Posts Tagged ‘customer service or lack thereof’

$800!

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Well, I made it back onto English shores. For those of you following me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll have caught wind of my excess baggage fiasco.

It’s not like I didn’t know I’d have to pay for my luggage. Any time you have to sit on your suitcase to shut it, you know you have a problem. The luggage allowance for this flight was 20kgs (44lbs). Considering I was moving countries, my load was always bound to go over that.

When I put my first suitcase on the scale, it was 31kgs (68lbs). The check in guy looked at me over his half glasses and raised an eyebrow. My second case was 30kgs. So, I was 40 kilos over.

“That’ll be quite expensive,” says the bright spark behind the counter.

“Yeah? How much?” I say.

“Well, it’s $20 per kilo, so….$800.”

“Well, I don’t have that and I need to get my cases home, so I guess we’re gonna have to do something about that.”

At this point, the $800 didn’t even phase me. I was totally confident that I would be able to barter with them like I was in some North African country. In my mind, by the end of it, I’d have talked them down to $40 and have a free camel ride to the boarding lounge thrown in.

I was directed to the manager. I don’t know her name, but let’s call her Hilda. Hilda made it clear from the get go that she had no time for my flighty dreams of taking all my belongings home with me.

“Listen,” I say. “I don’t have $800 and I’m moving back to England, so I have no choice but to take all this home with me.”

“Well, you should have thought of that before you came here. You can’t take it on the plane, so do you have someone who can come and pick it up for you? You’ll have to get it shipped back.”

Hmm, Hilda seemed immune to my charms.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “I did think about it before I came here. I thought about it endlessly. Three quarters of my belongings are sitting in a good will shop downtown somewhere. The rest of it has been shipped. What remains in these here suitcases is basically the sum total of my life. None of it is expendable. These are the bare essentials. All that remain. They’re coming with me.”

She glared at me. This, I imagined, was not how bartering goes down in North Africa.

“I don’t mind paying something, but $800 is daylight robbery.”

“Well how much would you like to pay?” Hilda asked. Great, now we’re getting somewhere.

“I have $85 in my purse. Have at it.”

Hilda laughed in the face of my $85 and explained, at length, why that wouldn’t be happening. “Why should you be the exception?” She asked.

“Let’s do a poll of everyone on this flight,” I suggest. “I will put money (all $85 of it) on me being the only one moving countries. That’s why I should be the exception.”

This was greeted with Hilda revisiting her earlier points, this time adding a raised voice and a pointed finger.

“Fine. If weight is such an issue on flights, how come overweight people don’t have to pay more for their ticket than me?” I asked. Hilda seemed stumped by that one. It’s a valid point, if you think about it. People with the correct height to weight ratio have been getting skanked by airlines for years!

By now, it was clear that whatever argument I threw at Hilda would not stick. She told me they only took credit cards. Awesome, I had just paid mine off and cut it up. I’d have to call my parents. Oh, but Hilda won’t let me use the phone and they won’t take foreign credit cards. “Well, you’ve got to throw me a bone here Hilda, Jesus!” I say, completely exasperated. The best she could do was get me to reverse the charges on the pay phone.

It finally got sorted and I arrived back in England with both my cases and an $800 debt to pay to my father. Good times.

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How May I Help You? NO!

Friday, September 4th, 2009

To pay the bills and support my writing dream while I’ve been here in Canada, I’ve had to do a few shitty jobs. My last one was as a travel agent. Now, to clarify, before people get offended, I classify a shitty job as any job that doesn’t have you following your passion. So, save the complaint letters please.

Anyhoo, for me, this job was particularly shitty because you HAVE to give a crap about it. You can’t just show up, breeze through the days and collect your pay cheque. If you mess up on this job, you’re messing up someone’s holiday and that’s kind of a big deal.

Anyone who knows me or reads this blog regularly has probably picked up on my low tolerance for bullshit, so a job in the customer service arena, while I’ve had many of them through the years, is probably not best suited to me.

The  clientele in a travel agency however are among the more annoying type of customer. Here are the top few types of encounter that made me want to stab myself in the neck with a pencil (so, in case you wander into a travel agency, you know not to do this):

“I want to go away somewhere…anywhere!”

Yeah, that’s nice doll, but let’s face facts, you don’t. If I suggest Outer Mongolia, odds are, you’re gonna turn it down. “Well, can you narrow it down a little? Whereabouts would you like to go?” “Anywhere!” This was usually greeted with extensive eye rolling by me. Listen, it’s a commission based job and I simply did not get paid enough to spend an entire day going through a frikkin’ atlas with these fools only to have them do a one week all inclusive in Cuba. Kiss my ass.

“I want to go to Africa/Thailand/Australia/Any far away country but I don’t want to spend over $500.”

Yeah, good luck with that homie. Tell me how it works out, because I surely can’t help you. There are more people than you could ever imagine who, after you tell them this little escapade is not logistically possible, will argue the point with you til the cows come home. Never mind that the flight alone to these places will cost more than double their budget. My suggestion to them was usually to start swimming.

“But I saw it cheaper online.”

Then I suggest you book it online asswipe. You know why the price is never usually the same? Because travel websites don’t update in real time (it’s virtually impossible for them to do so, because the prices are based on availability of seats, which changes every nano second). So when you see that flight to L.A for $500, in the time it takes you to make it to the travel agent, someone else has bought that flight and the price of the next available seat has gone up. You see how it works? Good, so don’t sit in front of me for an hour debating online prices. I’m not online, I’m right here in your face telling you to shut the hell up.

“But it was $20 less online/at this other travel agent.”

If you’re quibbling about $20, you can’t afford to go on vacation. Plain and simple.

There are many other scenarios which drove me to distraction, but luckily I worked with awesome people who could talk me off the ledge when I was about to roundhouse kick someone. So, spare a thought for the person you’re dealing with, in any customer service environment and know that they really don’t get paid enough to tolerate your bull.

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Public Service Announcement

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008


If you have to deal with someone in customer service today – please play nice.

 

As someone who currently has the misfortune of being on the front lines of dealing with the general public, let me tell you, the general public can kiss my Irish ass.

 

I am trying to hold it together here, long enough to keep a roof over my head and until someone discovers my genius, but I am one bitch slap away from this thing coming crashing down around me.

 

I truly don’t care what is going on in your day, how much shit the universe has chosen to heap on you, nowhere in the manual of life does it say it’s OK for you to dump your shit on me by default, just because I happen to be in your presence at the time.

 

I have dealt with more abuse in this job than I have at any point in my life (and I once worked in a call centre, so that should tell you something). I had a client who, after much back and forth with me, decided to take her rude ass, excuse me, business, elsewhere. She then called me to let me know that she’d done that and told me to ‘go fuck yourself, you fucking piece of shit’. To which I replied ‘OK thank you. You too,’ and hung up. And all of this for a sale that would have made me exactly $2.30. Pardon me for not giving a crap sweetheart.

 

Last week, I had a client who had asked me to call her back about something. I did, her phone rang more than ten times, no voicemail. The next day when I went into work, I was greeted by a scathing one minute and forty second long voicemail from her berating me for not calling her back. I am rude, disrespectful (and a bunch of other choice adjectives) according to her. The venom she spat in this voicemail left my coworkers jaws on the floor. One minute and forty seconds people. I called back and (when her answer machine finally came on after about 20 rings) left her a message in the exact tone of voice that she had for me. Screw that ‘customer’s always right’ shit. Sometimes the customer is bat shit crazy and needs to be put in their place. You better recognise! The next day, she came in, spent a crap load of money with me and couldn’t praise me highly enough. So, I concluded that she’s clearly bipolar and was off her meds. Hopefully, she has since upped her dosage.

 

I get abuse from all angles – in person, by phone and email. The trifecta of insanity. The common sense-o-metre seems to have been shut off in a great many people. When you rant and rave about your dissatisfaction with whatever your beef du jour is, you must be mistaking me with someone who gives a shit. Sometimes people even do the preemptive complain – nothing’s even gone wrong yet! Can you save your bitching until it’s actually legitimate? I’m fully aware that you will bitch me out when the time’s right, but when you’re whining about shit that hasn’t even happened yet, I really just stop listening and I’m making up a whole conversation in my head (and criticising your outfit).

 

So I’m warning you people, seriously, buttons are being pushed. The gloves are about to come all the way off. Hence forth, I will not be giving as good as I get, I will be giving better. And this tongue is razor sharp amigo. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of a lashing. I have officially entered my ‘I don’t give a crap’ zone and there’s no turning back. You have been warned. Do not test me.

 

Lucky I have a killer smile or I could come off as a real bitch.

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Phoning It In

Monday, September 15th, 2008


My phone broke. I have a phone that has a slide out QWERTY keyboard. The QWERTY key pad worked, but the one on the front decided it’d had enough. None of the keys worked. Well, that’s not strictly true – the 5 button worked, but since I don’t know anyone with a phone number consisting solely of 5s, that’s a bit redundant.

 

So, yesterday I took it back to the phone shop where they replaced my dud phone with a ‘refurbished’ model.

 

‘I don’t get a new one?’ I asked.
‘It’s refurbished,’ said the devoid-of-all-personality sales rep.
‘So, it’s busted is what you’re saying.’
‘Was busted,’ he corrected.
‘Great.’
‘Or maybe just someone didn’t want it and brought it back.’ This phone just went from being busted to being an orphan within a few seconds.

 

The rep faffed around with the new phone for a minute.

 

‘Did you back up?’ he asked.
‘Come again?’
‘Did you back up the data from your phone onto your computer?’
‘You can do that?’

 

He sighed.

 

With the transaction complete, he handed me my new, ‘refurbished’, formerly busted phone and sent me on my way. I turned it on and it looked completely different. I shot a worried glance at the sales rep. ‘You have to re-set it,’ he said. Cool, how hard can that be?

 

Answer: frikkin’ hard!

 

I don’t know how I ever got my head around this phone to begin with, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’ll be damned if I can figure out what the hell is going on with this little piece of machinery. What was my ring tone before and how do I get it back? What was the theme of my home screen? Was it aqua blue or guava bubbles coloured? And which menu even has those options? My phone book isn’t even in this bitch anymore. The sales rep gave me a print out of it, but I’ll end up with carpel tunnel syndrome if I type all those bad boys in now, so I’m tempted to just wait till people call me and play a fun guessing game.

 

So, for the foreseeable (or at least until I can find the manual), I shall be communicating solely through carrier pigeon and morse code.

 

Over and out.

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