Well, as you may recall from the last installment of my MacStories adventures, I was waiting for a check. Jennifer from Apple CR had said that it would take about two weeks to cut a check for me. Well, as the two week deadline approaches, I've been curious. Last Thursday I called Jennifer to ask her where the check was in the pipeline. She had said that I could call if I had any questions. So, I did. I didn't hear back from her and when I called on Friday I got her voice mail once again, this time it said she'd be out of the office until June 1st. It would have been nice if she could have made a 30 second phone call to me letting me know what was up, but no, she just had to take off early for her long weekend.
Well, today she calls back and is all curt and blunt with me on the phone. She explained that it would take Apple 2-4 weeks to cut the check "as I told you." I immediately corrected her explaining that she had left me with the idea that it would take 2 weeks, not 2-4. She then replied that it shouldn't take more than two weeks but that the check is handled by another department that she is not a part of and therefore has no way of tracking where in the pipeline the check is.
"Well, is there any way you can put me in touch with that department?"
"No, that department is completely internal."
"Huh. Okay, well, thanks anyway."
Click.
That "click" was her, not me. She decided that I didn't have any more questions worth answering. She decided that despite here enthusiastic asurances, she wasn't going to be nice to me any more because I actually took her up on her offer of courtesy and actually called her with a question. In fact, the whole "conversation" she was incredibly aloof with me. We've had a few conversations with each other, during them I've mentioned that the number she had was my cell phone and yet when I answered her call she asked for me. How many people have someone else answer their cell phone calls?? Maybe she forgot? WHY did she forget something simple like that?
Regardless, she went from polite and helpful over a week ago to being a typical corporate-minded, "why are you making me do my job, you dickweed" drone worker.
Why is it that people find it so hard to 1) do the jobs they're paid to do and 2) be nice to people in the process? If your job is customer relations, the least you should be able to do is be nice to people.
Perhaps they think I'm no longer a customer of Apple. I still own an iPod and I'm planning on buying an Apple in the future thanks to the wonderful abundance of computer choices open to me. [sarcasm mode cancel] What worse is that I feel like they don't care about the inconvenience they put me through. All they are doing is treating me like shit and not compensating me for the hours and hours of time I've lost with their lemon-of-a-computer. The very least they could do is be nice to me.
What it comes down to is this, it's not Micro$oft that has a monopoly on computers, it's the corporations that have the monopoly. They charge what they want to charge, do what they want to do and treat us the way they want to treat us. And the way they want to treat us is like the troglodites they see us as. The corporate world is the feudal system returned and we are the serfs, the peasants, those poor saps who have no choice but to eat the well packaged fecal matter that they feed us. Maybe that's why they call us consumers.
And who do we have to complain to for this corporate mal-treatment? Them? Clearly that gets us nowhere. The press? Oh yeah, with all the killing going on in the world, a story about some sap who got treated poorly is really going to rake in the advertising money...
Well, as useless as it will be, I'll fight the good fight and send another nasty email to Steve Jobs should I not get my check by next Monday. I don't know what I'll do after that.
Is it so difficult to be nice?
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