It happened again.
Do you ever feel like Jerry when they didn’t have his rental car?
I am always friendly, respectful, kind and generous to people behind desks, windows and counters, unless they engage in a particular kind of conduct that is guaranteed to cause me to be confrontational and critical, and that almost always leaves me feeling simultaneously guilty and infuriated. This is when an agent of a service provider announces, almost always with a smile, that the organization/company/government agency will not be able to do what it has assured me, often for a price, that it would do, or is not able to do it at an acceptable level of quality, or perhaps in the promised time frame. The agent helpfully tells me that I am stuck with the inferior product or service I bargained for and relied upon, and that yes, it shouldn’t be this way, but it is, so there.
Then, when I express some dissatisfaction with that result, explanation, and most important of all, the absence of any guaranty that I will be compensated or that the organization, while acknowledging its failure, has given any thought to compensating those like me or executing some response in time for my problem to be, if not solved, mitigated, the agent pathetically points out that he or she is just a humble and powerless messenger and that it is cruel of me to persist in expressing my dissatisfaction to him or her, since the agent is neither responsible for the problem nor has any power to fix it.
This is where I lose it.
And it happened again.
My wife and I paid close to $1500 ( in fees only, transportation and lodging not included) for the privilege of attending a national conference of a professional association to which we belong. When we arrived at the site hotel to register and pick up our credentials, badges, tickets and materials, shortly before the opening reception, we were told by a cheery, smiling woman that our name and convention materials were not there. “But we paid for them, and pre-registered,” my wife said. “I got a confirmation. We were told in an e-mail response that the materials for events and programs we designated would be waiting for us here.”
“Ah, then you must have registered on-line after Wednesday,” she told, us smiling. “Unfortunately, we were already here by then, and there was no way for us to make out your package! And you don’t have one of our formal, printed, professional badges that make you look like the member you are, but I’m happy to give you a crappy sharpie so you can scratch out a couple and look like you snuck in instead of paying 1500 buck for the privilege. Isn’t that good enough?” (She didn’t quite say it that way, but that was the gist of it.)
“Well, no, actually, it’s not,” I said. “Your confirmation said that everything would be ready for us here. It isn’t ready.”
“That was just an automatic response, sir.”
THERE it is! “Don’t blame the owners and programmers of the computer, sir—it’s Skynet’s fault!” Do not tell me that. Ever.
“What? I don’t accept that. It’s your system,” I said. “Why did you have your system take our money based on a representation that there was no disadvantage in registering when we did, when in fact such a registration was too late? Why did you have the automatic system confirm everything as fine and dandy when you had no means of receiving or handling the information? How is that we pay all this money and arrive to find that it has bought nothing?”
“Well,” she says, getting snippy, and forcing her smile,”we know that isn’t optimum, but there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there? Now just stop by tomorrow, and we’ll see if maybe through the hotel’s business center we can get you some badges, and if you’ll bring your printed receipts, we can give you your event tickets. Do you have your receipts?”
We did, but I wasn’t taking this. “We shouldn’t need a receipt. We already had a confirmation. Your organization—not a computer, but your computer, doing your bidding, lied to us, played a bait and switch, and that’s bad enough. Don’t tell me I have to jump through hoops to get what I already shelled out $1500 bucks for because the organization screwed up. I want the tickets, NOW, for the following events and functions. I want the materials, all of them, now as well. And I will inconvenience myself to come back tomorrow for real name badges that don’t look like they made for a Christmas party, but at that time, I will want printed badges, and an apology.”
Now she stops smiling. “I don’t even work for the organization!” she says, raising her voice! “This isn’t my fault! I’m just doing this for my husband!”
Since she in fact gave me everything I demanded (and when we returned the next day, her sheepish husband gave us the printed badges), I decided not to give her my official finale to these affairs, which has been, and would have been, this:
“I don’t care. You have taken on the job of representing an organization that has done a poor job and failed to competently and fairly to deliver what it accepted money for. It doesn’t matter if you are paid, or a volunteer. You are standing in the wrongdoer’s shoes, as its agent, and if I do not make my dissatisfaction known to you, then you will not make it known to the principal. When people like you take on a responsibility you are not capable, by knowledge, training or position, of fulfilling, you are assisting in allowing the person, persons or entity actually responsible to escape accountability. That makes you an accessory after the fact, and you cannot claim innocence and neutrality when you have placed yourself between the wrongdoers and their victims. This isn’t personal, because I am not addressing your personal conduct. I am addressing the organizational conduct that you have voluntarily agreed to be responsible for at this time, in this place.”
Do you think that is unfair?
I don’t. The interposing of a clueless, innocent, impotent and blameless agent is too often a ploy to force consumers to accept the unacceptable. I won’t play along, and I don’t think anyone should. I’m not the bad guy here, and I resent being made to feel like one.
Ethics Alarms 
I don’t think I have ever been in a position of authority or even “volunteering” in a position as this woman was, KNEW a person was getting screwed over and didn’t do something to try to fix the situation. She had a job to do even if she was doing it for her husband and if she couldn’t help you then she needed to make sure she found someone who could.
“…there’s nothing you can do about it now, is there?”
I think I would have absolutely lost it when she said that.
I’ve been in both positions and you are right.
However, the person on the receiving end of your ire may still feel personally attacked and is not likely to be given any consideration by the organization employing them either. It’s a very uncomfortable and distressing position to be in and usually is not compensated well either.
It is a very uncomfortable position, but if said employee cannot solve the client’s problem, then that employee has to take the fight higher, to a supervisor, or a manager or the resource guy himself. That way the client can begin interfacing directly with potential sources of the problem.
If those particular individuals cannot be bothered to assist, then I’d submit the client has all they need to know to demand a refund.
(that is to say, the lowest employee has done their duty in attempting to solve the problem, so that the client’s ire can be directed even more appropriately.)
In essence, what she was giving you, Jack, was a version of the old rendition of, “It’s not me. It’s the system that failed!”. However, we haven’t yet come to the point where faceless machines conceive of these little outrages and send hapless humans forth to inflict them on others of their non-metallic ilk. GIGO still rules cyberspace. Somewhere, there’s a worthless human at fault. If the only known route to that saboteur of human progress is through some poor, dumb girl that he’s set up as his human shield, then that’s the route you must take. When major rudenesses occur, one must be prepared to return like for like. Otherwise, you get walked on and fed the crumbs of the feast. I hope the rest of your convention went well!
Welcome back, you have many posts to catch up on.
Unless of course you’ve been visiting under a pseudonym.
Back to January, Tex! This has been one horrible summer!
Sorry to hear that, but if the horror goes back that far, you may as well say the horror started in November.
Not in this case. For most, THAT horror led to their being unable to get a good, full-time job. I’ve got one of those. Unfortunately, it’s more like the equivalent of two or three of those! I actually haven’t had a day off since the 16th. I’m supposed to have one tomorrow. I’ll believe it when it happens!
Well dang.
Keep on keeping on.
Well, I got that day off. Unfortunately, I slept most of the way through it. Of course, I didn’t get off until six in the morning!
What baffles me is that she’s stuck in that position to begin with. I’ve never heard of a professional symposium that didn’t have enough overhead allotted to cover a reasonably estimated amount of “material packages” for people who signed up on the last day of sign ups (also apparently their set-up day).
Sure, they could have just simply back-wards planned like any responsible planner does and done their math…. symposium starts on day X, ok, it takes us two days to set up and two days to order and arrange a material package, ok, then sign up ends on day X-4.
But even then, my first paragraph is sound, I’ve never heard of a symposium not ordering a moderate excess of materials for just these contingencies, barring of the course the materials aren’t super expensive or rare to begin with.
Of course, once pressed with an obvious error, the face of an organization shouldn’t say “tough luck” but “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, I will get you what you paid for, immediately”
I’m sure I haven’t attended one hundredth the number of conventions that Jack has, but everything I’ve attended never had any problem except when it was just plain my fault… and the convention officials would help me past that anyway. And in this instance, we’re talking about Jack Marshall, a nationally noted commentator whose presence would have been more desired than some low level slumdog like me! Personally, I’d tend to think that an organization’s effectiveness can be accurately reflected in the way it conducts its business (as in conventions) and the respect with which it treats its guest and members. For myself, I don’t demand being pampered… only in that the organizers come through on what they offered in the first place. I’ll take it from there!
During our architecture courses, we studied one semester in Italy. During that semester there was a 10 day, mid-term “Fall Break”. 4 of us planned and resourced a mad-dash blitz across Europe, and quite successfully took in 5 countries (in 8 major Cities and Regions). It was a whirlwind experience and despite everyone warning us that you don’t get a truly educational experience unless you stay in one spot, I submit that we did get an excellent experience.
However, one of those experiences was negative (and I don’t mean our trip to Paris). For our romp across the Old World, we had to fly the puddle-jumper airlines to make it affordable. Needless to say, they didn’t fly to main cities, but to outlying cities–which actually fit our intent of not sticking solely to tourist destinations as well.
One such puddle-jump flew us from London to Dinard, France. From Dinard our itinerary involved a drive through the Norman countryside with a visit to the hallowed D-Day battlefield. Knowing we’d need a car, we reserved a rental from the Dinard airport, the car company shall remain nameless. Our plane was scheduled to land at about 4 pm, the car company assured us that our vehicle would be ready and waiting.
After landing, knowing our time was short to drive to the hotel we reserved for the evening prior to our Normandy invasion, so we hurried to the car kiosk. What we found was a window closed with a metal security screen, along with all other rental car companies, closed. We searched for an attendant, perhaps he/she was on break. No avail. The crowd of arrivees slowly dispersed, which didn’t take long; apparently this out of the way airstrip serviced only 1 or 2 flights a day.
We soon saw a uniformed individual locking up doors of the airport and recognized him as the pilot who just flew us there. THE PILOT! Locking up all the doors. We asked him where the rental car people were, his response in polite but broken English “I don’t know”. We called the rental people, but they couldn’t help us (they were regionally headquartered somewhere in Scotland, and our point of contact was apparently less concerned with some stranded Americans since he/she had reasonable confidence of sleeping in a bed that night).
The Pilot/Airport Administrator soon approached us and informed us he was locking up the building and we had to leave. We assessed the situation and deemed that not all was lost, the hotel was a mere 12 miles away and we had a street map, but it was getting dark fast. So we decided we’d walk instead of calling a taxi. About 1/2 mile into the walk a dust cloud screeched to a halt next to us and the pilot, driving a mini-van capable of holding up to 8 people comfortably, wished us good luck before speeding on.
Needless to say, we were stuck in the middle of nowhere, France because a car company didn’t know the hours of one of it’s own outlets, and it’s “support line” didn’t give a rat’s ass about clients who were stuck in the middle of nowhere, 2 countries away, with the best threat of “I want my money back”.
But don’t worry, the story didn’t end with a 12 mile hike (one of our party was not prepared for a serious amount of hiking and having had a fever of 100 or so for 2 days decided she couldn’t tough it out anymore–and I don’t blame her), to summarize: a really kind old French couple who couldn’t speak any English and we, who couldn’t speak any French managed to vicariously arrange a taxi-cab through a proxy translator that we knew in Houston, TX.
Our taxi sped us to our hotel… the Kyriad (for any of who may stay in the French countryside: Kyriad is a nice, comfortable and inexpensive (or was at least) hotel chain to stay at). The staff there was equally accommodating and went out of their way, after hearing the ordeal, at about midnight to arrange a quick transition to our rooms as well as arrange a rental car to be delivered to the hotel in the morning.
That’s a nice little horror story, Tex! I’m sure that French pilot remains on your Christmas card list. Looking back in history, it’s hard to believe that the Normans were once the most kick-ass people on the planet. Today, it appears, they’re just plain old asses. My family came from there, too!!
I won’t fault the pilot. Would you pick up 4 haggard looking hitch hikers in the middle of nowhere? (and we were haggard looking)
And actually, the Normans we encountered were friendly, accommodated and reasonably hospitable. Reference the old couple late at night who helped us as well as the Kyriad hotel staff specifically. In general all other of the Normans were friendly as well. I felt quite at home with them.
It’s really once you experience the assholery of Paris that we began experiencing the stereotypical Frenchman/woman.
I suppose we can delete this one. I thought I stopped transmission when I realized I used the passive participle of accommodate instead of the active participle.
And actually, the Normans we encountered were friendly, accommodating and reasonably hospitable. Reference the old couple late at night who helped us as well as the Kyriad hotel staff specifically. In general all other of the Normans were friendly as well. I felt quite at home with them.
It’s really once you experience the assholery of Paris that we began experiencing the stereotypical Frenchman/woman.
I was there in 1974 or thereabouts. I quickly learned that when a Parisian says, “… but because you’re an American, I’ll…” it’s then time to back off and hold your wallet with both hands. The waiters ARE rude, too. But I think they reserve their worst for Americans with a little left over for the Brits and the Krauts.
No offense Jack but these stories are a lot funnier when it happens to someone else.
Ever reflect how you would handle this situation based on your age? What would you have done at 22, 35 45 60 and so on? As a younger man I would have gone apeshit and tore into whoever was the bearer of bad news regarding a purchase or service… Now in my 50s I just want it to work out the best it can, and move on.
*move on.
What kind of professional organization doesn’t own a printer? Every meeting I have every attended had a registration system that was set up for just such expected occurrences.
I did attend a meeting in which the society’s HR director had completely messed up the on-site job interviews. Her method of matching candidates to potential employers seemed almost random because of her complete computer illiteracy and her lack of knowledge of the field. What I did as a 25-year old was detail what happened and what should have happened in a letter to the society’s President. I’m sure the MIT grads were less kind. At the next meeting, 6 months later, I noticed that she was no longer employed by the society.
The rudeness I find annoying, It is the incompetence that really makes me angry.
“The agent helpfully tells me that I am stuck with the inferior product or service I bargained for and relied upon, and that yes, it shouldn’t be this way, but it is, so there.”
I think you left out a word or two in this sentence, Jack
Read it again. It’s fine. I could diagram it for you.
Maybe extra punctuation will help:
“The agent helpfully tells me that 1. {I am stuck with the inferior product or service I bargained for and relied upon,} and that 2. {yes, it shouldn’t be this way, but it is}... ‘So there!’”
No missing words.
The only thing I’d say is that I generally try to avoid actively going off on the representative. Even though they are representing the company who failed you, it is quite often literally not their fault. (Cases like the one you cited, where she knew in advance there were missing packages, are a bit different- I’m referring to problems that arise by surprise). When something like this pops up, I try to stay cordial to the low-level minion while firmly requesting [Read: Demanding] to be escalated up to someone who is paid to deal with screw ups rather than being paid to hand out convention badges.
I dealt with a similar type of system stupidity this week. Bank of America sold my mortgage to M&T bank, effective 8/2. BoA informed me of this in mid-July. That note was actually good. It said that if I pay my 8/1 due mortgage by 8/1, to pay BoA, but if I use 15 day grace period, I could pay either BoA (they’d forward it) or M&T. I paid, like usual, online a few days before the end of the month. I don’t trust BoA to do anything properly.
On 8/2, I received a letter from M&T telling me I needed to pay them by mail by 8/1 for my mortgage to remain current. Uh, what? I call, and am told that they didn’t have access to anyone’s mortgage information yet, so they sent that letter to everyone. Can you say intentional fraud? Heck, they won’t have access to anyone’s information until 8/9, so they couldn’t even say if there was a problem.
Then comes 8/5, and I receive a mortgage statement from BoA. Aside from updated dates and current balance amount, this statement is identical to what they’ve sent me every month for the last few years. I call BoA to see if anything’s screwed up, and the CSR tells me that my mortgage was transferred on 8/1. They just send out that notice so I can make sure the amounts after the transfer are correct. They don’t send out a closeout notice or a transfer notice, they send out the standard pay us X amount by Y date. I don’t care what the system does automatically, that’s fraud.
Polite CSR’s telling me that things are “automatic” or “policy” or “for your own good” doesn’t solve the problem of what they did.
Or acknowledge it, either. Or demonstrate that they intend to change, or are sorry, or won’t keep doing it. But this legion of powerless lackeys are between you and the people who cause the problem, and you’re a jerk if you give the intermediaries a hard time…because it’s “not their fault” and “they don’t make the rules.”
It’s what made Michael Douglas start killing people in “Falling Down.”
I was actually told by the BoA CSR is that one of their roles is to be ranted to. It just makes me sick. BoA (and other large companies) intentionally insulates themselves from complaints, and makes all their employees complicit in their bad behavior.
Exactly!! They are complicit, though they all haven’t thought of it like that.
That was a disturbing movie, too.