Good Customer Service
It takes two
BY LAVIDA ARNOLD

I have recently had the displeasure of dealing with another person dropping the ball and then trying to charge ME for it. Well, not really. But that is what started this whole episode. Let me explain.

When we were buying our home we had to have the electricity put in our name before we could close on the house. But since the deal wasn't closed, we couldn't rent a Post Office box. Therefore we had to have our first bill sent to the Post Office "general delivery". First bill we didn't get. Second notice came at the time we got the first one. Paid the bill and filled out the change of address form on the back of the "return with payment" stub. (Or so I firmly believed.)

Didn't hear anything for a couple of months. Asked previous owners; they said it would be billed every two months. Two months are here, still no bill. About the time we begin to wonder about this a man showed up to disconnect. I told the man we hadn't received a bill, and he said all he had was our physical address. Well, I pointed out, the mail does not deliver this far out. I wrote the man a check for the bill; he handed me a receipt and said that I should call the customer service number on the receipt.

I called and was greeted by a woman who said her name was "Susie" (Not her real name, of course). I explained that for some reason they had not changed our address, and we were not getting our bills. She began to get snotty and said, "That is just the 'past due' amount with a $25 service charge." I said that wasn't fair, it was not our fault that we hadn't received our bill. She looked up our account on her computer and said that it was going to general delivery and that if we hadn't gotten it, it would have come back to them, which, she said, it hadn't. Basically calling me a liar. I informed her that the address WAS changed on the back of the form, and if they dropped the ball on that, it wasn't fair to charge me for it. I asked her to please remove the $25 from our bill. (Now keep in mind that I firmly believed the address change had been filled out. But it wasn't. Still, she didn't even check.) Also, she said that I MUST have gotten the bills, or they would have come back to them. She said that she "couldn't" do anything about the bill, that I would have to write a letter, etc. etc. I told her that no way was I going to jump through a bunch of hoops for something that wasn't even my fault to begin with. "Just take the $25 off of my bill."

So, since I wasn't lying down for her little run-around routine, she hung up on me. Yes, very professional. After I quit shaking from the anger, I called back and asked to speak with the supervisor. She mumbled some lame excuse, so I asked to speak to the general manager. She put me on hold, and then she said that he wasn't at his desk, and would I like his voice mail? I said "Yes, Please." I left a message briefly explaining the rude conduct of his customer service person, the overcharge, and I asked him to please give me a call back. I was fuming! Is it right for the general population to be held hostage like this? Isn't there anything we can do about it? I felt totally violated.

PART TWO

After the accounting manager called me back the real debating began. (First, it was my mistake; he is not the general manger, but the accounting manager.) By this time I was angry and loaded for bear, but I tried to be nice, yet firm. (This is a hard balance for me, because my first instinct is to just rip somebody a new orifice.) At first he was in defense of the poor customer service because he was told that we were "disconnected". Yeah, I think I know the difference. The accounting manager pulled my file which took a few minutes. Funny how the previous person I spoke with couldn't have done this and saved a lot of time and argument.

He discovered that in error I had not filled out the change of address on the back as I thought that I had. Strike one against me. Then he discovered that the mail HAD been returned to them. Strike one against them. We had no way to verify if the change of address had been called in or not. No one gets a point. He said the fee would have to stand because they had to send a guy out. Strike two for me. I contended that if the mail had gone back to them, they should have called to find out what the problem was. Strike two against them. He said that someone called and left a voice message for us to call. Strike three against me. BUT WAIT! I am not out yet. The message that had come in was garbled (we only have cell phones out here, no phone lines.) So I had returned the call to the number that was on my caller ID. No one answered. Strike three against them. Still, Mr. Tod Young said the fee would stand.

I dug my heels in and said that isn't fair. Why should I have to pay for someone else's ineptness? Therefore, I informed Mr. Young that it wasn't right to hold people hostage just because they had no option but to do business with him. So I told him that, as a writer, I would be doing my next piece about him, his company, and the crappy customer service that I had received.

Now in all fairness, Mr. Young had been congenial throughout this entire ordeal, and stayed with me on the phone for nearly two hours. I gave him the name of my editor, Ms. Virginia Isabelle Bryant, so that he would be able to give her his side of the story. (I think he may have worried that I was going to write a slanted piece and not give him his say. He has never dealt with me, so he would have no way of knowing that my editor would NEVER let me get away with that.)

I then informed him that I would also be calling the Better Business Bureau to report the bad customer service and explained to him that just one call wasn't going to make a difference, but that if this was indeed their modus operandi (still need a spell check on that, please) whenever people called to find out if they were a good company to deal with, it would add to their bad ranking. Mr. Young, who by this time was probably getting a little bit tired of dealing with such a stubborn woman, suggested that since the fault belonged to neither of us, but rather to the Post Office that had failed to notify us that we had mail at the counter, we should split the fee. I had to agree with him that it was neither his fault, nor mine. So finally an equitable solution was reached that was fair to both parties.

Kudos to Mr. Young, who was willing to talk it out until both of us were happy. You see, in today's world of economic one-up-manship, there are two sides to the customer service issue; one being the practice of passing the buck higher up until the customer finally wears down and gives up. This is wrong, because we all have a right to be treated fairly. To make a practice of over-charging, add-on charging, etc, then leaving no recourse for the customer, we are all being held hostage by big businesses.

There is another side as well. The old "The Customer is always right" practice. Come on! The customer is NOT always right, and we know it! But there are those who would take advantage of that by taking it out on the poor store clerks who have to stand on their feet all day, ask permission to go to the bathroom or take a break, and put up with mean and nasty customers. They have their hands tied and are told to deal with it with a smile on their faces or lose their minimum wage jobs that they depend on to feed their children or put themselves through school. This is not right either!

Too many people take advantage of this and send an already over worked, under appreciated, and totally stressed out store clerk running to the bathroom in tears. Good customer service, TRULY good customer service, takes two. It takes an employee who is willing to talk it out. Sit and listen. Look for a solution that works for everyone. And it also takes a customer who is willing to stand firm when they believe they are right, but be nice about it and be willing to concede where concession is warranted.

Mr. Young is a very rare and valuable asset to the company that he works for. I would like to give a hearty KUDOS! A major CONGRATULATIONS! And a JOB WELL DONE! to Mr. Tod Young. A rare person who has what it takes to make the world a better place. Thank you Mr. Young
THE END

"I know that not everyone will agree with me, but I have found this to work very well. It isn't all one sided, as I said. I just haven't given his side and all the things that he does for me. At any rate, at least this piece should generate some real feed back."

Lavida,
Seems to be working. Writing is a gift. You'll never reach everyone with your writing, nor should you. Follow your own instincts. Don't be afraid to listen to those more experienced than yourself. But in the final analysis, listen to that ancient scribe in your head. This gift should be used to aid, assist, enlighten, encourage; not to demean or to advance any perverse hidden agenda. Remember, one little rap on the head can take all of this talent away in an instant. Use it wisely. Oh, write comedy to entertain yourself if you wish, but remember the purpose of this writing gift. Nothing wrong with reading others' good writing, studying, referring to good reference works, but the way to write is to get busy and--you guessed it--write. Love you,
Uncle Bill 7-29-03

I'm glad to hear that Lavida has such an idyllic life. She is the exception not the rule.
I just hope that somewhere down the line, her bubble doesn't get busted. If life ever starts slapping her in the face, like it has done to most of us, she may not be able to handle it. I did all that for my husband and also worked 8 hours a day in a factory. Didn't get me any Brownie points. BBS 7/28/03

"Women's Lib" From The Other Perspective by Bill

Dear Lavida,

I had the same mother as your Aunt Virginia, your Grandmother Alta. Saw a lot of the very same things. One of my earliest childhood memories is watching my mom trying to deal with a bill collector with seven little children hanging on her skirttails. (Funny thing, my spellchecker won't allow "skirttails" but "shirttails" is fine.) Still remember her flecking the broken paint chips off the door of that bill collector's old Buick as she tried to explain to him why a husband, who'd created the problem in the first place, hadn't already taken care of it by himself. Remember this little eight-year-old boy standing there and seeing the helplessness and hopelessness in his mom's eyes and vowing right then that if he ever had a wife of his own, this type of thing would never happen to her. Still remember those brutal beatings (mine and hers both) and my mom being essentially powerless to stop them. Oh, she would give me a switching, not nearly as often as my foul mouth called for, but never brutality.

I never allow (allow?) wife Kathy to leave the house without first making sure she has adequate money with her. She has her own job and her own money, but still I feel compelled to check. Where did I learn this? Certainly not by example as a kid. Just seems the decent thing to do. Learned, early on, to allow (allow?) wife Kathy free rein in interior design of our new house. Why? She's much better with this type of thing than I am. Knows how a house is supposed to function. In area after area, I'd have made one more big mess. Oh no, no important male appendages fell off in the process. Would not have been tied on very tightly if they had. Kathy caught me ironing (Ironing? Still a few of those left.) a shirt and became very upset with me. An obvious holdover from her childhood. Her mom always kept her dad's clothes prepared and laid out for him when he was a news anchor and TV broadcaster. Kathy's mom was duly rewarded. Dad divorced her and married his co-anchor, ex-fashion model, TV broadcaster, liberated woman. Go figure.

I could go on and on with horrible examples. One being about a mother who was advised by a sister-in-law to not have an abusive father jailed because? "Who's going to help you raise those boys?"

Hope you never have to plow this ground again. It's already been prepared for you. But you'd jolly well better keep it weeded. Cherish these hard-won freedoms. They all cost too damn much.

I've been accused of showing a touch of favoritism toward my nieces. Perhaps this is true. I love each one of them dearly. I also love my nephews. But why any partiality toward my nieces, whether I've been aware of this or not? Perhaps a lifetime of observations, of seeing my mom's lot in life, of sensing a terrible unfairness in this land of the free and the home of the brave.

So, am I a woman's libber? Nah, wrong gender. But by what definition does one become a "Woman's Libber"? Would a little eight-year-old boy seeing his mom faced with an impossible problem foisted upon her by a negligent husband and a callous bill collector and her being helpless to do one single thing about it qualify? What if this young son vows, at that young age, to never let something like this happen to a wife of his, then does he qualify? What if he grows up and gets a job involving technology and makes fairly decent wages and never encounters one single female in his line of work, then does he qualify? What if he encounters females, keen of wit and possibly better qualified than he, and yet, they still don't meet the "requirements"? What if he notices all of this and wonders at a system that perpetuates such things, then does he qualify? After all, what's more important, a name or an attitude?

I have a dream that my four surviving little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by their gender but by the content of their character.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black women and black men, white women and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Uncle Bill

I know that not everyone will agree with me, but I have found this to work very well. It isn't all one sided, as I said. I just haven't given his side and all the things that he does for me. At any rate, at least this piece should generate some real feed back.

Love the response to my last article. Of course you know that I was in an abusive relationship for 12 yrs, myself. People always seem to look at my writing and say "oh, that's very good." or "you write so well". But does what I write inspire something? ANYTHING? Are my words capable of inspiring emotion ? I am looking forward to more passionate responses from other family members. At last, I feel that perhaps I really AM a writer. I hope that I didn't sound ungrateful for the people whose affirmation encouraged me to pursue my writing. Without them, my writing would have just fallen by the way side. Thanks! Love, Lavida 7-28-03

WOMEN'S WORK by Lavida

Did you know that most women these days across our country don't get up in the morning and cook their husbands breakfast? And more than that don't make his lunch for him before he goes to work. Then there is laundry and house keeping.
Duane says that I was raised right. He thought at first that it was unusual for me to take his boots and sweaty socks off when he gets home from work. And then there is laundry. He is still amazed that when he goes to get something out of his dresser or closet that it is right there, clean and ready to go.
Every morning I get up somewhere between 5 am and 5:30 am. When he gets up at 6:30, his breakfast is cooked and waiting for him on the table. His lunch is made and ready to go. The dogs are fed, the fish are fed, and I sit with him while he eats (I still can't stomach eggs) and have a cup of coffee with him.
When he gets home from work, the kitchen is spotless, the laundry is done, I have a large glass of ice water waiting for him, the house is all clean, and the lawn has been watered.
I see this as my job. (And it has been much easier these past few weeks while the kids visited their grandparents.) I don't feel put out, taken advantage of or dominated. He does just as much for me. We have never raised our voices to one another. If we disagree on something, we talk about it to see if maybe there is some amicable solution. If women's lib wants to do away with this, let them be miserable. They just don't know how good things can be. 7-24-03

I HAVE A MEMORY - WOMEN THEN AND NOW by Virginia

"If women's lib wants to do away with this, let them be miserable. They just don't know how good things can be…" by Lavida Arnold

Generally, as the editor of Bryburcon.com, I try very hard to publish our readers' views while remaining neutral. All one needs in order to become a member of this BBC.com association is some DNA sent forward in time from Nellie Bryant and/or William Burdett, adoption papers or merely a love of what we are doing here. My "job" as I see it is to reflect what Nellie and (sometimes) William spent most of their adulthoods creating and knitting together, to build on the love that I fell heir to, and to remind all of us where we came from and who made the effort to launch us into the 21st Century.

I am sixty years old, soon to be sixty-one. I have a memory. I know something about "women's lib", where that came from and who made the effort to launch that into the future. Let me tell you some things that I have seen, how it was and how it is now because of the women on the cutting edge who made a difference.

One of my earliest memories is that of seeing my mother holding a bloody towel to her face. We, the seven of her children, hugged the walls, terrified and horror stricken. Today it's called "domestic abuse". When I was four years old it was called "life". Family members appeared, scooped up my mother and spirited her away until her beaten face healed. Then she came back home because she had no other place to go. Nobody called the police the way they would have done had the perpetrator of that abuse done the same thing to a stranger.

I was even younger than that when the same abuser covered my body with bruises and welts and wrenched tendons. I have a clear memory of an aunt standing me on a table in front of her, stripping off my clothes and cursing at the sight. Quietly cursing. Nobody called the police. It was called "life". Occasionally the others among the seven suffered the same fate with the same results.

I did well in school. I scored pretty high on nationally standardized tests. Nobody did anything with those test scores, as far as I know, other than file them away. Only one teacher ever told me I should go to college. I was required to take "Homemaking" classes, but I was not permitted to take "Shop".

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by our school district on district-wide sports events such as football, basketball, baseball, track. Not for the girls. Girls took "physical education" classes. In school. Along with those "homemaking" classes. A few hundred dollars were spent on those classes. There were NO inter-school sports events for girls except for the few who were permitted to cheerlead for the boys' teams.

Dozens of boys from our large high school received full college scholarships in order for them to play on college sports teams. Oftentimes they needed extra tutoring in order to keep their "C" averages and their scholarships. At my high school graduation I received a $113 scholarship, and then I worked my way through college. Later I did manage to land another scholarship, which was taken away from me after my marriage engagement notice appeared in the newspaper. Married women were expected to remain at home tending to their families. By the time I earned my Bachelor's Degree I weighed a hundred pounds and had an erratic heartbeat. I married, and my spouse and I decided to buy a mobile home. I was working fulltime, and he was working fulltime. The salesman said smoothly, "I'm putting this in your husband's name. It's just easier to do it that way." Easier too when it came time to divide assets. That had been the idea.

As I was working my way through college I was paid about a third of the wages the men working in the same capacity were paid. The reasoning was that they "needed to support their families". I would "just get married". During the last year and a half of my undergraduate college attendance I was supporting my daughter and myself, and I was too poor to press in court for the $15 weekly child support I had been "awarded". It was called "life".

During my college years I worked with a woman whose husband was a police detective. Kathy told me about a murder her husband investigated, how a man had been seen with the female victim shortly before she was found murdered. I asked innocently, "Did they send him to prison?" whereupon Kathy wrinkled her nose and said sweetly, "Oh no, she was a whore." Have you ever heard the term, "Blame the Victim"? Women's libbers gave that particular mental slither a name.

People who have not been there, done that and seen how it all got this way will say, "I'm no women's libber, but I believe girls should be educated too," or "I'm no women's libber, but I think women and children should not be abused," "I'm no women's libber, but I think women should be able to get a job they are qualified for." How do you think these things got the force of law behind them anyway? That wasn't always the way we lived. What do you suppose the liberation (as in "libber") is FROM? From responsibility for the safety, comfort, well-being of those we love? No, far from it; it is liberation from powerlessness in the face of default in these responsibilities by those we depend upon. A choice and a chance to help ourselves, to arm ourselves with education, protection under the law and choice in how we conduct our lives.

Some women continue stroking the old social structure in the misguided belief that by struggling for equal rights we are relinquishing any power we did have. These women seem to have developed little understanding of the issues other women deal with, possibly because they have carved out power niches within the old system and have never questioned the cost of their own privileges. I've never heard one of them refuse advantages that were bought with the struggle of earlier women, however.

That you, MY NIECE, the granddaughter of my beloved mother who held that bloody towel to her face over fifty years ago; that you would sweep under the rug all of that effort and pain and sacrifice. It was made for you too, honey, so that you can CHOOSE to stay at home and do the job you have chosen to do. And, NO, we are not trying to "do away" with your right to choose that life. And NO, we are NOT miserable. And YES, I do know how good life can be as well as how BAD it can be without equal rights. An old Arabic saying goes, "Trust in the Lord, but tie up your camel." I would say trust in the good intentions of those you are dependent upon, but have the force of law behind you in case you find yourself under the control of someone who abuses you and calls it "life". That law was hard-won by some "women's libbers" on the cutting edge. It is a body of law that protects men as well as women. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.