East Hartford, CT. The initial discovery that I shared space in the universe with these folks was the arrival of the first of several letters, all providing dire warnings that my contract with them was expiring, and implying that as a result, if I failed to take swift and decisive action, telecommunication life as I knew it was about to end. Inasmuch as I was at the time unaware that I had any sort of contract with them, expiring or otherwise, and was of a general mind to stare down the fates, their letters were all summarily dispatched to the circular file.
Then one day one of their reps, a nice enough but relatively clueless chap by the name of Kevin, caught up with me by telephone. I must have been feeling charitable that day because at the end of a brief conversation, I agreed to a ten-minute meeting in my office.
TCI is, for lack of a better term, an agent of AT&T. That label is one of my choosing because frankly, I’m not at all clear what the precise nature of the relationship is. Reseller? Franchisee? Subsidiary? Indentured servant? Contractual hired gun? I’m afraid if Kevin ever explained it, it didn’t sink in.
However, by whatever economic tether the two companies are bound, his conceptual explanation was that TCI is a seller of AT&T services. In this case, Centralink Service, which is to say, local phone service.
I thanked Kevin for the explanation, leaned back in my chair, considered him appraisingly, and then finally said, “And you are assuming all of this is a matter of interest to me because…………….?”
Well, imagine my surprise when part of his answer revealed that I had signed up with TCI years before, about the time I had purchased a new phone system. Evidently the contract was dropped into a file, never again saw the light of day, and that was the sum total of the relationship. My bill came from AT&T each month, and I had no reason to ever again recall that TCI even existed.
Which begged the unavoidable question, “Given your company’s rock solid impersonation of the invisible man, what do I need TCI for after all these years? I mean, what do you bring to the table that I can’t get, and haven’t gotten, directly from AT&T?”
“Well,” he enthusiastically replied, “Our role is to be your service and support liaison. If you find you have, for example, troubleshooting or repair needs, if you want to discuss plan changes or upgrades, or maybe if you have billing questions……whatever you may need, you just give us a call and we’ll take care of it. No bureaucracy, no sitting on hold; call us and we’ll cut through the red tape and take care of things for you. And it doesn’t cost you anything.”
Hmmmm!
I drifted for a moment, mentally revisiting the routine of past interactions with AT&T. Call a toll-free number, get abused by some mechanical voice recognition savant, grow old while being bombarded with excruciatingly bad music, be assured every two minutes by an obsequious disembodied voice that my call is important and, if I don’t die on hold, someone will be with me as soon as possible. And then finally, at long last, the call is answered, and I reach someone on the other side of the world who is either an idiot, or has been trained to treat me like an idiot, in either case, by reading a script in a language that sounds suspiciously like English.
At which time they tell me I’ve called the wrong number.
And the origins of road rage become clear to me.
Yet here was a sales rep telling me he could make all of that go away, and it would cost me nothing.
What’s not to like?
I almost fell over myself to sign up.
“Excellent,” Kevin says with a big grin that tells me his commission check was already being sized up. Then he leaned forward with a look I’d seen before. The look that said time to go for the gold. “Let me ask you another question,” he moved in for the kill. “If I could show you how to save money by switching your long distance to AT&T, would you be interested in seeing the numbers?”
If this had been a movie, it was at that very point that eerie music would have begun playing in the background. Maybe a dark object would have passed in front of the sun as flocks of birds frantically flew south. The indistinct outline of a knife-wielding maniac would have appeared in the shadows. There would have been a warning, an omen of some kind, something that would have prompted me to view his question with the same regard I’d give an email from the Bank of Nigeria.
But alas, there was no warning. Worse, it was early 2009. The economy was still falling apart, the Dow was still flushing itself down the toilet, and even a hint of being able to save a few bucks was, it seemed, worthy of attention.
So, I agreed to hear what he had to say and he painted a picture that I couldn’t deny was attractive. Decent rates for both US and international calls. Block of time discounts. Elimination of many taxes and/or fees that anyone who is not AT&T is obligated to collect and pass along. The savings locked in for a three year term. All of the numbers seemed to make sense. And, they would be there to solve problems for me.
Within days the discussion was reduced to a formal proposal and then a signed contract. By March 31, 2009, the switch in long distance carriers had been authorized. TCI was presumably happy. Kevin’s commission probably grew, so I assume he was happy. I believed I was about to save some future costs, a matter of deep interest in a down economy, so I was happy. The only loser, and the only unhappy party after the dust settled, was going to be my prior long distance provider, who had provided exemplary service for years, at a fair price, and was now toast.
I felt bad about for a few minutes, then got over it.
The next day, the fun began.
