I hate confrontation. Hate it, hate it, hate it. This will surprise nobody who has met me. Yet as I get older I find myself becoming a Person Who Will Call the Company to Complain. Why is that? I guess it’s hard for me to confront people I know because of the potential for hurt feelings and emotional fireworks, and I don’t want any of that with people I care about. But with a company, I don’t care. It’s not personal and I won’t make it personal. I just air my grievances politely and hope I find somebody sympathetic.
I realized that I have no problem calling the company to complain last week when Curative cancelled my COVID-19 PCR test with no warning. It was a whole Wagnerian saga: People waited in the snow and nobody showed up to the trailer. They didn’t email anybody until later in the day. This pissed me off since it was so hard to get an appointment for a test, and I really didn’t want to wait for hours at urgent care or somewhere if I could help it. Curative inconvenienced thousands of people by shutting down testing in the whole state for snow (especially annoying since we got a dusting up here in the more heavily populated part of Delaware) and many of the people who waited in line probably had symptoms and should not have been out in the cold.
So I called Curative. I admit I did leave a voicemail and let my voice go up half an octave when I told them this is a national emergency and their people should show up to work. But when I spoke to an actual person, I was calm and professional. It wasn’t the fault of the woman who answered the phone. I just asked her to tell somebody in management that nobody got a notification that Curative was closing for the day (until we got an email in the afternoon) and there were probably still people showing up for tests that wouldn’t happen. (I’m always nice to customer service people if I complain, since they had nothing to do with what happened. I’ll repeatedly say “I know it’s not you, but …”). I did later get a negative PCR test, so crisis averted.
Anyway, this made me realize I will jump through whatever phone tree I have to if I’m pissed off enough. When they say, “This call may be recorded,” I’m thinking, “I hope so.”
I had to call Lowe’s a few times to complain while we were renovating the rental house. I kept making appointments to get an exterior door installed and they would just cancel the appointments with no explanation. This pissed me off. I got stuck in a runaround of phone trees and hold music. They kept telling me to do it online but I tried that and that’s what didn’t work. I finally spoke to somebody and impressed on him that I was trying to give Lowe’s some money to do some work for me, and asked why they were making that so difficult, and I got someone to come out and do the work.
A lot of people hate using the phone, but for a shy person, I actually don’t mind too much. I feel like I get results better since I can (politely) put someone on the spot to help me, whereas I feel like my emails to companies go right to the void. Sometimes, even when I’m not complaining, I have some questions that may lead to more questions, and it’s easier to ask those live than keep sending emails. I also just had to call Comcast, since the buyer of the rental house is trying to set up service and I had to disconnect the old service. It was a bit of a runaround, since the boyfriend of the tenant apparently never disconnected it and took a bit to do this since I was trying to disconnect a service that was not in my name but instead in the name of the boyfriend who was not on the lease and moved out anyway months ago. But I preferred to do this on the phone because I needed to explain myself. The annoying thing was just trying to speak to someone since I had a problem that didn’t fit into the phone tree, and it was asking for account numbers and such that I just don’t have. I wish there were still an option to just immediately hit 0 and speak to someone and explain yourself since I still think in weird situations like mine, you are best off with a person. What number would I dial for the menu option “Disconnect service of boyfriend of tenant who was never on lease and moved out months ago after not paying rent and leaving a huge mess behind”? Would this be option 45738 on the menu?
I’m also that rare person who prefers ordering takeout over the phone. I get aggravated easily with certain online things and it’s easier for me to tell someone I want a pizza and give my name.
My point is, the phone can be annoying, but if it gets me what I want, I’ll stay on hold as long as you want.
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