Strange Customer Service

I stopped by McDonalds the other day to get one of their "apple pie" dessert snacks for 89 cents. The kid at the counter asked if I'd like to get two apple pies for a dollar, I said I would and paid him a dollar. A few minutes later he handed me a bag with one apple pie and a dollar, and apologized for the store being all out of apple pies.

I think this is excellent news according to my FastFoodEconomicIndicator?: the worse the service at fast food places, the more hope we should all have for the economy doing well. It's time to worry if you consistently get courteous, efficient, fluent English speaking, accurate change counting service at a fast food joint: that would mean the economy is so bad that the store has a chance to be picky about who gets hired.

I think I'm missing something: you got good service, and therefore this is excellent news for the economy, because good service bodes ill for the economy?

Oracle told us that we were "a problem customer."

We reported a memory leak in their Embedded SQL library for COBOL. (Pro*COBOL for MicroFocus? COBOL running under Unix.) They said "you must be doing something stupid" and "there are no bugs in Oracle." Later, when I reduced the sample to a one-page COBOL program that illustrated the memory leak (...a one-page COBOL program being a small miracle in itself ;-) they said "oh, that's a known bug." -- JeffGrigg

Oracle is known far and wide for its arrogance.

I once sent a code snippet to BEA showing a bug in WebLogic's JSP code. Two snippets in fact, one showing an example taken from the spec, and another just slightly different (but still compliant). The first worked, the second didn't. I got a response saying "Do it like this:", with the example from the spec. So I sent it back and said "But I want to do it like _this_!", because the latter meant I could reuse the JSP in several different contexts. That email bounced back and forth three times before it escalated to an engineer who was willing to look at the problem. -- RobertWatkins.

I once sent a code snippet to BEA showing a bug in WebLogic (can't remember the details of it.) They said they couldn't fix it, but they picked me as the new group contributor of the month and sent me a free BEA clock. At least the clock works. -- EricHodges

See TopLinkForJavaUsageExperiences. WebGain's support manager had no compunctions about suggesting that WebGain and Moneygram "part ways". That was, uh, most helpful. -- RandyStafford

Called customer support about a bug we had found in the OS/2 version of their product. The response was "Our OS/2 guy quit last week, so you're on your own until we hire someone else. Please let us know if you figure it out." I admired their honesty and the fact that they didn't just say "We'll look into it," but this was a pretty clear sign that it was time to find another product to fill our need.

We've had a few extended email conversations (lasting weeks) with a supplier along these lines:

 Us:  Looks like there's a defect in <feature>
 Them:  No, there isn't.  You must be doing it wrong.
 Us:  We followed your example very closely.
 Them:  <feature> works fine, you must be doing it wrong. 
 Us:  Here's what we did.  Can you see anything wrong with it?
 Them:  This looks like it should work, we'll get back to you.
 ...days pass...
 Them:  Try doing it this way instead - that'll work.
 Us:  It doesn't work
 Them:  You must be doing it wrong.
 Us:  We followed your example very closely.
 Them:  <feature> works fine, you must be doing it wrong.
 Us:  Here's what we did, can you see anything wrong with it?
 Them:  This looks like it should work, we'll get back to you.
 ...repeat a few times with various suggestions for different ways of using the feature, none of which work...
 Them:  Oh, hey, you know what, have you checked that you have patch # 12345.6789 installed? 
 Us: Where would we get that from?
 Them:  We have just today made available on our support site!

This got very, very frustrating. If they had said even once, just once, "yes, there is a defect", or "no, we can't get it to work either" we'd have been happy, but it was a struggle to get them even to admit that their product was defective in any way, even in the face of multiple, non-working examples.

See http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/dhos/Humor/holistic.html for a comparative evaluation of Microsoft tech support and a competitor.

A friend of mine used to train customer support personnel. (She doesn't anymore, because the company's telephone customer support is now done entirely from India.) She was often dismayed at the attitudes of people who got past the initial hiring phase and actually made it to the training phase. A typical story:

Trainee (after three days of training): I need to take this afternoon off. Is that okay?

Trainer: Why do you need the time off?

Trainee: For a job interview. By the way, I also need tomorrow off for another interview. Is that okay too?

Trainer (with surprised look): Why should I let you skip big parts of training? And why should the company keep training you and paying you if we know you are looking for another job?

Trainee: Why do you care? It's not your money!

Trainer: [speechless]

The training classes were often like kindergarten classes. She had to separate people who talked or flirted with each other too much. She even had to take pencils and markers away from people who drew on the walls. Maybe the FastFoodEconomicIndicator? should be extended to include a PhoneSupportEconomicIndicator?.

Here is a little story in a French McDonalds in Paris:

I stopped in a McDonalds I used to go to when I was a kid. Just bought something to drink and sat there to drink it. Then I saw something passing very quickly at my feet. I looked at the ground, and I saw a mouse (quite a little one). I was like, "OK, it's just a mouse" (a lot of tourists were really disgusted and fled), but then I saw like another, and another, and another.... In fact, the restaurant was full of mice. Garbage full, lots of stuff on the ground = mice restaurant... more amazing: the staff was aware of this but did not react at all... This was my last time in McDonalds. Not sure I'll go back soon ;)

The strangest service I've ever experienced was in a Ponderosa steakhouse in central Tennessee. It was almost completely deserted when we entered, with none of the staff on the floor. Someone finally took our order, then we sat and waited for our food. After a while, a server came out and started looking for the people who had ordered the food she carried. It shouldn't have been too hard to figure it out; there were only three occupied tables in the entire place. While we waited, I got the distinct impression that one of the people working there wasn't an employee, just someone "helping out a friend". Eventually our own order found us, and my companion's food was cold and wrong. He accepted it, on the basis that it would be more trouble than it was worth to get them to correct it.

In the meantime, the family behind us were also having problems with the service. The manager, a young man who looked like he was experiencing some kind of impairment due to a psychoactive drug, told them he was sorry - and then stunned me by immediately reversing his position, laughing and saying "No, I'm not really.". They got their money back and left. We should have done the same, but didn't.

Worst customer service I ever got was from a cable TV company in Chicago. I changed apartments and transferred service to the new address, after which they insisted that I had stopped paying my bill. I can't count the number of times I called, only to hear some variation of: "Sir, you need to pay your bills!" This despite the fact that I had cancelled checks proving that I was paid in full.

They disconnected my service and we played phone tag for 18 months, during which I found it impossible ever to speak to the same person twice, and they put a collection agency on my tail. Finally I talked to someone with two functioning brain cells, who followed a hunch and realized that, when I moved, they didn't transfer the account to the new address, they simply opened a new account at my new address, and all my payments were being applied to the (cancelled) account associated with my old address. So I had a deficit at one address and a surplus at the other! He was mortified, which was some consolation, as was the fact that they (finally!) reconnected my cable. After all that time I thought I'd never see the day.

See VisualStudioDotNetRebate?

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