Category Archives: slice of NYC life

Internet Service Provider Duopoly Millionaire Strikebreaker

I’ve got to write and post this quickly, my internet has been out all day so far, as it was most of yesterday, only winking back on a few minutes ago during a long call with Spectrum tech support. While on hold I learned, and passed on to Ron, the good-natured Spectrum rep, that Tom Rutledge, the great and important CEO of Spectrum’s parent company, a guy who made $98.5 million in 2016 when his outfit bought Time Warner Cable, is still refusing to negotiate with the technicians union, IBEW local No. 3, an outfit whose strike is in its second year.

Rutledge, in fairness to him and his principled refusal to negotiate with the lawfully constituted technicians’ union, is probably bitter at the vast drop in his income.  He made a mere $7,800,000 last year and his ungrateful technicians are bitching about giving up certain features of their health plan, retirement benefits and things like that.   It’s hard to blame Rutledge for being so intractable, unless you are the kind of person who is harsh to complete assholes.

Ron had no idea Spectrum technicians in New York were on strike, though he’d heard of vandalism in NYC.  I explained the difference between vandalism and acts of skilled sabotage by workers whose rights under the National Labor Relations Act seemed to be being violated.   I explained to him that in the old days workers who accepted bad pay to cross a picket line and break a strike were called bad names, including scabs, and that I was reluctant to let a strike breaking technician into my apartment to check a modem that doesn’t seem to be faulty, as it is currently working.  

Ron agreed the problem was not the modem, since it is getting a fine signal at the moment.   The problem could be in the “drop”, the box that splits off from the “node” for delivery into individual buildings.  The node serves 248 modems in my area, the drop might serve a dozen in my building.   There was no way for him to monitor activity on my “drop”, though only 10 of 248 modems on my node are currently offline.  If you are wondering why I don’t just switch to an ISP that is not so fucked up, I will tell you.

We have two ISPs in most of New York City, Spectrum (a branch of Charter, who bought the franchise from Time Warner Cable a few years back) and Verizon.  Both ISP giants provide substandard internet service, intermittent service, and, because the free competition we hear so much about only involves two giants in our free market, they are free to set whatever prices it pleases them to set for whatever service they see fit to provide.  I currently pay $50 a month for intermittent internet service from Spectrum, having grown tired of no service and repeated lies from Verizon.  Ron was somehow able to give me a double credit today for the hours last night into today that I had no service: a generous $3.33.

I have to contact the technicians’ union, IBEW local # 3 and get the latest on their strike against Spectrum, the internet provider with the handsomely compensated CEO, a chap who made over $100 million the last two years.  This wealthy titan will not negotiate with the union.  He does not believe in unions.  If he had his way, workers would not be paid at all. Think of how much more money he could make if all those wasted technician salaries, vacation days, health benefits, pension contributions were saved, clawed back, put into his tax-free investment portfolio!

I need to contact the IBEW and offer to help them publicize their strike.  They ran a great online ad a few months back, very compelling, but not a public word since.   Almost nobody knows about the status of the strike that strikebreaker CEO Tom Rutledge is doing his best to make go away.   I wonder how many are still on strike after more than a year, like Jewish children making a strong moral case to a Nazi. I want to support the union and I need the striking workers, if possible, to exempt my home from their sabotage of Spectrum’s never perfect, now never worse, service.

Spectrum told me yesterday that my modem is defective, that, for once, there is no outage in my area, on my node.   They will need to send scab technicians over to inspect it all, the modem, the interior connection, outside connectivity at the “drop”, issues relating to the entire node, etc. They gave me a generous $1.67 credit yesterday for a day without internet service (this outage must last, according to corporate policy, at least four consecutive hours to qualify for the refund). The modem I was assured yesterday must be broken, after hours of no service with no outages reported, is delivering a signal again now.   Ron assured me today it is very unlikely to be the modem.

Shades of the old runaround from Spectrum’s fellow duopolist ISP Verizon, who told me for months that there was a technical problem with my line and that they were working on it, that a technical team would contact me the following day. I was never contacted. The problem was not with my line, it was with the entire Verizon network, which was off-line for many months as they switched their network from copper wire to fiber. This required digging up streets, getting permits, burying fiberoptic cable, it took many months. A call to Verizon was the same bullshit, month after month. A complete lie.  The technical team will call you tomorrow, we have no idea why you have no service, now about that huge bill you keep refusing to pay…

If your only business is making profit, it would behoove you to lie if you might lose the bulk of your customers during the months they will have no service.  What self-respecting American business would admit something that would undoubtedly cause an exodus of customers?  Verizon billed me, month after month, for service I had not been receiving.  According to them, no refund was due until I paid in full.  They were demanding hundreds of dollars by the end.  Would it seem petty of me to call them Nazi motherfuckers?  Sure it would, they are just an American business trying to keep the lights on so that all Americans can enjoy a brighter day!

 

post-script:

The modern world, my friends, where every war must be fought by propagandists who specialize in branding, messaging and targeted marketing, sometimes brings us, just fucking bullshit.

Pull up the IBEW information on their long-running strike against Charter/Spectrum, and here you go:

check us out, brothers and sisters

You can read about the neo-liberal asshole NYS Governor’s battle with the mega-corporation, complete with mealy mouthed almost-threats and a hint at support for a striking union that is a key political support group.  We have to go to Crain’s, in May 2018, for any kind of update on this shit?

Crain’s article

Monopoly

Monopolies, one entity controlling an entire market and using unfair practices to squash competition, are officially frowned on in the “Free Market”.   Teddy Roosevelt made a name for himself as friend of the Common Man by busting up some big monopolistic conglomerates.   It was called Trust Busting when TR did it, walking quietly, carrying a big legislative stick.   A quick google search gives us:   

When a corporation eliminates its competition it becomes what is known as a “monopoly.” Monopolies took several organization forms including what were known as trusts. Stockholders of several competing corporations turn in their stock to trustees in exchange for a trust certificate entitling them to a dividend…

John D. Rockefeller, ruthless founder, chairman and largest shareholder of the Standard Oil monopoly, found that his vast fortune actually increased when the monopoly he ran was broken into many smaller companies, companies which included ExxonMobil and Chevron. Go figure!

The theory of Trust Busting was that it should not be legal for one giant company, using its vast size and market power, to gain preferential rates for itself and thereby eliminate all competition, control an entire market and charge whatever that market will bear for its products.

Today, since we live in a land of freedom, a nation of law (or, more accurately, two distinct and different sets of laws: one for corporate citizens and their human executors and one for everybody else), where nobody is allowed to run a monopoly, on the books, anyway, such practices are, heh, frowned upon.   We have businesses that are “too big to fail” and the government will use tax dollars to make sure they don’t, sure, that’s the Free Market.   We don’t worry that Google is really the only internet search engine, its name having been verbed to mean “search the internet”. Google, by the merit of its superior product, eliminated the many competing search engines of yesteryear: Altavista and Ask Jeeves are two that come to mind.   I suppose there is still Bing, technically.  I could google it, I suppose.

We live in a corporate culture.   The leaders of business have an army of skilled lobbyists who worked for the government agencies they are now handsomely paid for influencing on behalf of their generous corporate masters.   Corporations have accomplished campaign funders and wheeler dealers who make sure the laws are friendly to the interests of these artificial “persons” known as corporations.  If you were a wealthy psychopath, human or legally created, you might well do no less. 

My internet winks on and off throughout the day and night.  It may be out for ten minutes or an hour, when it goes down.  At times it will be out for two or three hours at a stretch.   It does this unpredictably but it seems to happen more regularly during peak internet use hours, like Friday or Saturday nights when many customers just want to sit back and stream a movie.  

It doesn’t take much research to learn that Spectrum, the company that swallowed up Time Warner, the company owned by, or also known as, Charter, is the only internet provider in my neighborhood.  (You will mention Verizon, and I will say: fuck them.   Here you go.)   Fine, if you want to be technical, internet service in my neighborhood is a duopoloy [1] and customers are free to choose either of the ISP giants.

I called Spectrum a couple of times yesterday, as my internet went out.   I ranted, politely but forcefully, stalling until my internet service came back on line.   The representatives I spoke to were cool, sympathetic.   The first told me at one point that there were 400+ people on my “node”, meaning that our internet was coming into all of our homes through the same “pipeline”.  He noted that 34 other people on my node were currently experiencing no internet.   As this was less than 10%, the company does not consider this an “outage” and so the robot you initially hear tells you confidently that there are no internet issues reported in your area.  The robot then walks you through resetting your modem, unless you shout “representative” forcefully enough over her instructions to be connected to a human.

The second time I called back, an hour or two later, I was again told  by the robot that there was no outage in my area.  The rep I finally talked to was a nice kid.  Tony was entirely sympathetic, in the end even issuing me two days credit, over $3, for the regular loss of internet service I’ve been experiencing.  He and I spoke for about 25 minutes, and during that time the internet winked back on just long enough for me to google this motherfucker, the highest paid CEO in the U.S., probably in the world.

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I told the kid I had the photo of his grimly smiling weasel CEO up on the screen, Tom Rutledge, I said his accursed name again, repeated his $98.5 million dollar paycheck and riffed on that and how intolerable it is to be at the mercy of a ruthless monopoly.  The rep was very agreeable, had no argument at all, no corporate talking points to spin the situation differently.  He completely understood, from personal experience, how frustrating intermittent internet service is.  

My polite but vicious rant passed the time while waiting for the internet service to come back on-line.   I managed to refrain from referring to Rutledge as anything worse than a grimly smiling weasel.  I had to admire my own restraint, looking at the soulless face of this foul, infected, years unwashed shit-spattered sphincter.  The smug face of a monopolistic master of the universe.

I know, I know!   I’m so judgmental!   Isn’t this piece of shit Tom Rutledge entitled to be paid whatever the market will bear for someone of his superior talents, his genius, his great contributions to society?   I told the kid about the technicians who work for Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter, the ones who have been on strike for over a year.  The company will not bargain with these unionized workers as it seeks to cut their medical and retirement benefits.  

The kid didn’t seem to know much about the strike, or maybe the fact that we were being recorded added to his reticence.   Here you go.   I mentioned to Tony that it was quite possible these rolling outages were sabotage by technicians old Tom Rutledge was nonchalantly fucking by not negotiating with them.  I said that while these interruptions were a major pain in the ass, you had to hand it to the striking technicians if this was industrial sabotage.  Tony sort of agreed.

One reward of a long conversation with a sympathetic phone rep for a huge corporation is that you can sometimes learn something.  Tony told me he was looking at a chart of my intermittent internet service (service which is out right now, I notice…) and could see by all the red areas on the chart exactly how many times, and for how long, my internet has gone out.  I asked him if he could send me that chart.  Naturally, he could not.  It was no surprise.  8% of customers on my “node” were currently experiencing no internet connection.  Not enough, you understand, to call this an outage or service interruption of any kind, but enough to demonstrate that these rolling outages are almost certainly not caused by my modem or router.

Tom Rutledge’s policy is that nobody is entitled to a refund for lack of service unless that service is out for at least 4 hours.  Why four hours?   Rutledge pulled it out of his highly compensated ass.  4 hours of no internet qualifies the customer for a credit of 1/30 of the monthly charge, unless the month has 28 or 31 days, in which case the credit is 1/28 or 1/31 of the monthly fee.   Tony was the first rep who told me he could actually see a visual record of the last month and that the record looked very, very intermittent, sketchy, unreliable.   Several of the other reps had pretended they were bound not to give me a refund for less than fours continuous hours of no service.  Go figure.

I told Tony that while Tom Rutledge smiles his fucking weasel smile and makes new rules to maximize the corporate bottom line, raising rates for shit service by up to 25% a year, underpaying reps and others who do the actual work for Charter/Spectrum, refusing to negotiate with the unionized technical workers, everybody else, of course, is getting what we deserve.   Hey, it’s a free country, you dig?  Even though Charter/Spectrum/Time Warner has a monopoly, or duopoly, for crap internet service in my area, squeezing the bandwidth to provide unreliable service as cheaply and profitably as possible, you have a choice.  You can always choose NOT have internet service.  It’s not a right, it’s a privilege.  This is America, bitches.

American Exceptionalism:  piss on average consumers and insist they are fucking liars for pretending it’s not raining.

 

[1] a situation in which two suppliers dominate the market for a commodity or service.

“I’m going to assemble my thoughts”

“Where are you going to assemble them?” asked Sekhnet, covered in dirt as she tills the rich earth of her little farm in the back.   Sekhnet is never happier than when she is covered with dirt.

Upstairs, I tell her, where I can write them down, see them before me, move them around until they make some sense.  

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know where they were.”

I made lunch for us, vegetable wraps, which we ate out in the garden, which  is starting to come to life, there are beautiful colors everywhere.   Mama Kitten, now almost three years old, an ancient for feral cats around here, came over to rub against my leg and have her ears scratched, her face stroked.  She liked having her back scratched so much that she turned her face around, with an open mouthed expression, thinking of sinking her fangs into my hand, then thought better of it and rolled on to her side, to have her ribs scratched.

Her four latest kittens (she’s given birth to at least twenty, the first litter when she was six months old) are as beautiful as all the rest, as good looking as their beautiful mother.   They are not much bigger than large mice at the moment, and much cuter.  All the rest of Mama Kitten’s many offspring are dead, but when they were alive they were very handsome, playful little cats.   Sekhnet has photos of a hawk sitting on a nearby tree.   The fucker was licking his beak the other day as the tiny kittens were dragged by their mother to another hiding place.   Six months or a year is a long life for these beautiful little animals.

We have a friend who takes care of a small colony of feral cats in her backyard.  She has had them all spayed and neutered and they all get along fine, huddling in winter months in the warm insulated dens our friend makes for them.  Most of them are seven years old and older.   One year, at her urging, we caught three young kittens here, took them to her vet to be neutered.   Within a few weeks all were gone, probably delicious snacks for the hawks.  Of Mama Kitten’s many offspring, every one of them a beautiful little animal, these four new ones are the only ones alive.  Alive and delicious.

 We watch these adorable, doomed little souls, the four of them, then the three, then maybe one.  They play, they display bravery, or timidity, they show their little personalities.   Then nature does what nature does.  Man plans, God laughs.  We try not to give them names, though some, like Dobbie, Cathead and Mini Me, we could not resist getting personal with.    

We were told by a cat expert that once a feral cat gets to a certain age without being touched by a human it will never let a human touch it.   Mama Kitten, as a young adult, often sat close to us when we sat outside, but never let us touch her.   Then she began eating from a spoon we’d hold out to her, as her next batch of kittens also did.   Then she began rubbing against our legs.  Now she is like our pet, living in the merciless wild, surviving not through God’s mercy but by her superior skills as a survivor.

How do you bear the sorrow of seeing these adorable animals disappeared like political dissidents in some South American dictatorship?   I have no idea.  God’s merciless plan, I suppose.  Everybody’s got to eat.  

Sekhnet shot a video of Mama Kitten in a stand-off with a fledgling hawk.   Sekhnet took the earthbound bird’s side, you can hear her in the video trying to dissuade Mama Kitten from killing the bird, which was almost the same size as the cat.  The plucky little predator was not taking any shit from the cat who could have easily killed her.   It was a standoff.  The bird hobbled off to grow up to feast on kittens, most likely. 

When I feel the anxiety that plagues so many in America today I usually try to get some exercise.  I walk five miles a day most days, I ride the bike for short, hard, uphill rides or long leisurely ones along the beautiful Hudson River, and always feel better after a ride.   Since my fucking idiopathic kidney disease, and the twelve weeks of no exercise after the “chemo,” I have been trying to get back into shape.   It has been a battle, trying to get the legs strong again, the heart and lungs back up to capacity.  I tried too hard, apparently, a week or two ago, pushing myself two days in a row, and now wear a knee brace.   I am bitter, I am anxious, I feel sorry for myself, and angry.   If I get up too fast, CLICK!, my knee locks up like a steel trap, with the flash of sudden pain one associates with a steel trap.

Nothing for it but a visit to a specialist.  Thankfully I managed to arrange one for two weeks from now.   I will try to take it easy, keep my knees calm, take hot baths, let the soreness in my shoulder from doing a sitting one-handed push up every time I stood, when the knee pain was at the worst, calm down.   I will try my best to keep myself calm and reasonable.   That is more than most people are able to do but I consider it a worthy goal.  

 There are millions of anxious people who live with deadly secrets, too terrifying to even think about.  The threat of certain fearful truths becoming known makes people into fabulous story-tellers, geniuses of fictive narrative.  They rewrite history, they invent the present, they dream of a future where they are magically not irrevocably fucked by hideous things they can never admit.  

I must take solace where I can find it — from the blessings of my life, of all life, and from my stance– at least I’m not one of those poor fuckers who can’t bear to explore themselves, look at the demons that are always close behind.   I may not know everything I need to know about living a good life, but I have a leg up on many people I can think of.  Even if that leg is currently a bit tender to walk on, or even to sit with now as I assemble my curious thoughts here in the far reaches of Cyberia.

 

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Second Round of Public Hearings on the Rezoning of Inwood

Manhattan Borough president Gale Brewer apparently has to sign off on the Rezoning Plan that developers are pushing to fully monetize the quiet, bucolic village on the northernmost end of Manhattan Island.   It is a multi-billion dollar plan and unknown parties stand to make a real shitload of money if the gentrification plan goes through.

The Borough President will make her recommendation to the City Council on April 25.   She sent all Inwood residents a very well-designed brochure that lays out the bones of the proposed plan, with a map showing where developers will be allowed to build mixed use apartment buildings of up to 295 feet tall.   My street, I learned, is considered part of the Upland Core and apparently will not be rezoned for any building higher than the current six story limit.

At the meeting last night I asked for the deadline to submit a written statement in opposition to this rezoning plan.   Friday, April 13, the day after tomorrow, I was told.  So be it.   Thought I’d start a draft here, as I don’t have much time to get it done and submitted:

Dear Borough President Brewer:

Please vote NO on the current rezoning plan for Inwood. 

At minimum, please recommend severing the fate of the Inwood Public Library from the larger rezoning plan.   The issue of demolishing our public library for private profit warrants its own debate.  Our children, and all of us in this working class enclave, deserve no less.

For starters, thank you so much for the beautifully designed mailer with the map.  I think the formulation:  no rezoning = gentrification, bad rezoning = gentrification needs one more equation:  current rezoning plan = wildly accelerated gentrification.     It was a great help to read the steps of the process and see the layout of the planned changes and the extent that high rises will be allowed to spring up in our historically low-rise district of Manhattan.  The opacity of this developer-enriching plan has been a major problem all along.

To cite one example to stand in for the rest, the almost unreadably legalistic “Whereas” “Whereas” of CB12’s approval of this proposed development plan.   The lack of readily digestible information on the full scope of this plan that will further enrich unnamed developers and provide new market rent apartments for up to 80% of the 14,000 new Inwood residents is a major impediment to intelligent public debate.

I moved to Inwood more than forty years ago.  I used to bike up to play softball in Inwood Park and fell in love with the sleepy little village of Inwood and the sprawling, beautiful nature reserve.   My first lease for my rent stabilized apartment was $182.  My stabilized rent today is $805.   My neighbors upstairs and downstairs each pay at least twice that, even though each has a ‘preferential’ rent taking some of the sting out of it for them (since the landlord claims he could legally charge them even more).

There are many problems with the plan, including most obviously, the massive crowding that will occur as a result of the new density proposed by those who profit from building high-rise market rent buildings.  You noted that there are currently 16,000 rental apartments in Inwood.   The construction proposed in the rezoning plan will bring in 14,000 new residents, most of them willing to pay “market rents” of $2,000-$2,500 and more.   It doesn’t take a mathematician to look at these numbers and see how drastically, and disproportionately, the proposed plan will increase crowding in Inwood and otherwise affect the character of this quiet, working class family neighborhood.

The new high-rises and large influx of new market rent renters will make the rezoned neighborhood suddenly “hot” and seen as a great real estate deal in Manhattan.  This will give private landlords of existing buildings even more incentive to harass and evict tenants.   This is already a major problem in Inwood, and would become much more severe, once the profit motive gets the shot of steroids this accelerated development deal would instantly deliver.

Beyond overcrowding, loss of affordable housing, displacement of long-time residents, more stress on an overtaxed antiquated infrastructure (including the ancient sewers), increased car traffic and pollution, increased subway crowding on already underserved lines, there are other ominous features in this gentrification rezoning plan.

One is the continued silence on the question of the Inwood Library.   We were told by the representative from the EDC that a wonderful new library will be provided in the common space at the base of a massive new high-rise to be built on the library’s present footprint.   The credibility of the EDC is not bolstered by its touting of the $30,000,000 improvement of Highbridge Park, a park 1.4 miles south of Inwood (Google maps), as an example of how this plan will improve life for residents of Inwood.  They also made a bold and ridiculous claim about 100% affordable housing in development along with a new modern branch of the Inwood Library (see EDC “fact sheet” Inwood NYC Snapshot.)

Why is it necessary to demolish our library for the profit of a private developer who seeks maximum return on the largest possible number of units in his new 80% ‘market rate’ building?  What is the plan for the year or more of construction of this massive new high-rise?

Most of our overcrowded local schools do not have libraries.  The Inwood Public library is an invaluable community resource.  Presumably, according to advocates of the rezoning plan, including the EDC, it will be an even better one several years from now, when the children of the well-to-do new residents will be able to take an elevator downstairs to pick up their books.  What of the interim?

I am filled with a sense of futility about the fate of my neighborhood.   I have seen the massive displacements in every other area of the city where accelerated gentrification plans have been approved.  We have seen wealthy powerbrokers ramming neighborhood-killing deals through reluctant, ill-informed, politically weak citizenry going back to the days before Robert Moses was even a malevolent glint in his father’s eye.  

I had hopes for something better under Mayor de Blasio, although the forces acting on him, as on our compliant local Inwood politicians, most of whom sent representatives to speak for them rather than face the massive crowd at the CB12 meeting, seem to suggest that, well… there are forces that are just too powerful, well-connected and relentless to resist.  Political reality, I suppose, in an era when gigantic political donations are considered free speech.   We have an administration in Washington full of people who have lobbied for and profited from favorable government regulation, brazen about the appearance of impropriety in their dealings, being the beneficiaries of our two-tiered winner vs. loser approach to justice.   Our current president, as a developer, was the recipient of $885,000,000 in tax abatements and other breaks to build luxury buildings, much of this public generosity coming at the expense of New York City (source: NY Times 9-18-16)

Your opening remarks at the Public Meeting of April 10th gave me the hope that you understand and are sensitive to the dynamics of this rezoning plan, and its likely fallout for Inwood residents should it be implemented.   As I’ve noted, I’m not optimistic about the combined comments of all the current residents of Inwood amounting to a hill of beans in this discussion.  Not when put onto the balance against the powerful forces of progress and economic growth who stand to reap untold millions on this plan.

Their representatives speak of freedom on the march, open spaces, open waterfronts (the Hudson is already open, there is a long public park there), new community spaces, universal pre-K, a gleaming new lobby library, etc.   They pitch this as progress, but, as one panelist pointed out to deserved applause, the plan will benefit mostly the newcomers and absolutely come at the expense of many current residents of Inwood.

It is my weary hope that you will defy the expectations of the powerbrokers and real-estate profiteers and vote against this insatiably overreaching rezoning plan. Whatever else this plan might be, it is not designed in the interests of those of us who currently call Inwood our home.  

At minimum, please recommend severing the Inwood Public Library from the larger rezoning plan. The issue of demolishing our library warrants its own debate. Why is public property being ceded to a private interest?   The closing of the library, even if only for a year or two (an eternity in a young child’s life), deprives the people of Inwood of a community resource vital to education and democracy itself.   Selling the public library to a private developer merits its own discussion.    Our children, and all of us in this working class enclave, deserve no less.

Reminder: Your feedback is vital to serving you better

Capitalism, which will not sleep until the entire world is consumed, every salable resource wrested from the earth, every animal that can be monetized slaughtered and sold, all air, water and land made toxic, has imperatives.   One is never to let a customer you have thoroughly screwed off the hook for not giving feedback.   

The U.S. Postal Service, in a public/private partnership with some top notch marketing firm, sent me a robotic reminder, another “invitation”, today:  your fucking feedback, asshole, we’re fucking waiting for it, to fucking serve you better, you fucking ungrateful fucking fuck. [1]

 

I won’t take their survey, for obvious reasons, but perhaps I’ll email the private marketing firm something like this:

Please take me off your email list.   I received unacceptable service from the Post Office, was forced to pay for it twice and received no follow-up outside of  your feedback survey emails.  

The properly stamped business mailer I sent my rent check to my landlord in was returned to me postmarked, with no other marking on it.   The Post Office deemed this nondelivery my problem, not their’s.

I’d paid for the stamp, put the check in the business mailer, and, without explanation, it was returned to me instead of being delivered.    I think most people would agree that this constitutes the opposite of service.   The “customer service” I was subjected to afterwards can only be described as “Postal”.

At the Post Office there was a wait to speak to the supervisor, since the clerk had no authority to do anything.   Rather than admit that this kind of thing shouldn’t have happened, or even hint at an apology,  I was pointedly asked by the Post Office supervisor if I had never made a mistake.   This brusque individual, rather than assuring me that the Post Office would fix its error immediately, upped his customer service game by telling me it was my option to pay for overnight delivery, if that was what I wanted, but that the Post Office had no responsibility for the mistake of a postal machine.   In fact, he said, the Post Office had no obligation to do anything but put the envelope through the same faulty sorting machine again and hope for the best this time.

When I was not satisfied with these options the supervisor gave me PS Form 3849 and told me if I had a complaint, there was a number to call on the card.   He gave me his last name, smiled and invited me to make a complaint.  The “complaint number” turned out to be what used to be called a lie.   Perhaps you will consider it merely an ‘alternative fact’.  Call the number for yourself:  800-ASK-USPS (275-8777).

I found a number on-line where I could make a complaint.  I was apologized to by Postal Employees and promised a full, confidential inquiry and an emailed report back in 2-4 business days.   I never heard back from anyone but the Post Office’s marketing partner, weeks later, offering me a survey to fill out.  My “confidential” complaint, I learned when I called to follow up, had been routed back to the snippy supervisor of my local post office, the jerk who had given me the fake complaint number after telling me with icy politeness what I could do if I had a damn problem.  So much for confidentiality.

The rent envelope, with arrows drawn by the supervisor pointing to the address it was supposed to go to, was returned to me a second time several days later.    I went to another Post Office, where again I was told there was nothing they could do but put it through the machine again and hope for the best.  I was told that apparently the supervisor hadn’t known to cover the erroneous barcode that had routed the rent check back to me a second time.  In the end I was forced to purchase another stamped envelope and send the check to my landlord a third time.  The landlord’s office informed me that the rent check had been delivered,  a few miles away, about five days later.

A week later I had a call from someone at that local post office.  The woman who called from the local post office in regard to my complaint (which her message said she was about to “close out”) left a message at 3:10 pm informing me that she left work at 3:00 and invited me to call a number the next day that was never answered.

So, with all respect, MaritzCX, independent customer experience firm, hired with taxpayer dollars to conduct the survey and analyze the results, fuck you and fuck your fucking survey.  And have a blessed day.

 

[1]  “We come in peace”

Thank you for being a valued United States Postal Service® customer. In our continuing effort to serve you better we would like your feedback about the service you received as follow up to your recent inquiry. Please let us know how we are doing and any improvements you would like to see by taking a few minutes to complete the survey.

Please click on the following link to access the survey. Your answers will be kept strictly confidential.

Begin Survey

Thank you in advance for your valuable time and input. As always, the United States Postal Service® looks forward to serving you. If you need assistance with this survey, please send an email to postalexperience@maritzcx.com.

Please do not reply directly to this invitation.

How they kill you, part 2

On March 10th the rent check I’d sent to my landlord was returned to me, without explanation.   I took it to the post office the following Monday to have it re-sent and the clerk who examined the envelope was a very dim bulb.   She studied it for a long time before realizing her supervisor was the only person with the wisdom to do anything for me.

The supervisor was a brusque man, blunt, using the word “sir” like a shit-covered baseball bat he casually waved around as we spoke.  A machine had made a mistake, sir, not a human.  Have you never made a mistake, sir?   I can’t guarantee anything, sir.   The machine will hopefully do better after I draw arrows on the envelope.    I can’t give you a receipt, sir, unless you pay me.   You want to make a complaint, sir?   Knock yourself out, call the number on PS Form 3849, here you are.  Complain away, sir.   That’s really all I can do for you.  Tell ’em Umar treated you badly, sir.

I did not react particularly well to this fucking lying asshole (the number on form 3849 does not allow a caller to make a complaint of any kind), and some might say I deserved what I got, the rent check to my landlord returned to me a second time, almost a week later.  In the meantime I’d made a complaint, a guaranteed confidential one, that I was promised would be followed up in two to four business days.   A few days later I learned the confidential complaint had been forwarded to Umar himself to investigate and resolve.  In the end I went to another post office, paid postage again and sent the check to my landlord.  It arrived, I was told, on March 23.

On March 26 I had a message from a woman who seemed to have a hard time pronouncing her own last name.  The voicemail was recorded at 3:10 pm.   She said: Hi, this is Kathy … at Inwood post office, in reference to your complaint, your service issue.  Please call me tomorrow, I’ll be leaving at three today.  Call me at 212-567-7821 in reference to it.   I want to go over it before I close the case out.  Thank you.

The phone rang, at great length, when I called back the next day, each time I called.  Nobody ever picked up.   Not a business you’d ever like to deal with again.

Then I had this email, under the subject “Your feedback is vital to serving you better” and immediately thought of the grinning Martian chirping ‘we come in peace’ as he vaporizes your genitals with a death ray. 

 

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Another great public/private partnership, working harder to serve you better.  Would you like to take a survey for the service you are about to receive?  LOL!

It reminded me of many things, including the almost two hours I’d spent the other night trying to resolve an ATM error.  The machine sucked my $100 bill into the “checks only” slot, a second before I noticed that this machine, unlike any other at this bank, had a “cash” slot on the other side of the keyboard.  No receipt, no return of the bill.  Almost two hours on the phone with poorly paid, ill-trained, overworked women who apologized and thanked me over and over for being a preferred customer, as they placed me back on a brief hold while they waited for someone from claims to come on the line.  The four bar loop of hold music that they unfortunately had no control over played demonically, over and over and over.  

It was not until two days later, when I called and spoke to another rep, that I had the $100 ‘provisionally credited’ back to my account.  I’d told the kid that being apologized to and thanked as a ‘preferred customer’, while being treated like a grifter trying to shake this bank down for $100, after years of no such desperate acts, was kind of a crappy way to do customer service.  Imagine if I was not a “preferred customer”!   The kid got it, and as far as I can tell, fixed it.  

The first thought I had with this ‘preferred customer’ shit was echoed by this dark, dark, puckish (to my sick mind) entry in Wikipedia for one of the few German words I have committed to memory:

Screen shot 2018-03-26 at 9.31.20 PM.png

source

Fuckin’ A, yo.   Nazi perspectives, indeedy.  Getting a lot of those perspectives lately, from some very fine people, the finest people, the best people.  You got a problem with Nazi perspectives?   Call the complaint number on PS Form 3849 and please hold for a customer service survey that will only take ten minutes and will help us serve you better!