This is a long, meandering, perhaps pointless saga.
But my mental health demands that I write it.
For years, as part of my employment, I've contracted with the vendors for our law firm. When ever I have a choice I go with a small, locally-owned service provider. My experiences over the last couple of weeks confirm the wisdom of that choice.
Follow me across the kroissant….
July has been a hell of a month for me.
At the end of the hottest June on record for Denver, I learned that, instead of having two or three months to coordinate the dissolution of the law practice at which I've worked for more than 26 years, we would have one month.
Because one of the partners at the firm had major surgery in mid-June and was out of action for more than a week, we requested a two month extension of the expiration of our current lease, set for on July 31.
We were refused.
We've been good tenants: we've paid the rent on time every month for the past almost six years. We've never made extraordinary demands on the building or the facilities.
And it's not like a new tenant was begging to move in — it's a very basic suite of offices; further, the building has floors of empty office space, including a suite on our floor which has been empty since 2007.
But the office building at which we've had our suite for the past six years had recently been sold and the new owner — a gigantic out-of-state real estate conglomerate — refused a short-term extension. Instead, it demanded a "holdover" rate at double the current rent (rent already above current market rates), or a new lease at a much longer term than we wanted or needed.
We're a tiny little blip on its radar. I guess for the new owner showing a little compassion or flexibility — and losing rental payments for two more months — wasn't enough for it to bother spending 15 minutes amending the lease to allow a two month extension.
The next case of Too Big to Care came with our telephone and internet service provider.
On July 3 I called, trying to find out whether it would continue hosting our domain name and email when we cancelled our account at the end of July. I explained that the partnership was dissolving, we were moving out of our suite, and we would not be setting up in another location.
After abruptly telling me no — they had no service level lower than the one we currently have — the representative hung up on me before I could ask any more questions. I didn't call back immediately because another call came in for me; the next day I received an e-mail asking "what they could do to retain our business". I replied, asking that someone call me to arrange the discontinuation of our service, and asking how we could ensure that callers to our business lines would be properly notified of the new phone numbers for the partners.
I received no reply. But when I went onto the website, I saw that a ticket had been opened concerning the closing of the account, so I assumed (I know, bad of me) that the process had been started. I put a note onto the ticket, asking that someone contact me.
After a couple of days passed I called in again. After meandering through the voice-mail maze (because these companies don't really want to talk to you — they want to deal with you cheaply on-line), I finally got hold of a human and was transferred through two departments. The second woman I spoke with actually bothered to look up our account and saw the open ticket, and then tried to connect me with our "account rep" — apparently the only person allowed to take action since he was the one who started the ticket. The phone rang and rang and rang — no answer. But she did give me his direct dial number and I called the next morning. His voicemail message was that he was out of the office until the following Tuesday. I guess that explains why I didn't receive any assistance — and why he hung up on me so abruptly to start his Fourth of July vacation.
So on Tuesday, July 17 I called back. The "gentleman" seemed most perturbed that I hadn't sent in a letter I hadn't been instructed to send to a fax number I didn't have to start the process of closing our account. And, since I hadn't sent the letter I didn't know I had to send to the fax number I didn't have, we'd be charged for a full month's service after their receipt of the letter.
Deep breath. OK. I then asked to arrange forwarding of our current main line number to one of the partner's phone for a month, and to have a "this number has been changed" message on the other partner's direct dial line for a month, stating that we were prepared to pay for the service to those two numbers. I was told that because we are a "digital voice" customer that would have to be arranged through our phone equipment — which made no sense as our phone equipment would be disconnected when we vacated our suite at the end of July.
When we first contracted with the company, it was an up-and-coming company which had offered excellent service —both in the quality of the internet and phone lines, and in customer responsiveness. Since then the company has experienced explosive growth.
Oh, I figured out a work-around — that's one of the things I'm really good at. Since we were already stuck paying for half of August we're going to keep the account open until the end of the month so we can forward calls placed to our phones to other phone numbers. And we're going to port the main number to the new business my friend and I are starting — we'll be acting as an answering service to our old bosses.
But I've also been warned by both our new service provider, and the guy who's been our phone equipment vendor for years, that our current provider is very difficult to work with. Apparently if they can't keep a customer, they stall and throw up obstacles to keep them paying as long as possible, and delay porting, hoping it becomes unfeasible so they can hold on to a block of numbers.
It's become too big to care.
Today I had a run in with another company which has been, for decades, too big to care. It's a document storage corporation, whose business model (you can look it up on its web site) is to ding its customers for as many little, repetitive charges as they can.
More than a decade ago when this company bought the locally-owned vendor we had used, we transferred our business — at some expense — to a new vendor. And then, a few years ago, that vendor got eaten up by the behemoth.
As part of the process of moving our offices and dissolving the partnership, I've been untangling the stored records of the partners, and have been doing the necessary task of putting a large portion of the documents we need to retain into storage. To save on the recurrent add-a-box and permanently-remove-a-box fees, my practice has been to recall boxes that I know will be emptied, and refilling it with new contents before sending it back to storage. And, as often as possible, I send boxes to storage, and different boxes delivered at the same time to cut down on the outrageous delivery fees.
Yesterday, I placed an order to have 26 boxes picked up and taken to storage, and to have an additional 54 boxes delivered to our offices today.
The little delivery man brought in the 54 boxes — but he didn't take away the 26 boxes. I called to find out why.
After sitting through 10 or 15 minutes of sappy music interspersed every minute or so with a recorded recitation of the company's commitment to saving its customers time and money (hah!), I got a "customer service representative" on the line. When I asked… quite politely, considering the circumstances — why my boxes hadn't been taken away, he asked for the order numbers (and the website is set up so that you order delivery and pick up on different pages), and then said… and I'm not joking…
"Well, I see that you didn't request coordinated pick up and delivery! Your pick up is scheduled for tomorrow"
I couldn't help it. I lost it. I said "well, I guess I must be stupid to expect that when I request your company to bring me something, and to take something away, with five minutes separating the requests, that both requests would be accomplished at the same time, on the same trip. But then I guess then your company couldn't charge for two delivery charges, could it?"
After stammering "oh, no, you're not stupid" (yes, sarcasm was lost on him), he offered to put in a "customer concern" report. I told him to go right ahead, but it wasn't a "concern" — it was a complaint. And then I told him that, while I knew it wasn't his fault, he worked for a really, really, bad company that was too big to care.
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I suppose this is the American Business Model. No longer should a business serve its customers well, with reasonable charges but, instead, ding them with repetitive charges, for as long as they can drag their feet and continue to bleed the customer.
Get Too Big To Care; it's the key to success.