Miscellaneous Shellfish
I don't have a lot to say, but it seems like bad karma to leave my technical support venting up as the top post for too long. (We do have a phone again. I wrote a long and brilliant feedback letter to the president of the company, in which I cited Benjamin Franklin and systems theory.)
The mama robin has four babies, who are now big enough that we see their wee, oversized heads sticking up out of the nest, usually with their beaks open. They just sit there waiting for food to arrive.
My fifth decade of life on Earth began on Thursday! I don't feel any different.
We have friends in town this weekend, and I'm going on vacation soon, so there's lots to do. Zena and I declined to bid on one job this week, and referred another one out to a consultant that we thought would do a better job. We have a lot to learn about building our business, I guess. But, we have a bank account, and will soon have a Web site! (And actually, we have a pleasing amount of work at the moment).
Enrico has had job interviews this week too. He's just started taking steps to leave his stultifying place of employment, but it's very exciting.
We're thinking about southern France for next year. Maybe the Languedoc-Rousillon. So many cool things to see there, from mountains to beaches to the castles where doomed religious heretics once holed up for their last, tragic stand. I'm starting to teach Enrico French, or trying to. The pronounciation rules are proving a challenge, since I just know how to pronounce things but can't often come up with the rules to explain why. But he's doing very well, and has stopped questioning the logic of it, which is a necessary step. "You mean the little hat over the vowel has absolutely NO pronounciation effect whatsoever, but just tells you there used to be an S after the vowel, once upon a time?? What a ridiculous way to run a language." Yep.
So...That's about it.
2 comments:
I write Earthling, EarthLink's blog. I appreciated the levity in your previous blog entry about the customer service problems. It was a really entertaining read, and that made the medicine of your unpleasant adventures with ours and our partners' customer service go down easier. How did it get resolved? And I'd be curious to hear what you had to say in your letter. Judging by your gift for writing, I bet it would be both a good read and useful to chew on.
Ah. Well. At my husband's urging, I had changed the names of the companies in question in this entry in case, um, Planetlink notice my little blog and became displeased. But I see you found me despite or before the switch!
So, the resolution - Previously, on Flora Gets Phone Service: The tenacious Ricky at Loop 3 had connected me with Tommy back at Planetlink. Tommy informed us that Planetlink had a widespread outage of voice services at that time.
"Well, this lady has been without a phone since 10:00 yesterday. That's 28 hours. Are you saying all your customers have been without phone service for 28 hours?"
Well, no. So Tommy promised to check into the problem and call me back. He took my number, we said our fond farewells to the ever-helpful Ricky, and - lo and behold, a half hour later Tommy called back to say that in fact something hadn't been done properly on my phone activation, and he couldn't fix it until the outage was resolved but he wanted me to know that he was aware of the problem and would take care of it as soon as the system was back online.
Half an hour later, we had a phone. Somebody from Tommy's office called me at 8 am the next day to confirm it was working.
But you see this just highlights the problem with the Powerless Tech Support Farms. I could have kept calling back every four hours, and then once a day, as suggested, and NOBODY at the phone numbers available to me would have had any information or ability to resolve my problem. It was stuck in limbo.
Meanwhile, I sent my feedback letter. I won't publish it, as much of the story I related is already recounted here. I did get a response email which I suspect was boilerplate, but it was just detailed enough that you can't be sure:
"Dear Ms. Flora,
I am writing in regards to your recent interaction with PlanetLink. I would like to extend my personal apology for the problems you have encountered with PlanetLink. I will pass along any failings I find to the people responsible - allowing them to help improve PlanetLink Services to more closely align with what you, our customer, actually needs. We appreciate you taking the time to bring this to our attention. We appreciate the feedback from our customer's, both positive and negative, regarding this subject and we will use it to help improve ourselves in the near future.
Respectfully, etc. etc."
So there you go.
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