This is something that will turn the NEVEREVEREVEREVER Trumper into a gushing fountain of gratitude (kind of like his cabinet already is). It will take some time to tell the story because it took a lot of time for the story to develop. And it might not be finished.
More than a month ago, Nancy called Bright Speed to get our landline phone transferred from our old house (referred herein as House A) to our new place (we’ll call it House B). We’re old people and we are set in our ways. We do have cell phones but we have and want to keep our land line.
What happens if we don’t have our cell phones when we break our hips and our cell phone batteries run out of juice before we can crawl to them?
Three weeks after starting what became an endless and frustrating process, and after the latest failure to get anything resolved, I went to the company office in downtown Jefferson City to indicate that we were disappointed the transfer had not been made after uncounted calls answered by people who had no idea where Missouri is. I guess it balances out because we have no idea where they were or how many different nations we talked to. The guy I later talked to admitted he was in Guatemala.
Each call during this ordeal has been answered by a machine that has asked us if we are reporting a problem with issue X or Issue Z. It did not understand the word “no.” After several back and forth human to machine interactions, we were transferred to a human who assured us we were the only people in the whole world to them and they were there to help us.
We were assured each time that our call was so important that it was being recorded.
Understand that we—probably like you—have never believed the recorded messages when they told us, “Your call is important to us.” If our call was important, why didn’t they have a person whose lifetime primary language has not been anything close to English eventually taking the call?
I really didn’t need to say that, did I? All of us have been around long enough to know “customer service” in today’s automated world is an anachronism.
After three weeks of being told the human understood our problem better than the machine did, and after several assurances that the problem was being taken care of, it still had not been. Taken care of.
That’s when I walked up the steps to the front door of the Bright Speed office in Jefferson City. The door was locked. I could not tell if the lights were off or if the door and windows were covered with black plastic trash bags. There was a sign next to the door that did not assure me that my visit was important to the company. It said, more or less, “If you’ve got a problem, buddy, here’s a toll-free phone number to someone who took an English lesson last week. Tell them about it.”
That’s when I called the kind and maddeningly patient person in Guatemala. I wanted that person to give me the local phone number for the Bright Speed office—you know, ANY number to the local office. Surely there has to be one so someone at home can ask someone presumably hard at work in that building what they want for dinner.
Unfortunately, the guy in Guatemala had no plans for dinner that night in Jefferson City, Missouri.
What I should have done was wait in the parking lot for another four hours or so and jump one of the employees who came out to go home for the dinner that had been discussed on one of the telephones I am sure is in that building.
Instead, I went two blocks down the street to the offices of the Missouri Public Service Commission to see if it had a number I could call. Surely the state regulatory agency would have a number.
The door to the PSC offices was closed and locked but at least the lights were on.
If you want to see a commissioner, it turns out, you have to call ahead from a telephone just outside the door. So I called. Nobody answered. It was the noon hour, so I thought the PSC was just out to lunch. I went to House A, where I called Nancy on her cell phone. She was at House B getting ready to come to House A after lunch. She didn’t answer because—
—the call showed up on her cell phone as possible spam. It appears Bright Speed had assigned a new number to the phone in House A. She later called me on my cell phone to find out where I was.
Then I used my cell phone to call the phone next to me in House A and it rang and rang and rang somewhere but not on the phone next to me at House A.
So we now had a new number at House A but nothing at House B.
That was almost two weeks ago. Nancy finally did get someone who told us the transfer would be made last Friday. So last Thursday, I went back to House A and disconnected our various handsets—except for one and brought all of the equipment we had not yet moved to House B. When I had picked up the handset at House A before unplugging it from the wall, I checked and found there was no dial tone even though there was supposedly a new number assigned to that address.
We still didn’t have a dial tone at House B Friday night.
Last Saturday, Nancy spent most of the morning talking to numerous people who were sympathetic and we were finally told that a local technician is coming to House B tomorrow (Thursday) to get us all hooked up. As we record this adventure for you to share with us, we do not know the time when that person will visit us.
However, we did get a text yesterday (Tuesday) asking if we still wanted that person to visit us or whether the problem had been fixed.
Whether it had been fixed? By whom? Nancy is the handywoman of the house. Her husband, you see, is the writer who knows which end of the screwdriver is which but has limited knowledge of how it is used.
Frankly, we are not confident that an English-speaking person driving a Bright Speed truck will be in our driveway tomorrow. But after five-plus weeks, someone in a country far, far away seems to have had a local Bright Speed number that we could never get and used it to call Jefferson City and to talk to a local technician we should have been able to talk to in March who could have left the dark and locked lair of Bright Speed and performed some customer service in a matter of hours instead of sending us on this odyssey.
We are not holding our breaths, though.
And we have reached the point that if nobody shows up tomorrow, I am going to the parking lot of Fortress Bright Speed and wait for people to leave at quitting time and I’m going to tackle one of them and get this thing done.
NOW, here’s what President Trump can do what will truly make America Great Again—because it once was great when we could call the local phone company and get a problem taken care right away.
He can take his Magic Marker and scrawl his cardiogram on a new executive order requiring all company call centers to be located within the borders of the United States and operated by people to whom English is the first language. It not only would take care of a maddening problem of customer service, but it also would provide jobs for all of the workers who have been buzz-sawed out of the federal employment tree by Elon the bureaucratic bush whacker.
We hope that the compliment we would pay to him for doing that would not cause some of the readers of these entries to have a stroke.
Thank God Bright Speed isn’t in charge of the red telephone at the White House.
But who needs a red telephone when you have Signal?