Dante's "Divine Comedy" describes 9 circles of hell. But he can easily be forgiven his inability to anticipate the Cable industry, which currently bundles virtually all of your home digital services into one huge bill.
But his original admonition still stands:
"Abondon all hope, ye who enter here."
I spent over two hours this morning interacting with my cable provider. It's Comcast. We have the whole shebang bundled, and my wife has an iPad which, up until a few days ago, worked just fine. She told me two days ago that she had lost her WiFi connection.
My heart instantly shrank. Not only did my heart shrink...but my testacles receded deep, deep inside of me. I knew what was in store. I was going to have to call customer service.
If you have never dealt with Cable Customer Service, consider yourself blessed. Seriously. You have never been jerked around by anyone, any entity...you've never been truly sodomized until you have to deal with your cable service provider. If there were an Olympic Sports event devoted to fucking your customers...There would be Comcast, Time-Warner, Century-Link...and who knows the others. They are all the same.
To know one is to despise one.
I'm actually a very patient man. As opposed to my wife. She can go from pleasant to shouting obscenities within about 8 minutes. That's why I try to wrestle the phone from her. 8 minutes, in today's economy, is nothing. You haven't truly entered the Twilight Zone until you reach the 45 minute mark. And my wife doesn't have the patience for that. Unfortunately for me...I try. The only other option is to watch my wife burn off every customer service agent in the Western Hemisphere.
They don't deserve her vitriol. But you know what? We don't deserve their inability to
solve our problems. And worse. We don't deserve there disdain.
I always start out pleasant...really, I do. I'm from the Midwest. I start out with these interactions with the mindset that if you treat them with respect, they will treat you with respect. But it rarely pans out that way. The cable companies always find a way to send you back to ground zero, no matter how long you have been interacting with them. You get to a tech guy...who seems to be able, but not quite, to fix your problem...and he says to you..."you know what....I'm going to transfer you to a specialist." And, lo and behold, you find yourself at the very beginning of the decision tree...having to input all of your account info yet again, and answer all of the same old tired questions yet again.
This is like wash, rinse and repeat..........over and over again.
I really think the cable industry takes especial pride in their ability to thwart those customers who need some assistance.
But perhaps I am wrong.
But I have to ask you......if you found yourself at the helm of an evil cable enterprise, who would you hire as Vice President of Customer Service...in order to insure that each and every experience was soul sucking, enraging, demeaning, heart explodingly horrible?
Take your choices from some historical figures: