John Linton
How many times do you think to yourself "I don't have to worry about that any more" - and then you do? It seems to me that it happens constantly and just when you think you have absolutely, and for the very last time addressed some niggling, or major, issue and moved on to something else - you have to go back and do it all over again. I'm beginning to think that I am simply not equipped to do the things I have taken the responsibility for doing in either my personal or business life - either that or I simply don't understand the fact that some large number of things will never work or work out as you have every right to expect them to.
Perhaps it's just that the human species gets bored easily and doesn't want to do things that obviously work well when you do them a certain way so they must do them differently after a while to see if they achieve the same, required, results? Maybe human beings are innately creative and therefore can't bring themselves to do things the way they know produces the expected result or maybe they simply get bored with doing things that are required to produce essential results and don't bother to do them at all? Too negative? Perhaps. But even on this beautiful Sunday morning with its bonus extra hour of sleep can't rid me of the annoyance I felt in dealing with my emails this morning.
There was the latest email (five previous) from a woman customer screaming (in the written sense) abuse at me, Exetel generally and all of its employees that she has been without internet for three days over a long weekend because of our stupidity, indifference, ineptitude and rudeness and..... Her internet service was suspended for non-payment. She had lost her credit card and canceled it. She called up and was told to look at the screen and enter a correct credit card number which would restore her service or simply click on the 'forgiveness button' and restore her internet for 72 hours while she sorted out how to deal with it. So she tried to do this but, for whatever reasons, she, three times, entered credit card details that were incorrect over a period of two days. Interspersed with each wrong entry were abusive calls to Exetel demanding restoration of her service and for the last day and a half emails to me of unbelievable levels of abuse demanding the same thing. Eventually she managed to enter some correct credit card details and, magically, her service was restored. So, the first email I looked at this morning was yet another tirade of abuse demanding "compensation" for her children not having internet access for two days of the long weekend and a statement that the first thing she did when her access was restored was to churn away to a "half decent ISP".
The second email I read earlier this morning was a similar stream of abuse, if anything even more unreasonably worded, from a person who had emailed me twice before over the past two days stating that not having telephone "support" had caused him to lose "$112,000" in his business and he was going to "sue Exetel for every last cent". I replied to his first email which I received around 10 pm on Friday night saying that he could call Exetel support 7 days a week and that on week days (including public holidays) and that support hours closed at 9.30 pm (AESST) so he could call again tomorrow but as it was a weekend support opened at 12.30 pm but closed at 9.30 pm. Around 11.30 I received another even more abusive email saying that "he had checked on a third party forum and had been assured that Exetel had no telephone support and demanding that I resolve his problem. I replied giving him the support telephone number and the url of the support contact page. Back came an even more abusive reply saying I was a liar and and he had checked on the third party forum and been assured that no telephone support existed and "he was going to his lawyer". I got two more abusive emails yesterday and this morning he sent, presumably his final, abuse email saying that he had got a 'PC help company' to come over and fix his problem (he didn't specify what the problem actually was but obviously it was no fault of Exetel's) and that he was going to charge Exetel for the cost of that plus all the "hundreds of thousands of dollars he had lost" because he didn't have an internet service required to run his business.
The customer is always right even when they can't enter a credit card number correctly or seek (completely wrong) advice about how to contact Exetel on a third party forum and refuse to believe the url and telephone number details provided to them by the CEO of the company whose contact details they somehow managed to find.
Such people certainly do nothing to brighten up your early Easter Sunday morning.