Cal STRS. They were quite incompetent after my dad, a retired teacher, passed away. There was some rigmarole about the guy who was supposed to authorize or approve something and how he was on vacation–hence a delay.
Also, they asked for a copy of the death certificate. We sent it. They sent it back a few days later. Then they asked for it again.
These people are handling RETIREMENT monies??
In some situations, yes. In this one, I doubt it would’ve mattered in the slightest. What would the poster hope to accomplish? “You’re absolutely right, our mistake, let’s send a tech out right now with you”? Not gonna happen.
This type of behavior goes on on a daily basis – Best Buy employees know that they can make wild promises about the third party company in order to sell more TVs. The third party can shrug it off and say “hey, this is our schedule, take it or leave it” because you’re just a service order to them. More will follow.
The higher up you go at Best Buy, the likely you’re just going to get placating answers that promise action but yield little. Quite honestly, the offer of the refund is the best you can really hope for. And it makes sense from their standpoint. There’s no telling what actually transpired in the initial conversation, and both companies have little to lose. The third party isn’t going to lose the contract to install because they’re likely already living up to the terms of their contract. Best Buy isn’t going to lose 90% of the people who swear off of them forever. Best Buy knows that the worst you can threaten them with is to return the item, and they even offered that as an option. Hell, even if the SM called the company himself, he’s likely to have no power to change their tech schedule. Going higher than the SM will probably get you a “the regional manager will call you back within a week.”
Seeking higher authority can be very rewarding, for sure, but in this situation it’s best to count your losses and move on. And swear off of them forever if you really want to.
This isn’t really directed to Best Buy, or to the person who posted the problem. One of my pet peeves is when people think that the solution is to always demand to speak to someone higher until they get exactly what they want. Sometimes that’s the thing to do, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes “can’t be done” actually means “can’t be done,” especially when one company is making a request to another on behalf of one customer.
My poor disabled brother (I must admit, a born loser - if it can go wrong for him, it will go wrong for him) - some years ago bought a VCR from, yes, Best Buy!. Took it home, plugged it in, and it didn’t work. Took it back to the store. They said they would have it repaired and he would have to come back and get it when it was fixed. (Oh, brother doesn’t drive, our elderly mother chauffeurs baby brother around!)…Finally they called, said to come pick up his now repaired VCR. He did, took it home, it worked for a day and it stopped working AGAIN!..Took it back (second verse, same as the first…) A week went by, brother finally demanded a phone number for the repairman. Called the guy - in Texas! - we live in NY - the repairman said, oh, I just finished fixing your VCR, I remember because it’s the exact same VCR Best Buy sent me to repair a couple of weeks ago. :eek:
Best Buy sent their piece-of-crap VCR from NYS to Texas to be repaired? TWICE? Would it have killed them to give my poor born loser brother another piece-of-crap VCR off their shelf and then send the non-working one to Timbuktu for repair, or tossing it in the garbage?? A month of waiting for the thing, it didn’t work twice, several rides from mom had to be arranged, and a long-distance call.
When I heard this story I found it hard to comprehend such idiocy on the part of a company (thinking it was because of that black cloud following my brother around), but I soon learned that such shennanigans were not unusual for Best Buy.
My current favorites are an old pair of these BUT, I ordered a new pair recently and they are slightly different from my older ones. Too soon to say better or worse but they are slightly different. I also have a pair of Keen sandals with an enclosed toe that are pretty nice.
You’re right to think that I might be keeping track of my outlays, but I wasn’t.
My point is that Citibank said they had NO IDEA how they were being paid money, and there was no possible way on EARTH they would EVER be able to determine this. They were MOST vociferous on this point.
Oh, you’re dealing with public service employees? I’m sorry, and I really do feel for you, but there’s almost no level of incompetence that would surprise me from them. And I’m a public school teacher.
When you can’t get fired for being a complete idiot, you revert to complete idiot.
True. I was pretty much thinking of situations like reversing a charge a company made against you after they screwed up, sort of thing. Something that they absolutely would be able to do, but they’re just going to tell you they “can’t” at first, because that’s how they make money.
IIRC, Sampiro had quite the saga dealing with his mother’s pre-paid funeral. Thank Og he had the paperwork, because the funeral home sure as hell didn’t. I’m off to search…send the bloodhounds if I’m not back in 300 seconds…
Well crap. That’s what happened to them. I had a pair in the mid-nineties and loved them. And then lost them. 
Anyone recommend a good make of sandal?
The worst was the company I bought my computer speakers from, whoever they were. It was some company I found on pricewatch.com. I was living in a college dorm next door to a karaoke barber shop that always played their rap music loud. (Yes, they would actually cut hair in a college dorm while someone rapped on a mic.) I ordered some loud ass speakers for my computer that were supposed to put out over 100 dB so I could drown out their crap. Well the speakers didn’t come for half a year, well after the semester had ended. When I finally got them, they didn’t work. So I sent them back. It took another half a year to get the replacements, after adding a BBB complaint to their huge stack. At least those worked, and I still have them after about 5 years.
This story is a little more involved. It involves both the local cable company - Longview/Kilgore Cable - and the local telephone company - AT&T (previously SBC). When I moved to Longview for the first time, I decided cable internet was probably the way to go since I wanted cable tv anyway. Aside from that, DSL wasn’t offered in the part of town where I was. So I get cable internet and cable tv for $100/mo total. Well when they finally hooked it up, I wasn’t getting the speed I was supposed to. This is where the trouble began. They would send someone out to see what the problem was. That someone wouldn’t get the connection fixed. One person they sent, after realizing my computer had FreeBSD, decided he needed to go get his laptop. I offered to do everything for him, but he just had to have his laptop. I assumed he was going to get it from his truck, but he took off and never came back. I had to call again to get someone else to come out. Another guy had to show me his massive calf muscles and talk about how all the girls at work thought they were hot. Come to think of it, I think this is the guy who fixed my service and gave me free HBO at that, but he was a weird one. It took four or five calls to finally get the speed I was supposed to be getting. They screwed up my bill once too, but they corrected that pretty easily. My cousin was not so luckily. I don’t know if he ever got his corrected.
So I moved away from this town for a while and didn’t have to mess with them anymore. Not far down the road, I came back. Well I didn’t want to deal with them again, so I called AT&T about DSL service. They told me I couldn’t get it where I was. I found this hard to believe since I’m in a dense residential neighborhood just a couple of blocks from two schools and from my friend who had DSL, but they double-checked and said I couldn’t get it. Well I dreaded the thought of using dial-up, so out of desperation, I gave Longview Cable a call. They tried to sell me the triple package (tv, internet, and VoIP) for $100, the same price I was paying before for tv and internet. Well I already had VoIP and I wasn’t interested in tv this time. How much is just internet? The guy actually told me that internet alone was $100. What the fuck?! So I have to pay $100 for just internet when I can get all three for the same price even though I don’t want the other two? I hung up on the guy.
So I decided to check up on wireless internet. I’d heard good things about the wireless internet from AT&T, but rather than deal with someone over the phone, I decide to go to one of the cell phone stores and talk to someone in person. So I asked the guy if I could get some kind of wireless modem that I could connect to my network so all my computers would be able to access it at the same time. He told me I could and asked me for my address so he could look it up in the computer. I had no clue why he needed my address for wireless service. As it turns out, he wasn’t listening very well to what I was saying (or thought I didn’t know what I was talking about) and thought I meant DSL with a wireless router. Well after he looked it up, it turns out I could indeed get DSL at my house. I don’t know if the lady on the phone misheard the street name or what. So I signed up for that.
Well they gave me an estimated date when they would come and turn it on for me. They didn’t need to come in my house but they needed to do something outside of it apparently. So I waited for a few days after the estimated date and there was no sign that they had done it. My modem light was still blinking. So I give them a call to see what’s going on. It took about 10 minutes to actually get someone. Well as it turns out, they had turned on my service. They just couldn’t be bothered to leave a note on my door or anything like that. My modem light was still blinking because I had to register the modem in order to connect. So we get to registering the modem and here’s where the fun part begins.
“What version of Windows do you have?”
“I don’t have Windows.”
“Oh, you have a Mac?”
“No, it’s a PC.”
“Sir, do have Windows Vista or XP or…”
“I have Linux.”
“What’s that?”
I told her it was an operating system. I think she was clueless at this point. She told me they didn’t support Linux and that I should get a Windows computer and call back. Yeah, let me run out and spend $500 on a new computer so I can get my DSL working… I tell her if she’ll just tell me what I should do in Windows, I could translate it to my operating system. She won’t do that, but she decides to transfer me to the next tier of technical support. I figure finally I may get someone who can tell a keyboard from a hole in the ground. Well after waiting several more minutes, the person finally picks up… and can’t hear me! They waited a whole 5 seconds before deciding to hang up. So I try calling in again, waiting on hold again, going through the same crap with the first tier support again, and get on hold for second tier again. This time, I get disconnected while on hold! At this point, I’m pretty pissed off.
So I call in a third time. This time, I tell first tier support I have a Mac. So they transferred me to the Macintosh department. Well thank the gods, I got an American lady. I told her I don’t have a Mac, I have a Linux computer but the two aren’t terribly dissimilar and I wouldn’t be using Linux if I didn’t know what I was doing so if she just gives me the instructions for a Mac, I can probably figure out what to do. She was real nice and did just that. You know what the instructions were? Open my browser and go to a couple of web sites and fill out forms. That’s it… You know what the difference is between opening Mozilla in Debian and going to a website and opening Internet Explorer in Windows and going to a website is? Not a god damn thing! I spent about an hour going through this shit when the first lady could’ve told me to open my browser and go to whatever website I needed to go to. What a load of shit…
To top that off, I found out a couple of months later they weren’t automatically deducting my payments from my checking account like they said they would. They didn’t just say they would, they said they had to or else I was going to have to pay a security deposit. Well apparently neither happened, at least not until I got a $150 bill, called in, and set up the automatic payment thing. And on the two occasions I’ve been short on funds, they try to take the payment two days in a row, hitting me with two $25 fees when I’m almost certainly not going to have the funds the second time. It was my fault I got the first fee, but if there’s no money, quit trying! You’re never getting the money if you keep racking up bank fees for me.
But I have to admit, I’ve hardly had an interruption of service since joining them, unlike the cable company.
After I had to have some (now repressed from my memory) dealings with SBC, a friend and I were trying to come up with things SBC might stand for. I said it stood for Sucks to Be a Customer. He thought of a much better one, though- Satan’s Bastard Children.
I had a similar experience the last time I flew on American. Understaffed at the ticket counter (therefore long lines), delays, all that sort of thing. I figured out what they are actually doing, though, and they are geniuses. They are trying to ensure that another synchronized attack like 9/11 never happens with their planes by never having any of their planes take off on time.
Verizon, hands down.
Calling them for any purpose is an exercise in run-around and “we don’t care, we’re a local monopoly”.
Dreyfus. I’ve never actually been a customer, but after my mom died I was administrator of her estate. So, to get the estate in order I had to close accounts, pay any debts, etc. Most accounts were easy to close, they’d ask me for basic info and maybe a copy of the death certificate or something, done deal.
Dreyfus on the other hand, I remember being a big pain in the ass. After talking to them on the phone they had to send me forms to fill out, not only fill out but they had to be notarized as well! They also needed original copies of the death certificate, not copies. It’s not like she had tens of thousands of dollars in the account either.
And even after the account was closed they kept sending their privacy policy updates and various other things to her, and started sending them to ME at my home address too. I’ve never been a customer of theirs. So I had to contact them twice more to get those stopped. :rolleyes:
Propet breeze walkers.
Manhattan Cable - this was in the early 90s.
If you called for an install, it was 2-3 weeks before the next available appointment.
I was moving from one apartment to another in the same building. Set up the appointment for them to do the new install. The guy showed up, ran the cable from the wall to the box, said “wait, I have to put a new box in here since it’s a different apartment”, did so, demonstrated that it worked, and left.
Then I tried the other channels. About 1/4 of the channels worked.
Next available install? 3 weeks.
And there was the time my cable suddenly quit working. Completely kaput.
I called, and got a service appointment for 3 weeks later.
The tech showed up, checked my setup, checked the cables in the stairwells, and came back in and said that the line to my apartment had been capped off. Yes, someone went into the building, and SPECIFICALLY TURNED OFF MY SERVICE. Apparently the cap-off was something they did when they suspected cable theft. Quite possibly one of my neighbors was stealing service, but I sure as hell wasn’t.
The other shitty-service place I’ve dealt with, that comes to mind immediately, is NylCare / New York Life (health insurance). Many, many, MANY arguments and screwups. We now call them DeNylCare.
The mention of Chase Bank reminds me of my loathing of BankOne, which has since been bought out by Chase.
When I opened up my account with BankOne (entirely because they had a ludicrous number of ATMs in Chicago, where I lived at the time), they made some kind of typo when they entered my social security number. So, say my SSN is 123-45-6789, they entered it as 122-45-6789. Just one of the digits was off, and it was only off by one. So, every time I needed to talk about my account, I had to go through this whole rigamarole about my SSN because I could never remember exactly what digit was wrong and what they had done to it. It’s enough to remember my actual SSN, trying to remember my wrong SSN was not in the cards.
So, you may ask, why didn’t you just have them correct it? OMG I TRIED. They sent me this huge amount of paperwork to get it fixed, and they wanted like a million pieces of information for me to prove that my SSN was what it said it was - including my actual SS card, which was in my wallet when it was stolen like ten years ago and I never got around to replacing. Just a major pain in my ass, which really burned because guess who made the mistake in the first place? I’ll give you a hint: IT WASN’T ME. Plus, it’s not like I needed to show them all this proof of identity when I opened the account, so it doesn’t make sense that I would need to jump through so many hoops for them to fix it.
It’s been six years and now my account is held by Chase, but yes, they still have my SSN wrong. groan It occurs to me now that maybe Chase’s procedure for fixing it would be easier than BankOne’s was, so maybe I should give it another shot.
In closing, fuck.
Simutronics
Honesty, you can’t just leave it at that. Did you not like the De ICE change? Didn’t like the switch from GS II to GS III, or GS III to GS IV? Or are you talking about another game that Simu runs? I was only ever in Gemstone, and I left it because of a variety of reasons…I wouldn’t say that Simu did me wrong, but rather that it fit my needs for a time, and then my needs changed.
I was Granita Smithdott, dwarven warrior, Popabee, dwarven cleric, and Akrose, dark elf sorceress, for the record.
Another vote for Best Buy…
I purchased a laptop from them last year that came with a virus protection software that I agreed to pay $5 a month for. When I changed bank accounts at the beginning of the year, I needed to call and change my subscription to the new account. Now, at first I was not sure if I should call the virus protection company or Best Buy until I found my laptop receipt that clearly stated that I was to call the Best Buy main number for any issues with my Trend subscription.
I spent well over an hour being transferred to people and telling my story over and over again. I finally got one person that said “oh…you need subscription services” and transferred me. Guess what? Disconnected!! So then, I thought, ok- I’ll just start asking for the subscription services department. I got responses from several different people, most of whom treated me like an idiot for not calling Trend even though it CLEARLY stated that I was to call Best Buy. The worst of these responses came from when they transferred me to Geek Squad. “Well…I don’t know how we can help you m’am since we are NOT Trend.” I decided to try one more time then screw them, I’d have to buy a new virus software program. I went through again and got transferred to Geek Squad again- by this time I was barely keeping control of my temper and I right away lashed into the guy and told him I DID NOT WANT GEEK SQUAD, GIVE ME THE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE BECAUSE GEEK SQUAD DOESN"T KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT MY ISSUE WHICH IS THAT I’M TRYING TO MAKE SURE YOU GET YOUR $5 EVERY GOD DAMN MONTH!!.
“Ok, you need to change your Trend Subscription? I can help you with that.”
“You can??”
“Of course, you should have called me first”. :smack:
And the guy actually managed to successfully change my subscription to my new debit card. The only problem is that now, every month, my debit card gets charged twice. The second charge eventually drops off and doesn’t post, but it’s still annoying. Not so annoying that I would field that horrible call center again though.
Ooh, I had that job! There was actually a script book of responses to reasons for cancellations. It was sort of like one of those find-your-own-adventure books: if this, then turn to page 42; if this, then turn to page 51; etc. A popular CSR game was to try to find a path through the book that led to the page that said, “OK, I’ll cancel your account right away.” It existed, but it was a challenge to ge tthere!
Honestly, it was a pretty good company to work for as a CSR overall–for actual service items, you were pretty empowered to do whatever needed to be done to help the customer. But there was the constant dread that hung over you of answering a call and hearing, “I’d like to cancel my account.” 'Cause that process was no less painful for the CSR than for the customer, believe me.
Heh. The only thing I don’t like about living in Dallas (well, besides the summer weather) is that American owns practically every goddamned gate at DFW International, so if you want to fly anywhere, that’s pretty much who you’re stuck with. :mad: This summer, my boys and I flew up to Chicago to visit my parents, one-way. We came back Amtrak. The actual clock times seem to disagree, but my heart tells me that I spent more time sitting at the airport waiting for American to find a plane for us than I spent on the train coming back.