Technical Abort

Would you pay more for a product or service if you knew for a fact that the company employed enough knowledgeable customer care and technical support representatives to allow for a satisfying experience? If you’re like most people, you’ll shout out an emphatic “yes,” but then you’ll run right to the company that gives you the biggest discount and worry later about how incompetent their people are to deal with. Everyone says they will pay more for quality. Everyone is lying.

If you’ve guessed that this post is another savage rant about customer service, then that’s two bells and an ice cream sandwich for you, friend. Without exaggeration, I spent around twelve hours this weekend and Monday dealing with the “helpful” staff at Verizon, but honestly you could substitute any name you want, and the result wouldn’t be very different. The reps don’t know anything, and the tech guys aren’t much more advanced. I could tell that the fellow assisting me on the first issue had no clue what the next step was and that he was taking so long without speaking because he was furiously thumbing through a manual hoping to find an answer. Given what I’ve told you, I can understand why you might think that I had presented them with a monumental challenge. Instead, the problem was that I couldn’t get into my account. This was perplexing to me, since I knew my correct username and password.

Verizon insists on an extra layer of security, so they would not let me in without sending a link to my phone. This would have been fine, expect that my phone was broken. I explained that to the two numbskulls I spoke to, both of whom were massively perplexed by this startling turn of events. It took an hour and ten minutes before numbskull number two hit on a solution, which was to remove my account from the system, put it back in under my wife’s number, and then have me reregister with a different email address so the system would accept it. When you read something like that, you wonder how your phone even works if this is the level of expertise that their people bring to the party. I won’t even impart the second phase of my nightmare, which was so ridiculous and convoluted that you might think I made it up. I’ll only tell you that hours of stress and frustration could have been avoided if a so-called “tier two tech expert” knew enough to tell me to get an adaptor, something I had to Google later to discover.

Many companies are now either offering or demanding that you go through additional security steps, but it seems to me that the thieves are often barely slowed down by this. The only ones getting locked out are the people who belong to these accounts. I have a Yahoo email, but only because Apple screwed up so many times that I had exhausted my other email accounts and the only way I could get back into Apple was to create a new account with an alternate email address. Yahoo decided to not let me in because of “security concerns.” I was told to come back in an hour and try again. And the Verizon locked me out and demanded I change my password when they noticed “suspicious activity,” which apparently, they define as me paying my bill online. I probably don’t even need to tell you that my attempt to change the password was unsuccessful on multiple occasions and I eventually resorted to dealing with their customer service for a round of head scratching as they tried to figure it out. I would consider switching to another carrier, but let’s be frank and admit that those others aren’t going to offer any noticeable improvement. It’s just trading corporate logos.

As it stands, having a smartphone, or at least a cell phone, has become a necessity. I don’t have a home phone anymore, so most people contact me on my cell, either by call or text. If I decided to no longer have a phone, I’d no longer have most of my friends (whether that is good or bad is something to ruminate on further). I’ve also gotten used to various conveniences in terms of streaming music and video on my phone, as many of us have. In a perfect world, nothing would ever go wrong with our devices or our accounts, but there is a 100% chance that sooner or later you will find yourself locked in mortal mental combat with a member of some conglomerate’s support staff. May the force be with you.