Customer service follies (motor vehicle service edition)

We purchased new tires for our car last December (through the dealer, Heritage Toyota, which was our first mistake, but they had been pretty good on the service front).  Over the course of the intervening year, we noticed that we were regularly having to put air in the tires, and when Sarahmac took the car in for regular service today, she pointed that out to the service tech.  They made sympathetic noises, but didn't find any leaks in the tires, but that there was significant damage to the wall of the right front tire, and recommended replacing it immediately (and that we should pay for it).  Sarahmac naturally didn't want them to install another crappy leaky tire, and brought the car home.

I called the dealer and explained in no uncertain terms that I was unhappy with having bought tires that needed to be replaced after a year; they said they could look over the tires and determine whether anything could be done (because, apparently when Sarahmac mentioned it this morning, they didn't take the uterus-haver seriously); I said I would bring it back immediately, and that I needed the work done in two hours so I could pick up the kids from school.

When I arrived, there was nothing in the system about my problem; I asked in no uncertain terms for the tech to hunt down the tech I had talked to on the phone because I didn't want to explain everything all over again; no, I didn't have her name, because I had assumed we were in the 21st century and that when I arrived they would route me to the correct person (also, when I'm furious and furiously trying to contain that fury, I forget to write down the name of the person I'm talking to), and now this apparently makes me the bad guy because the tech I'm now talking to gets an attitude.

He finally goes off in a huff to find the tech I talked to on the phone, and when she arrives, everything is okay, they're ready to work on the car.  After an hour and a half, the car is ready, they determined that there was a leak between the tires and rims (translation: they installed the tires incorrectly a year ago) which was now fixed, and they replaced the bad tire for free.

Everyone (well, everyone except the snippy tech) was perfectly "nice", but they didn't do the right thing by the customer until I started playing bad cop.  I expect that when dealing with out-of-state institutions, but didn't expect it when dealing with Vermonters.  Oh, well.

Poor customer service + Little-known state regulations + Honest company = Big fat check?!

Our neighborhood was built on solid rock; my understanding is that our lot was a swampy part of a farm that was drained (60's and 70's-era wetlands management, bay-bee!), and what they found under the muck was solid rock, but anyways, that means we don't have a basement, and we aren't hooked up to city gas, so even though we live in Vermont's equivalent of a major metropolitan area, our house has a big tank of #2 fuel oil for heating and a smaller tank of propane for the oven and range -- the previous owners had a propane-fueled heating stove that they used as an alternative to the fuel oil-powered baseboard heat, but they really wanted to take the stove with them, so we actually use very little propane.

So, at some point not too long ago, our propane provider began charging us a rental fee for the tank**. More recently, they were bought by Amerigas, and changed our account number... after they had sent out the yearly bill for the tank rental, so of course they misfiled our payment -- it was accepted and cashed, they just didn't credit our account -- and after I called and they admitted their mistake and said they would straighten it out, of course they didn't, and that's when we looked for a replacement and found Patterson Fuels, who are awesome.

Amerigas was then supposed to pick up their crappy old tank and go away, but of course they didn't get around to it for nearly a month***.  They were crazy-makers, but we were done with them.  Or so we thought, until we received this letter:

This is the most hilariously unexpected correspondence we've ever received.  I've blacked out the amounts, but let's just say that given how little propane we use, all our cooking fuel needs and tank rental fees for the time we were Blue Flame / Amerigas customers were effectively free. 


** This was when we should have started shopping around for another fuel provider, but for some reason we didn't. 

*** and when they finally did pick it up, they filled up Patterson Fuels' tank, which is a big no-no.  We complained to them about it, but I still don't have the full story on how that ended

Kids' magazines

Let's browse through some magazines!

The December 2012 copy of National Geographic: KIDS has 42 interior pages, plus front and back covers (inside and out), for a total of 46 pages.  Of these:

• 16 pages are devoted to advertising (including 2 pages of ads disguised as an article)
• 20 pages are devoted to "factoid"-style articles, games, and reader-contributed material
• 6 pages are devoted to written articles
• 1 page is an interview with a "pop star"
• 3 pages are devoted to administrivia (the cover, the table of contents, etc)

... and the color schemes of the "content" pages and the "ad" pages are extremely similar, to make it as difficult as possible for a kid to tell the difference between ads and content.

Shame on you, National Geographic: KIDS!

The December 2012 copy of KIDS: Discover has 20 pages (they number 1 from the cover page).  Of these:

• 0 pages are devoted to advertising
• 2 pages are devoted to "factoid"-style articles, games, etc
• 2 pages are devoted to administrivia (the cover and back cover)
• 16 pages are devoted to what amounts to a magazine-long series of 2-page spreads that each cover some aspect of Antarctica.

I love you, KIDS: Discover!

Open letter to Vanguard

I recently received a snail-mail letter telling me to stay invested in Admiral Shares.  This pisses me off for a couple reasons:

1. I'm signed up for e-Delivery on all possible communications from Vanguard.  Only letters that the Feds require you to snail-mail to me should come via the post office.  I seriously doubt this falls under that category.
2. This was my Roth IRA account, which I opened in 1998 and have maximized contributions to every year.  Because of Vanguard's once-stricter conditions on switching to Admiral shares and the crappy economy over the last 13 years, it wasn't until last year that I *could* switch to Admiral shares.  I had been desperately wishing for Admiral shares until then, and I certainly don't need to be told to stay in them.

I love Vanguard, but you are wasting money on fluff.  Whatever you spent snail-mailing me this letter (over and above the cost of sending me an e-mail) is money that should be going into my retirement account.  Stop it.  Never, ever, ever, send me another paper letter about how great Admiral shares are.  You have my e-mail address.  I read e-mails from Vanguard.  Send communications there.

Netflix and me, the sucker

A lot has been said about Netflix/Qwikster, but one thing I haven't seen stressed enough is this: 


Actually, scratch that.  I was about to say that I, and presumably many other Netflix customers, still have the streaming service solely because we want 3 DVDs out at a time.  This was based on the fact that when the new pricing went into effect and I looked at the options online, it looked to me that if you wanted no streaming, you could only get 2 or 1 out at a time... but when I went to go get a screenshot of that for this blog entry, I finally noticed the "Show Additional all DVD Plans" text in the lower right.  Because I have "only" a 20-inch screen and usually have the bookmarks sidebar open, half the text was off the screen.

So... it turns out that you could simply cancel streaming from the get-go, and if you were just using the DVD service anyway, actually pay less than you were previously paying.  

So, aside from Netflix's skeezy tactics of not showing the 3 DVDs out at-a-time with no streaming option by default, what's the big deal here?


(I mean aside from the fact that now that the DVD rentals are a separate business, everyone like me will drop the streaming service until streaming matures to the point where it can almost completely replace the DVD rental service... at which point, the best option might not be Netflix.)

Survey techniques that could use improvement

A couple weeks ago, the CDC called and wanted me to take a phone survey, which would "only take about 10 minutes."  All right.  I know that this is a lie and it will probably take 20-25 minutes.  Fine, I'd like to help the CDC.  So, the first few questions have ordinal level answers, like "How many cigarettes do you smoke a week? A. None, B. 1 to 3, C. 4 to 10, D. more than 10."  And the like.  We get to "How many times have you tried chewing tobacco?" and I answer, "Never" and the interviewer starts to list out all the possible answers, and I repeat, "Never" to which the interviewer replies that they have to read all possible choices, to which I replied that I couldn't complete the survey under these conditions, as the conditions under which they wanted me to take the survey was wasting my time.


I can sort of understand the need to list out all possible choices for a nominal response; if they ask what my favorite color is, I could perhaps mistakenly answer "A. Blue" instead of "C. Yellow", but when the response is ordinal, there's absolutely no need to read out every single answer.  Case closed... but no, the CDC called back.  It took two minutes to explain to the nice interviewer what the problem was, but finally, case closed.  No, the CDC called back *again*.  This time I simply said I wasn't finishing the survey and hung up.


What I don't understand is why they don't have an online survey option.  An entirely automated call system could call you up, go through the necessary decision tree to get the right person in the house on the phone, then ask if you if you want a live person to administer the survey or take one online.  The live person choice connects you to one of their phone interviewers.  The online choice tells you to go to cdc.gov (or other short url) and enter your phone number, and the site then administers the right survey.  Put a button on the online survey that says, "I want to talk to a live person" that connects you at any time to one of the phone interviewers.  I can read faster than any interviewer can speak, it lets me take the survey on my time, they might actually get more interviewees whose time is valuable, and they can conduct more surveys with fewer phone interviewers.  It's really that easy!

the worst travel experience ever... (part 2)

...was capped off by our triumphant return to home at 3am this morning. After leaving brother Stu's place shortly before 1pm (giving us more than ample time to make our 5pm flight), we quickly found that there was a 6-mile backup going into the I-64 tunnel, so we turned around and went through the I-664 tunnel. Just outside of Williamsburg, traffic ground to a halt and we were left wondering for 20 minutes whether this was the "usual" northbound traffic of northern Virginians going home after a weekend at VA Beach, until we passed the accident scene. We made it to the terminal at about 3:15pm and promptly found out our flight to JFK had been cancelled due to thunderstorms around JFK, and there wouldn't be another until 6am the following morning. Even better, there were only 3 seats on that flight, so Finn would get
to sit on our laps. We were all set to be booked on that flight when I noticed that the 3pm to Boston had been delayed until 5:15, and there was room on the flight, so we decided to fly into Boston and then rent a car 1-way so we'd get home that night. Using Richmond's incredibly slow wireless connection, we got a confirmation with Hertz (Enterprise and Alamo having failed us first -- Alamo more dramatically, since Enterprise said "Oh, we don't do 1-ways more than
N miles; the guy from Alamo had me on the line for 10 minutes before figuring out that he had no cars at that location). The Boston flight was delayed until 6pm, and then we finally boarded at 7pm, as rain starting pouring down and lightning flashed. At 8:45pm we finally took off (we were "first in line" on the runway according to our captain; of course, we were the only people at the airport!!), and we had a quick flight and nice touchdown at Logan, and were on the road shortly before 11pm. From there, we only had to stay awake (and hope the kids would sleep) until we got home. Yay.

So both ways it would have been faster to drive, and now we're seriously thinking about driving the next time, even though we hate driving long distances. Gah.

just got into my hotel room...

...at 11:30pm. That's right, my US Air flight from PHL was delayed from 6:00 to 6:30, so we boarded around 6 and found the air wouldn't work until the plane was under power and it would be a few minutes before we got our flightplan; around 7pm we taxied to the runway, were told that there was "weather" between PHL and ORD so we had to taxi to the back of the line and that it would take about 30 minutes to get new orders; shortly before 8pm we were given a new flightplan and taxied out to the runway, were told that there was more "weather" on our new path and taxied to the back of the line and that it would take about 30 minutes to get new orders; at 9pm we finally taxied to the runway and took off, and the flight still went through "weather" between PHL and ORD. Had the "weather" gotten better and that's why it was now "safe" to go? We'll never know.

Lies, Damn Lies, and E-mail Phishing Scams

Gmail's spam filters are very good (erring a bit on the side of junking things that aren't spam), so it's an event when something gets through. The following e-mail, supposedly from the IRS, was in my inbox this morning, and obviously a scam. This is not a new scam (as you can see from a quick Google search), but frustrating to see around tax time, when people may let their guard down for "good news" from the IRS.

from IRS Internal Revenue Service reply-to taxrefund@856.irs.gov, to undisclosed-recipients, date Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 5:45 AM subject Tax Notification

hide details 5:45 AM (5 hours ago)

Reply

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
United States Department of the Treasury

Dear Taxpayer,

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal
activity we have determined that you are eligible
to receive a tax refund of $184.80.

Please submit the tax refund request and allow us
6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records or applying
after the deadline.

To access the form for your tax refund, use the following personalized link:

http://0x7C.0x3.0x3A.0x85/www.irs.gov/taxrefund.php

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service


Document Reference: (0x7C.0x3.0x3A.0x85).

Fun with Afni

Today I received a COLLECTION NOTICE from Afni, Inc., for a "remaining balance from the original creditor for services associated with the previous telephone number listed below". A quick poke on Google showed that a lot of people are experiencing the same; the theme I've picked out is that Afni bought old debt cheap and is trying to collect on it, partly by snail-mail spamming people unassociated with the original accounts. Another problem is that in many cases, the "debts" appear to be billing mistakes by the "original creditors". Yay. Just what I wanted to spend time on today.

What to do? Well, I went to afnicollections.com, just to see how I might "manage my account online". There they want the Account # on the collection notice and the last four digits of your SSN. Hm. Well, I sure as hell ain't gonna give them anything they haven't already proven they know. No SSN on the collection notice, so online account management is out.

There's a toll-free telephone number for Afni listed on the notice; should I call and try to get this straightened out? Well, no. The overwhelming advice I've read is that you do /not/ want to get on the phone with someone whose primary motivation is to get money from you. Seems obvious, but there is definitely an urge to get on the phone/internet and "settle the problem" quickly.

So, it's the snail-mail route for me. These hits were helpful to me in writing a letter: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/271/RipOff0271533.htm#254990 http://complaintwire.org/Complaint.aspx/BL6ADlQfXwAGogjJkKUatA My letter went out in the mail today, Certified, Return Receipt Requested. We'll see what turns up!

The best part of all this? Further down on the Google search was the website for the company that "remove[s] negative information from the first pages of Search Engines and replace[s] the bad links with positive information." The internet is a beautiful thing; it's caused even the companies who harass people for a living to need "protection".