It’s very possible I could’ve gotten an Indian phone operator whose name is actually Jack, but I’m pretty sure I got someone who is working in a call center in India. I knew they existed before but never to my knowledge got someone from one of them before. They did an episode about those call centers on Morgan Spurlock’s show “30 Days.”
Usually I pay my credit card off way before due, but a while ago for some reason I wasn’t able to see charges on my account. I guess I sort of forgot about it until I received an automated phone call offering to help me pay it off. I was part way through when I hung up because I realized I could just pay it at the ATM if it wasn’t working online. Turns out I couldn’t via ATM either. So I called up, and after dealing with one person and their heavy Indian accent I got a guy who said that my card had been frozen, and that’s why I couldn’t pay or see it online.
He read off the last few charges all of which I knew I made. I think though that if there ever was suspicious activity on my card it’s long past so it’s almost moot that he asked me about the last four charges or so. It may have been because I used my card in Boston or Chicago when I was away during some anime conventions.
I went to the Transit Museum with my sister which was a lot of fun. I think I want to go back at some point and read everything for all the sections of the exhibit. The ironic thing was how difficult it was for them to tell us what subway stop they are at. The guy on the phone kept on repeating the subway lines they were nearby and not the stations. I could’ve guessed from the lines they listed, but I wanted to be sure. Incidentally they’re near both Court St/Borough Hall and Jay St/Borough hall stations.
The coolest parts were things like all the subway turnstiles that ever existed and of course the actual subway cars. The other fun parts were the advertisements in the cars. Unfortunately not all of them had advertisements, but what was there was fun to look at. Stuff like “Buy war bonds!” and various products like Ivory soap except without any sort of logo or product picture or illustration.
This is actually meant two ways. On one hand I can’t stand dealing with financial things because I know very little about how it all works and get a headache trying to think about them. On the other hand Citibank clearly outsources their phone service like all the other mega corporations because the guy who answered for the most part had good English but also was fighting a bit of the Indian accent so I didn’t even understand everything that he was saying. But I’m not one of the dicks out there who will get angry at the phone service person because their English isn’t very good so I just kept on saying no thanks until they ran out of things he was obligated to say and then I hung up. Though the last thing I said was “No thanks that will be all.” To which he replied “Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”
This is a lack of continuity strip because there’s no way in hell this character would be taking a car service either on his own, or because of his job, he’s just tech support.
Where I work I get to take a car service home if it’s late enough, if they’re very busy they have to call you back to tell you when your car will arrive. Sometimes it’s a person telling you when the car is coming, but the other time it’s an automated system with a computer pronouncing your name and telling you what your car number is and when the car is arriving. Then it asks you to press one if that’s correct. Of course I just hit one, but who the hell designed this system? We want the customer to confirm the car they ordered is number 63 and that it’ll be there in 8 minutes? I wish I had that kind of control, but I have a feeling it’s more up to them.
So there’s this new Best Buy that I decided to go to on the grand opening because I needed a camera battery. This is roughly equivalent to what I went through to get the battery. Basically it was like the opening of the Apple Store in terms of the number of employees there and the craziness. I mean, the Apple Store was blasting “Love Shack” and handing out free T-shirts on their opening day with maybe twenty people behind the genius bar. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but the genius bar was definitely full.
I went with a friend to the Best Buy and we assumed that every person who had been hired at Best Buy was there for the opening day, but during normal days half of those people would actually be there. It seemed almost as if every single person was there with an assistant or two. They weren’t even so helpful. We were perusing the DVD section when the guy asked us what we were looking for. When we said “Family Guy” he just started perusing with us equally confused about where it was (we found it before he did). Then I think he offered to take it to the counter for us.
So I go upstairs to get my camera battery, the first guy I talk to hands it off to another guy and they keep on asking if I want the camera in addition to the battery. Clearly I had the camera with me, and I kept on saying that I just wanted the battery. Then on the way to the cabinet the second guy was asked by another person what we were looking for and the battery was handed off again. So then we have maybe three or four people looking for the battery. One guy finds one in the cabinet, then another comes from out of nowhere with a different battery. I settled on one and then we go to one of the mini-counters to checkout.
Meanwhile my friend was at a separate counter getting her DVDs, and when they said that she won a gift card there suddenly was all this hubbub about which gift card it was along with more confusion, people looking things up in the system and basically more stuff impeding us from getting out of there.
Finally we finished getting our stuff (complete with receipts longer than a boa constrictor). Every person is thanking us for coming in and telling us about some survey that we can enter online to enter for a $500 gift certificate.
Then when we get to the door the guy checking receipts looked at the name so he could say something like “Well Derek, thanks for coming to Best Buy and have a good day!” Then on the way out of the door is a statue/greeting person standing between the doorways just staring straight saying “THANK YOU FOR COMING SIR” as if I were the president leaving the Best Buy. He wasn’t even making eye contact. If they replaced him with a statue I wouldn’t have known the difference.
Scary.
This is I believe the second Au Bon Pain comic that I’ve done, though it’s certainly possible that it’s the third. The first time was when I was bitching about their whole receipt policy plus the bizarrely uneven totals their food always comes out to. It’s never a five or a zero at the end, it’s always a three or a seven or something.
Special thanks for this comic goes to M. Fox because he’s the one who was telling me the story at work today, and since I updated this comic at around 3:00 am EST it was the best thing I could think of at the time. Essentially he has a personal boycott on Au Bon Pain because of their terrible service and their b.s. sandwich forms which you have to fill out (plus those forms don’t give the option of withholding ingredients, forcing the customer to ad lib something on the sheet). They could really learn a thing or two from the deli guys who can remember five different orders and still recall the orders of frequent customers when they walk in.
So my friend was telling me about how the guy behind the counter was ignoring him until he filled out the form, then tried to make sure that there wasn’t any bacon in the sandwich by writing it in the description. Then he found out they were somehow out of both chicken and turkey. Seriously, that cuts out almost half of what they probably serve.
This is almost verbatim one of my many calls I made one day to get people to stop killing trees for the sake of sending me junky catalogs I’m going to chuck anyway. To think there are people out there who will actually decide to look in these catalogs and then order something.
This deal actually had one other side catch that to some might’ve made the expedited shipping less lucrative and that was that it had to be picked up at a local Citibank branch. It still seemed like no one would choose the slower shipping if given the option of faster shipping at no additional charge.
It’s really scary when the people sound just as mechanical as the machines if not more so. There are times they’re rattling off the script and I’m afraid to interrupt them because I might break something in their already fragile brain. I don’t envy those people. Especially the outsourced people in India who get a lot of crap from people who can’t understand their accents and say horrible racist things to them because they were upset even before they called them up.
I lost my ATM card after I went to get money on a particularly late night out. It was one of those machines where you have to leave the card in there. I’m so used to being in and out of the ATM I left the card there, which of course meant it got sucked up by the machine so no one else could get to it.
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