Part of my job is taking calls from people who are receiving child support or unemployment benefits from several states including the above. Currently there are 20 calls in queue (mercifully I’m on break so they’re an SEP for the next few minutes at least). I’m willing to wager right now that at least 15 of them are form child support recipients demanding to know why their money isn’t on their debit cards yet. Problem is, we have no way of knowing because we can’t see anything about payments until they post to the cards. Bigger problem is that the various states don’t tell the recipients when they call the states for status that there’s a 2-3 business day delay between the “posted” date the state gives and when the funds appear on the cards. So everyone calls the states, get told (by the automated line) that the payment “posted” on, say, 8/11, and the recipients turn around and call us and then get pissed at us for “keeping their money” from them. Biggest problem is that most if not all the live people at the state child support offices, when the recipients actually get through to them which is apparently rare, tell them that the state’s “posted” date is the date that funds become available on the card and instead of researching the payment direct them to call us. In other words, they lie right to them, repeatedly. Probably 40-50% of the pissed off calls I get could be handled if the state would just add a note to the automated line along the lines of “please note funds will be available 2-3 business days following the posted date.” But that would I guess prevent the shitty state workers from lying to the recipients and avoiding doing their jobs. Fuckers. I hate them.
So why don’t you place a few calls of your own, or write a few letters, to the heads of the relevant state agencies and/or state legislators and/or governors and/or in-state media?
That does suck, but BrainGlutton is right - you should write a letter. Back when I worked on a government database interface, a manager at a client office wrote a letter to the govenor responsible complaining that we wouldn’t support his printer (over our ancient, pre-TCPIP mainframe dealy). It eventually came back down to me that the govenor was asking why we wouldn’t support it (we just couldn’t, I’d really tried everything), but things did happen.
Ugh. Just got off the phone with an insane woman who insists that not only are we doing just that but that we’re also targeting her personally because she’s complaining about it. Believe me, if there were some way to lose that bitch’s money…
…I still wouldn’t do it because it’s supposedly for her kids and it’s not their fault that their mother is a crazy twat.
OK, here’s an ugly truth about people who use third-party outsources for their customer screwsus … er, I mean, “Customer Service” component: The client (in this case the governments of various states, including my beloved Colorado) doesn’t give a rat’s ass about its “customers.” No one who uses outsourced customer service really gives a rat’s ass about the customers. In this particular case it’s because the states are woefully under-funded, thus woefully-understaffed, and because the legislators, who don’t give a big stinking pile of crap about the people they represent, have (1) refused to adequately fund the various state offices and (2) put ridiculous restrictions on the bureaucrats in order to make a few more shekels of interest on their accounts each month (thus the delay in “posting” versus “available funds.”) Yep, Otto could write a letter of complaint – if he wanted a whole new career in washing dishes or flipping burgers.
Tell it, Otto, my man. When you work takin’ calls, nobody wants to talk to anybody and everybody wants to yell at the cube monkey.
I have a better idea, Otto – e-mail me and I’ll give you my direct cell phone number. Then, instead of posting a new thread and getting a bunch of well-meaning but utterly impossible suggestions, you can call me and vent to one of the most sympathetic people you’ll ever find (I supported two DSL clients, a bank, an overseas scanner manufacturer and a PDA manufacturer in my years in the cube.)
Meanwhile, keep the faith, bro. If they weren’t idiots, they wouldn’t have to call you in the first place.
Because it’s partially thanks to the wacky “standard” reporting requirements of the Feds that the interstate CS system is so fucked up in the first place.
I used to work in enforcement at the county, and sending a case to the Interstate division was as good as sending it in to a black hole. You’d get a job hit and/or address hit on an non-paying AP living and working not five miles away in the next state over, and buttload of legal and administrative reconciliation paperwork required, not to mention the normal crushing everydoy workload, worked to ensure that it’d be a minimum of six months before the enforcing state got a wage withholding running, by which time the AP was long gone.
Every state has a different enforcement and tracking system, not to mention a different set of laws and regulations, all of which are complicated by the ever-shifting Federal laws, regulations, and data-processing requirements.
I can understand why Otto’s pissed at the state workers, though - at least I got the occasional stress relief of suspending some jackasses driver’s license or listening to him/her whine when we snatched their tax refund to break up the grinding bitching of the custodial parents.
I’m glad I don’t work there any more. Does it show?
That would be my first thought, but seriously, do you think they’d understand that and lower the call volume? Anytime a phone company, provider, or the credit card processing company used by our client has an outage of some sort, we put up a “cloud” in the prompt stating there’s an outage.
Does absolutely nothing to keep the queue from getting out of control by those that think the outage applies to everyone but them. Just like the 2-3 day notice would apply to everyone else but the person chewing you out about it. Sucks, but what can you do other than go out in a blaze of glory by promising each and every one of them you’re personally wiring the money to them right now. Then pick a really inconvenient Western Union station to have them wait at.
