Thursday, April 12, 2012

Once Upon a Time (Part 4.9)

This morning, at the crack of 8 a.m., the scribe received a second automated call from Link of Sudden telling him an appointment would likely occur today between 8:15 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. and would take 20 minutes. This did not seem like enough time to bury and install a cable from the box down the hill, so the scribe took it to mean someone was coming out to deliver bad news that he could not have access to the web of the whole wide world. They would deliver that news in the first minute, allowing the scribe 19 minutes to scream at them in his golden voice.

At 12:30 p.m., with no sign of the Link of Sudden, the scribe phoned them up. The phone lackey did not immediately know what the appointment was for, so she had the scribe tell her the whole sad tale and of the many promised and reneged upon phone calls while she looked through the extensive notes in the file. The scribe couldn’t even work up any anger about it all, but just answered her questions with resignation.

The phone lackey eventually discovered that the calls were for the disconnection of services to his former castle in Borderland and not an appointment for Tri-Metro at all. She asked again why he was disconnecting his service if he only wanted to transfer it, which nearly set the scribe into a hair-pulling fit. He then pointed out that he had been trying to do exactly that for six weeks, but had now been told that once the matter was in the hands of the construction department only written communication would occur, at some indefinite point in the no doubt distant future. The phone lackey said this was odd, because she’d never heard of that rule and the account had no notes to that effect. The only thing it said was “customer is disconnecting service because survey is taking too long” which was not at all accurate of the situation. The survey has ALREADY occurred; it’s the results of the cost/benefit analysis and potential Plan B cable connection to the cable hub in his neighbor’s yard that is taking too long.

The phone rep was sympathetic to the cause, however, and said she would put in another escalation form, this time going to a supervisor and not the department the previous reps had routed such escalation forms to. She said that it was company protocol to tell me that someone would call me within two days, but she didn’t want to be a liar so she would just tell the scribe that that’s what she was supposed to say. The scribe had a good and hearty laugh at this and congratulated her on a job well done.

And since she was so helpful and honest, he asked her if, perhaps, disconnecting his service entirely was the wisest move. After all, if he was no longer a customer, would he even appear on the radar of the Link of Sudden in terms of incentive to even attempt to answer his questions or, dare he even dream, hook him up with service? The phone lackey said that she completely understood why he would want to disconnect, but if it were here she would give the disconnect a couple more days in order to give the form she had just sent up the pipe at least a chance to work. That said, the scribe asked to reschedule the disconnect for the following week.

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