Note to my clients today:
A QWEST representative told me last Wednesday that my new service would be turned on, at my new apartment, on Saturday, July 7, 2001. He stated that I WOULD have the same phone number I had had three months previously, which was 520/318-9184. This incompetent or lying phone representative claimed I would have my phone, at 520/318-9184, turned on at that date, for a fee of $35.
On Saturday, July 7, I had no phone service at my new apartment. On Sunday, July 8, I had no phone service.
On Monday, July 9, I called Qwest again. This time I spoke to a phone representative who claimed that no phone service would be available to me until July 11. Why? “The computer says so.”
“A technician” needed to be sent out, she claimed, rudely. I told her no technician needed sent out. She again insisted “dat’s whut the computer says.”
I explained that computers aren’t there to be obeyed. The phone line at this place did NOT need any technician. This stupid nonsense went on for several repetitions.
“Lemme double check da computer one more time,” she replied, finally.
Strangely enough, now the computer was “wrong.” Sullenly, she said she would turn on my phone some time this day. She gave me no indication that the new number would be anything but 520/318-9184.
Some long hours later, my phone was finally activated. Only by coincidence, I discovered later this day that 520/318-9184 was NOT my new number. The incompetent phone representative had given me no indication it wouldn’t be. She in fact didn’t give me a number at all. I didn’t know my own new phone number was NOT 520/318-9184. I’d been telling everybody I called that it was.
Now then: the number 520/318-9184 is going to be published by NEXUS magazine, a worldwide magazine of a readership somewhere near a million, published in 8 languages, as the number that people interested in a certain book can call, to order this book. The book price is about $20. That’s a potential of some part of $20 million dollars in sales, now going to a disconnected phone number, thanks to Qwest incompetence.
I called Qwest “account representatives” attempting to SOLVE this incredible problem of their own incompetence and was disconnected twice. I was told, with numbing repetitiousness, that company “policy” indicated I wouldn’t have gotten the number I WAS ASSURED I WOULD GET in the first place. One “helpful” representative asked me if I’d like a number “close” to the one I had been given to expect. Oh, goody! I wonder which of the readers would try the number, and then try to guess what the REAL number was!
This representative would give me NO supervisorial numbers to call! When she claimed she would “see what she could do,” she DISCONNECTED ME.
The deadline of the magazine which will publish the information that will make a $20 book available to a million readers was YESTERDAY. Too late to change the number to suit Qwest’s incompetence.
And I, as a representative of NeKongo Press, get to talk to incompetent teenagers who tell me there are NO SUPERVISORS at their offices, to find out what we can do about a loss of somewhere around a potential $20 million dollars in sales.
I don’t suppose it would matter at all to Qwest personnel that half the proceeds of the book in question were going to an African church of some millions of members. Why should it? They have jobs! They can’t do them, but so what?
Just what do you think we should do? I’d like to see Qwest behave responsibly. I doubt it. So we’ll just have to find another million readers to tell this story. And sue.