Apprarently someone at the bank is running a dating site. Now that’s cleared up, would you or would you not recommend Olivia and/or Arlene to a friend?
Every time I use the help desk at work I’m asked if I would recommend the help desk. Um… I really have no other options. Neither does anyone else. So no, I will never recommend the help desk, even if it’s perfect. And I’m not going to tell people to avoid it, either. Because I don’t have a choice. Sheesh.
You say that as if it’s easy. I have no proof of what my social security number is. I can’t get a new card via the internet, either, because both my name and my address have changed since my last card, which was sent to my parents’ home when I was a child.
Way back in January of 2020, I foolishly thought I would be able to renew my Georgia state driver’s license online. Nope! As soon as I went through all the things required to set up an account on their site, I got the notice that I could not do so because I would have to get a Real ID compliant license in person. Like an idiot, I perused the information hoping for some logic and sense. No, no, no! I would have to present two certain identifying documents to get the thing. The two I chose were my military retiree ID card and my US passport. What peeved me the most about that is those were the exact same documents I presented to get the driver’s license in the first place! Ah, then I go there and am politely informed by the person at the counter that I need something proving I live at the address on the license. So, I had to rush back to my sister’s house, change my mailing address for my online bank account, print that out, then rush back to the Department of Driver Services and finally got a temporary license. Of course I did finally get the real Real ID compliant driver’s license finally.
But, yeah, I’d say it was definitely to their benefit nobody even suggested I take a “How did we do” survey that day.
Seriously, if you’re going to make a survey for your organization, why not consider, I don’t know, maybe thinking about how you could not have the picket fence result in the first place.
Oh, you’re in California? Then it’s fairly straightforward to renew and get the REALID simultaneously. Just bring your requisite documents for the REALID and also your current DL. The application will for your renewal will ask if you’re also going for the REALID. Kayla and I got ours last year and it was pretty easy.
I would love the opportunity to design one of those bank surveys. It would be along these lines:
On [this date] you visited our branch at [location] and our teller Olivia deposited a check for you. Please indicate how you would rate your experience with Olivia:
Did you feel any inclination to ask Olivia out?
What if Olivia asked YOU out? What would you say?
If the answer to Questions 1 and 2 are both “no”, please suggest in the space below what Olivia could do to make herself more attractive.
If your belief is that “it’s not Olivia, it’s me”, please provide in the space below the names and phone numbers of some friends who in your opinion might think Olivia was pretty hot stuff.
The problem is that I don’t think I’d recommend any of my friends to Olivia or Arlene.
- If you can’t recommend any of your friends to Olivia or Arlene, do you accept the fact that you need better friends?
I too completely support the OP’s rant. My reason is that I doubt many are actually read. I had a bad experience at a grocery store, and during the survey, when asked if I wanted to be contacted by a store official, i said I did. Of course I was never called, emailed, or contacted in any way.
I once, just once, gave a less than stellar online review to a business, after one shopping experience, and got a snippy reply. It seems if you don’t tell them everything was perfect they get unhappy.
(This REALID side-track is a bit of a hijack, but I feel it’s vaguely adjacent to the main topic of this thread. So I feel okay discussing it a little bit, but not too much here.)
What you seem to be saying, Monty, is that either the instructions you got were incomplete, or maybe confusing, or else you just didn’t read them all very very very very carefully.
I’ve been perusing the CA DMV web site in excruciating detail, in all its myriad over-simplified and often ambiguous pages, trying to piece together everything I need to know. The comment from kaylasdad99 several posts above, seems to supply one still-missing piece – that some application I must fill out lets me do both at once. One problem is that the necessary instructions are scattered all over several different pages. For example, there is a page called “Easy as 1-2-3” that describes what you need to get REALID. It says you need some ID and lists some docs you can use. It says you need proof of address and lists some docs you can use. AND (wait for it…) it says you need to give your Social Security number, but it DOESN’T mention that you need to show any docs to prove it, let alone what docs will work. Some other page somewhere does explain this, however.
@puzzlegal , this may be helpful for you: Keep poking around for more information on what you can use to prove your Social Security number. The list of acceptable docs may be listed somewhere, and may include other possibilities besides your SS card. In my case, for example, I get Social Security benefits, so I get a Form SSA-1099 every year, and I think that works. If you are still working, find out if your annual W-2 form (do you get one?) will do. I think it does. Whichever, it needs to show at least your first name, middle name or initial, and last name, and your full SS number.
@puzzlegal, do you also have ALL the docs you need to trace your entire history of all your names since the day God created the universe? People who have changed their name due to marriage or any other reason will need that.
Interesting poster name / post congruence. 
@puzzlegal – Here is the document from CA DMV listing documents you need to bring. One might suppose it applies in your state too, since it’s the Feds dictating what documents you need.
Note it does NOT mention that you need to bring any document to prove your Social Security number. In fact, at the top of the doc just below the “Easy as 1-2-3” header, it specifically says you need to bring docs from section 1 (ID) and 2 (address) and doesn’t say anything about bringing any doc from section 3 (SS number).
Make what you will of that. (I’m betting that they WILL demand such a doc, so I will bring my SSA-1099. Maybe you could investigate this a bit more for your state.)
There’s a separate cluster of pages in the CA DMV web site that walk you through a stupid interactive questionnaire over which documents you need. It won’t just show you a list of docs. I walked through all the pages, checking off stuff. It never asked me about any document for proving SS number.
Stupid bureaucracy web sites.
The goddamned post office. There are quite literally 22 people in line and just one person working the counter.
Maybe, just maybe, you could get through a few more people if you didn’t spend half an hour on everyone pointing out the survey on their receipt and telling them the website to go to, yadda, yadda, yadda. Just weigh my package and STFU!
I just helped my dad apply for a RealID last Thursday. I’d started the application last summer when his passport was still valid, but then we weren’t able to go.
When we got to the counter, she looked at his expired passport and asked if we had his birth certificate, which we did. She also wanted to see his expired drivers license, but I got the sense that it wouldn’t have been a problem if we didn’t have it. The other docs we uploaded, which she did not ask to see in meatspace, were proof of residency in California. We never got asked to prove his SSN.
Sorry, i didn’t mean to totally hijack this excellent rant about surveys. I should probably start my own rant about real id. But for the record, i went through all our tax documents, and mostly they hide all but the last four digits of the SSN. Only one form had a full SSN on it, and it’s my husband’s W2. I even contacted some of the issuers to ask if they could give me an unredacted form, and they said “no”. I have a valid passport. I’m hoping my state backs off on requiring the SSN. I’m hoping i don’t need to prove my SSN for other stuff, frankly, because it will be very hard to do so.
Oh, and the name on my driver’s license doesn’t match the name on my passport, and neither matches what my employer uses, and my bank actually has my name wrong. (They have treated my middle name as part one of a two-word last name.) And none of those match my birth certificate. The joy.
I just feel fortunate that they don’t expect me to date them.
I heartily agree!
And it makes me wonder how useful the data is that they receive considering that almost every human is sick and tired of being asked to take the ten-thousandth survey. When someone does respond, they are certainly an unusual person and might not represent the market.
(slight tangent, but there is a survey involved)
A particularly annoying offender is Five Below (a dollar store in the US). The survey is just one part of a process that seems to be full of stuff that doesn’t work as designed and just slows everything down.
They have several self-checkout registers, but only 2 are open–this is to help the workers, not the customer, since they can close out 2 registers faster at the end of the shift.
Once I start scanning, I have to use my thumb to cover the QR code on the Razzles I’m buying: Razzles puts the UPC and QR codes on to help, but puts them side by side in a move of silliness. But the bar code scanner should ignore QR codes, right? The store never disabled QR codes, so if you accidentally scan that one it breaks the register and you have to go to another register.
The super market-style “T-shirt” plastic bags are designed to easily open, just like at the grocery store, but they made them out of a thicker plastic, so the self-open feature fails and they provide tubs of that tacky stuff cashiers use to count bank notes.
After I fight with my candy and fill the bag, the register asks me if I want to support some random charity that I have no way of researching at the point of sale.
Then when the POS terminal comes alive, it shows the survey! Always a survey!
I hit Cancel to get out of the survey, it says “Maybe next time?” I have to hit the Cancel key again. I fear that “Cancel” will cancel the transaction, but this time it doesn’t.
I wave my Apple Watch in front of the terminal and it beeps.
“Do you want a printed receipt or an email receipt?”
No. I don’t want to stand here and type my email. Twice.
So they take a process that is intended to be very speedy and they slow it down to a crawl by incrementally adding suck to their checkout process.
Funny thing is, around the busy Christmas season they turned off all of the stupid stuff and it worked like it should: no survey, no prompt to donate to orphans in wherever, no question about emailed receipts. They wanted things to run smoothly and it did. Now they went back to the crappy setup.
That was essentially the answer I gave on one survey last year. I’d been using a beer delivery company during the pandemic, but stopped buying beer for a few months, because I went on a diet. They noticed that I hadn’t ordered lately, and sent me a couple of annoying “What did we do wrong?!?” surveys. I finally got annoyed enough to actually tell them, “Hey, sometimes people just stop buying for reasons completely unrelated to your service, deal with it!”
They sent me a $10 discount for my next order.
Having done battle with a POS terminal years ago at my shop I can never ever see that abbreviation without reading it as “Piece Of Shit”
That’s all.
I actually do want a receipt. And my experience is that if I enter my email once, I never have to enter it again. Also, if a merchant uses the same credit card vendor as others that I’ve used (“Square” is popular among small merchants) the vendor remembers what email is associated with my card, and I just say “yes”, and it shows my email and I click “okay”. And then I have my receipt.