Cursed Tongue: Can I Stop Being a Grown-Up Now?

Posted by CursedTongue on March 27, 2006

Recently, my sister-in-law spent hours on the phone attempting to set up high speed Internet with Telecom X. She set up the account with phone and Internet service over a month ago, and the DSL just wasn’t working.

After more calls than she could count, her misadventures ended when the vortex of stupid momentarily cleared and someone revealed that Telecom X was over capacity and could not offer her service in her area. I believe she said she detested Telecom X so much she could, “Beat it and rip its limbs from its body.” Seeing as my husband survived childhood, I think it safe to say that she is not generally a violent person.

Shoveling the mundanities of life is difficult enough without your telecom company messing mercilessly with your head. Sure, there are no longer Blue Mondays where women spend the entire day beating clothes in a washtub with a stick and using a domestic torture device appropriately named a mangle to dry them. But, you’d think with all of our technological advances, by now we would have found a cure for stupid.

Forget about the cure for cancer, if we can figure out the cure for the terminally idiotic, the people who could actually cure cancer would have time to do just that.

Of course, I don’t blame the low-level customer service representatives for this national epidemic. Most of representatives are simply doing what they’re told, and working with what they have. Which, from talking to what I believe has been a proportionately unfair number of these people, is usually a computer slower than continental drift. Except for Jim, at TCF Bank: he is absolutely the laziest, most useless customer service representative on Earth. Despite his extensive research into the matter, one can indeed close one’s account without visiting an actual bank branch.

Of course, it was a month later that my money was sent to me and then my new bank lost it for two weeks. Did I get as much as a new account toaster? Or even anything as simple as an apology from Sharon, the incompetent teller who lost the check, and who I believe has white out on her computer screen? No!

I would change banks again if I didn’t already know that it would be more of the same financial carnage and customer service bungling. It’s enough to make you curl into a corner and rock with the fervor of a person suffering from autism, which is exactly the angle of these merciless companies, I suppose. Why offer helpful customer service, when you can send the hoi polloi crying off into the night and still make plenty of profit?

In addition to playing the financial equivalent of hide and seek, I have ben having warranty repair problems with our new house, which came with pre-cracked fiberglass tubs. We’ve gotten to the letter writing stage and that still hasn’t produced any results.

Having recently moved into a new house, I’ve had many things to coordinate through various companies. After hours of calling, selecting a number so they can better direct my call, entering every number associated with my account, repeating every number associated with my account to a representative, being put on hold, being told some whack job story about slow computers, getting “accidentally” disconnected, getting passed from useless person to useless person, being told that I am beyond helping, I usually end up no better off than when I started. It’s really starting to wear on my already fragile nerves.

With a headache warranty repair claim in addition to the typical runaround from banks, cable and gas companies, I’ve gotten so weary of being denied and talked over and hearing the warranty repair process speech, that it’s really too bad fiberglass won’t catch on fire. I think what I am feeling is best expressed by the astute observation of my telecom frustrated sister-in-law who asked, “Can I stop being a grown up now?”

- Sarah Letnes

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