Author: Dave December 4, 2007

I wanted to write about this topic because I have a particularly foul taste in my mouth today after having dealt with a myriad of customer service representatives over the past few weeks, and days especially. Still going through some nightmarish ordeal with issues that should be cake!

I’m not going to write the names of the companies who are pissing me off this week because I don’t think it’s necessary as we all have horror stories about customer service and I’m sure we can swap the company names interchangeably in this post. Just in the course of one week I’ve had to deal with the most insanely asinine issues for problems with hardware, software, and services that I PAY for, some of which I pay damn good money for, and it’s as if the customer service departments at these companies are run by these folks.

Unsafe data
I’ll start with my external hard drive I bought about a week ago. This hard drive, created by the YoYo company we’ll call them, a very well-known company I might add, worked great for almost a week. At the end of a week, after having backed up ALL of my company data on it (smart me, it’s not my only source of backups) farted out on me in a fit of stupidity. Great product!! After a logistics nightmare of running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off, I was able to install another internal HD and set up all my backups again and restore my data. Thanks to the redundancy master (me) I didn’t lose much, just many hours sleep and I actually gained a few gray hairs. Makes me look more distinguished perhaps.

Rescued myself from that one, thanks for all your effort fictional YoYo Company. Thanks for the old reliable “fake feeling of security with a 500 gig external HD to back up your important company data only to crash days later” trick. I had forgotten about that one having never actually pulled it on anyone before.

After this issue and my successful restoration of company data and temporary sanity, I was able to find a horrible bug in a very expensive piece of software I bought that rendered it’s capabilities useless, at least for the purpose I was using it for. I also lost heaps of time and money on it, but in theory I got everything back up and running while using this product still. This product built by…let’s call this company Butt Pirate Inc, BPI for short, while still usable to me caused me loads of grief and opened up a whole different can of worms.

Disservices
BPI’s product issues, which were met with a “duh I unno” kind of response by their customer service, caused more grief with an even more enormous company that provides services to my company, let’s call them PayForAMassivePainInTheAss.com. PFAMPITA.com’s customer service was already a huge headache for me from the past, and I knew what I was in for when I had to explain to them. Their customer service’s “I think that’s your support ticket, isn’t it?” approach caused me more inflammatory hemorrhoidal problems than the others combined because theirs is a direct strike to the wallet even more so than YoYo Company and BPI’s combined.

Colonoscopy?
Here I am at this point, STILL waiting with my spastic colon and newly acquired eye twitch waiting for these people to get a move on, and do what I pay them for. I should mention that after receiving a good dose of their lower grade customer service, I paid for one day customer service and it’s been a few days now and still no answer to speak of.

Once my issues with PFAMPITA.com are cleared up, I can again carry on with my daily routine of noodling around the office with the peace of mind that my dollars are not invisible, and they do in fact hold value in the general market, low as they may seem.

No more rambling
My point is, during this same week from hell I’ve been busting my butt to provide great service to my customers and clients because that’s what I’ve learned from my dealings with these other companies. Now that I’m able to provide services, I make it a habit to stay on top of things instead of slacking off like some of these people and in the long run, I end up getting dedicated, happy people who appreciate it. That’s what customer service used to be about, so what happened? It makes me feel like a million bucks when I know that I was able to help someone out and I really enjoy the feedback and compliments I get from people. Maybe YoYo Company, BPI and PFAMPITA.com are run by the Burmese government and they got a tip off that I used to watch a lot of the old episodes of Kung Fu.