Much thanks is due to Ryan Harkins for helping to keep this from becoming “Jake Tapper is an Asshole” Tuesday with some thoughtful commentary about why customer service is almost universally terrible. This comes in the wake of my beginning a vendetta against Verizon, which damaged my business, lied, cost me money, wasted my time, raised my blood pressure, and made it all worse by generously offering me eight dollars and change for my trouble.
Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post “Breaking! Verizon Sucks!”
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My wife and I just encountered a situation with Spectrum, for internet services, and Ameritas, for life insurance. In each case, speaking with a different customer service representative ended up in wildly different stories and results, and in each case has left us angry and considering cancelling and seeking another company.
On the Ameritas front, my wife has a life insurance policy that was issued when she was a baby (I’m not permitted to say how many years ago, but she’s an early Millennial…), and we’ve been dutifully paying the annual premium for years for the $50k whole life policy. The problem is that since the policy is so old, the company apparently has no idea how to handle it anymore. It isn’t available to view through their website. Apparently it can’t be converted to a different policy that is able to be posted online. When discussing what to do moving forward, we’ve been told
- We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date a few years from now
- We’ve actually paid all the premiums, and now we have the policy in full, no further payments are needed until an unknown date far in the future
- We haven’t paid all the premiums and need to pay late fees for not paying this last year’s premium
- We don’t have to pay late fees, but we do need to pay the premium (that we’ve already paid)
- We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and are in danger of losing our policy altogether
- We’ve not paid the premium that we have paid and our policy is changing into a different, inferior type of policy







