After growing up and living in the (American) West, I’d come to understand one solid fact about US West, the local telephone company: It was the most evil, awful, horrible, and despicable company on the face of the planet.
And then in 1998 I moved to Indiana.
Even before I moved to Indiana I realized that the folks in the West were myopic. They didn’t understand how good they had it: US West could have been Ameritech.
I remember dialing up the Ameritech 800-number about a month before moving to Indiana in order to establish my phone service. Upon getting through I faced a phone tree: “Press 1 if you are already a customer, press 2 if you are a new customer.”
I pressed 2.
The phone tree presented me another series of options to choose from: “Press 1 if you want to establish phone service in Illinois; Press 2 if you want to establish phone service in Indiana; Press 3 if….”
I pressed 2.
Clearly I was a new customer wanting phone service in Indiana.
Eventually I reached a live human being who wanted the nitty-gritty details that a phone tree just cannot handle easily, like my street name and house number—which I happily provided, followed by the name of the city—which I provided.
And then the lady asked what state that was in.
Which made me wonder, why exactly had I bothered to answer the automated voice’s question—or why the information hadn’t some how been passed along to the person I was talking to.
Really, nothing annoys me more than having to repeat information. It’s almost a guaranteed way to give me a bad impression of a company.
It turns out that there is another way to annoy me—and that’s to try and sell me stuff that I don’t want—I find it distasteful to stand at a Best Buy cash register and have some cashier try to sell me a subscription to a magazine or an excessively expensive extended warrantee for a $30 trinket. I once timed a woman in front of me at Best Buy: five minutes to buy one item. I told the cashier not to try and sell me anything else, and it took me 30 seconds to buy my one item.
Ameritech was the master of the up-sell and continual verbal sales bullshit. I would occasionally call the company, whether to move my service (I moved several times in Indiana) or change my package of services. After a few calls where they tried to convince me to add shit to my services that I didn’t need/want/imagine, I started being proactive, asking the call center employees to not try and sell me anything—it’s actually a really good way to bypass the bullshit, and the employees were more than happy to oblige me.
Until I got this woman—I can still hear her voice clearly in my mind. She’d agreed not to sell me anything and to just make the changes I requested—and we’d sped right though the entire call—but as we were wrapping up, she paused and said to me, “I see that your local (in-state) long distance service is not with Ameritech.”
She was right: I’d switched away to save money.
That said, I was annoyed—I responded to her, “I thought I asked you to not try and sell me anything.”
“You did,” she told me. “I’m not trying to sell you anything; this is like telling you your fly is unzipped.”
So… did you check?
LOL
If it had been a guy, you could have asked him if he saw anything he liked when he noticed the open fly.
*shrugs*
it’s a pretty cruddy pickup line. I would ignore any guy who used it on me….
hahahahaha!