Self-service customer service

So, in the midst of running errands this morning, I stop in at the local big box improvement center, which shall remain nameless (it's the one with the orange signs), to pick up some TSP and primer so I can paint my front door. I head for the paint department, where I quickly locate the quart cans of Kilz2 latex primer.

Things start to go downhill from then on. I make a complete circuit of the paint department, scrutinizing the shelves for surface cleaning products. I finally find one section that includes paint strippers, concrete cleaner/degreaser, and stuff like Goo-Gone. No TSP, or even TSP substitute. I decide to try the general cleaning product section a couple of aisles away. It's loaded with detergents, household cleaners, and stuff for cleaning your deck, siding, or driveway... but no TSP.

OK, back to the paint department, where I encounter a chipper young man who asks me if I'm finding everything OK. Actually, I say, I'm looking for TSP. When this fails to bring a glint of recognition to his eyes, I prompt, "It's for cleaning surfaces before priming and painting." Ah. He heads for the paint stripper section. "It should be here somewhere." No, I say, I've already looked there, and there's nothing labeled TSP or TSP substitute. Pause. "Is TSP a brand name, or is it the chemical in the cleaner?" This guy is working in the paint department, and he's never heard of TSP? Next he says, "If it's not here, maybe it's with the other cleaners a couple of aisles over..." No, I say, I've already looked there, too. "Well, then I guess we don't carry it."

This strains credulity. TSP is the classic, standard cleaner/degreaser/deglosser for prepping surfaces for painting. Even if the Big Orange Home Improvement chain has gone wildly green, they at least must have a TSP substitute. As a last ditch effort before making a special trip to the Big Blue Home Improvement chain, I'm preparing to ask the lad if there's anyone in the paint department older than 17 who might have at least heard of TSP before...

... when my eye falls on the shelves across the aisle from the paint strippers, where I suddenly spot, tucked up on a high shelf above the cans of paint thinner, turpentine, and denatured alcohol, boxes of TSP. And a bit lower down, bottles of a TSP substitute concentrate. I point them out to the young man (so that, hopefully, he will be a tad better prepared for the next customer looking to paint her front door), grab a bottle of the substitute, and head for the checkout lanes.

Having had my fill of human customer service for the day, I plunk my purchases down at one of the self-service checkout stations and scan the bar code on the TSP substitute. The checkout station registers the purchase and then exhorts me to bag the item while I fumble with a bag, trying to pull it open. Well, I guess I must have taken too long for the machine's limited patience, because by the time I actually got the bottle into the bag, the screen had appended the comment "Item Not Bagged" next to the line item. Then, the following message pops up at the top of the screen:

UNEXPECTED ITEM FOUND IN BAGGING AREA. PLEASE REMOVE ITEM BEFORE PROCEEDING.

WTF? You told me to bag the damned thing, and I did. What's unexpected about that?

OK, I take the bottle out of the bag, and the "UNEXPECTED ITEM" message goes away. It's still saying the item isn't bagged, so I try putting it in the bag again.

UNEXPECTED ITEM FOUND IN BAGGING AREA. PLEASE REMOVE ITEM BEFORE PROCEEDING.

I give up and flag down the young lady who's overseeing the self-service checkout area. She comes over and looks at the message, tries taking the bottle out and putting it back again, and gets the same message. She goes back to her master station and, apparently, tells my register that the item is not unexpected and to shut up about it. The message goes away, though the register is still convinced that the Item is Not Bagged. I scan my can of Kilz2 and hastily insert it in the bag before the register decides that it, too, is Not Bagged and finds another UNEXPECTED ITEM in the bagging area. Success! I swipe my credit card, sign, and get out of there before it changes its mind.

After this, negotiating the checkout at Wal-Mart with $70 worth of groceries is almost a picnic.

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Check this out

Previously in Hinterspace, I mentioned inheriting my mother's knack for always selecting what turns out to be the slowest checkout line, abetted by idiot customers, clueless cashiers, and/or equipment failures. While this bizarre corollary to Murphy's Law continues to dog me to this day, I've never seen anything to beat this instance of bad checkout line karma, which occurred circa 1976, in down east Maine.

I'm in the local A&P, doing my grocery shopping, and get in the checkout line. It doesn't matter which one, right? Because they're all long and they're all slow: I've miscalculated the timing for my shopping, only realizing after I'm in the store that it's the 3rd of the month – specifically, the day that Social Security checks arrive in the mail (this was 1976, remember?) – and every senior citizen in town has just cashed their check and hit the grocery store (I'm not sure this store could be dignified with the name "supermarket" in that timeframe).

So I've got plenty of time to kill in that checkout line, and by the time I finally inch my way up to the register I've read the front pages and more of every tabloid, women's magazine, and recipe/crossword/horoscope/"how to hold a garage sale" booklet surrounding the candy and gum racks. I unload my cart onto the counter while the senior in front of me pays her tab and counts her change, and then, finally, it's my turn. But wait. There seems to be a slight delay; uh-oh, it must be the obligatory cash register malfunction to cap off this interminable checkout line from hell.

Is the register out of tape? The cash drawer stuck? A number key broken? (We're talking mechanical registers, folks; this is long before electronic whiz-bang features took over. Though it probably wasn't quite as much of an antique as the clipart above might imply.) A power failure, maybe?

The answer is: None of the above. The store management has chosen this moment, in the middle of the busiest day of the month, with lines of customers at every register, to disconnect and remove this cash register where I stand with my unloaded groceries, and install a new one in its place. Granted, the replacement is a newer model. But gee whiz, couldn't it have waited a few hours until after closing? I mean, there's no indication that the old one has stopped working – it worked to check out the endless line of customers ahead of me, including the lady right in front of me.

Eventually they get the new one plugged in and fired up, and manage to actually check my groceries before the ice cream melts into a puddle, and I get out of there and go home. I don't think I ever go back to that A&P again, and when you're as far out in the boonies as this, writing off one of the less-than-a-handful of places to buy groceries isn't to be taken lightly.

Oh, yes, in their haste to get that new cash register rolling, they fail to initialize its calendar (I guess there were certain rudimentary electronic functions even then). If I remember correctly, it's July 3, but the register tape reads something like September 35 in some future year.

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Or even a lizard...

So, once that CSR deleted my ex from my car insurance policy, and somehow lowered my rate to boot, all is good, right? If you believe that, I'd like to sell you the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.

Oh, on the face of it, it looked like it was taken care of. When I logged in to my account online, the Welcome message was back to welcoming only me. And on the Driver tab, he was listed as having been removed from the policy. So far, so good.

Three days later...

My updated policy declarations and insurance cards arrive in the mail -- addressed to both me and my ex. With his name listed on the declarations and the insurance cards. You may recall that the renewal paperwork I just got did not have his name on them. So... removing him from the policy adds his name to the paperwork?

I call customer service again. I explain once more how I had his name removed 5 years ago, and then it turned up on my online account, and how the last CSR had removed it. I point out that if I did not want his name on the online account, it made sense that I didn't want him on the paperwork, either. She doesn't have any idea why this happened, but with many apologies she goes into my account and nukes the listing for him completely. He no longer appears as having been removed from the policy; he isn't listed at all. OK.

Four days later. Another set of updated policy declarations and insurance cards arrive in the mail. His name is still on everything. By now I've got the insurance company on speed dial. I go through the whole explanation again. This CSR is as mystified as all the rest. His name isn't in my online account. The paperwork should match. But it doesn't. She says she will email me an insurance card (in pdf) with only my name on it. In a few minutes, I get it. Yes, it has only my name on it.

As I write this, it has been another three days since then. So far (knock on wood), nothing more in the mail.

If I get any more mail from the insurance company addressed to my ex, I'm going to roast a gecko.

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So simple, a caveman could foul it up

I'm currently both ticked off and baffled by my car insurance company. For you to understand my mood, we need a bit of history. Six and a half years ago, I moved from upstate New York to the South Hampton Roads area of Virginia. It was 5 or 6 months before I got around to buying car insurance here (i.e., I waited till my previous policy was about to expire). Since my previous insurance company failed to respond to my request for a new quote, I signed up with a new one, which shall remain nameless. They returned my calls, and gave me a decent rate, although they required one thing that was both inexplicable and a bloody nuisance: Because I had been separated from my husband for less than a year, and was not yet divorced, they insisted that insurance regulations required them to put his name on the policy too.

Never mind that he lived 600 miles away and had his own car insurance -- apparently, without a divorce decree in hand, I had to wait a year to convince the insurance company that he wasn't ever going to be driving my car. If I wanted insurance, his name had to be on the policy. Oh, and by the way, they needed his driver's license number too. Too bad it wasn't just his Social Security number they needed -- I had that memorized almost 30 years before -- but since New York no longer used the SSN for driver's licenses, I was forced to call him and ask for the number. Fortunately, we were on reasonably good terms, though he wasn't at all pleased about having to be listed on my policy.

So, for months all my correspondence from the insurance company came addressed to both of us, even though he had never lived at that address. When I eventually bought a new car and called to have it added to my policy, it was almost exactly a year since we had separated, so I asked to have his name taken off the policy. They did so, and that ended that. Or so I thought.

Fast forward five and a half years, to tonight, when I logged into the insurance company website to check on something. Imagine my astonishment to see that the "Welcome" message addressed, by name, both me and my long-divorced ex! Mind you, I've logged in to my account many times since they supposedly took his name off the policy, and it was never there before. (Trust me, I would have noticed.) It also has not appeared on my policy declarations, bills, or insurance cards, including the renewal paperwork I just got today. But on the website, under the "Driver" information tab, there he was, listed as the "co-insured".

Well, I have no idea how or why they resurrected this more-than-five-years-outdated information, but I immediately clicked on the link to remove a driver from the policy and filled in the reason as "Divorced - requested removal in 2002". Before long I got an email saying I should call customer service to handle this request. So I did, and explained that I thought it a bit odd that this should turn up after five years of absence. I never got any explanation of how this could happen, though the CSR did delete him from the policy (again) after I assured her that no, he did not reside here; no, he had never resided here; no, no one else resides here!

At that point, evidently she decided she ought to check to see if any other information was out of date, and asked me a couple of random questions including where I was currently employed. I informed her that I am unemployed. After some more fiddling with the computer, she allowed as how my rate was decreasing by something like $12 per six months and she would make that change. I asked why the rate was going down (I know, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but this was totally unexpected). I didn't get any kind of satisfactory answer -- something about "based on the information you gave me..." -- so I finally let it drop. I'm left wondering if it has to do with being unemployed (in which case, shouldn't it apply back to January?), or having a phantom ex-husband removed from the policy (ditto, but back five and a half years?), or what. I guess I should just not worry about it, as long as it's a decrease and not an increase.

I think they'd do better having the cavemen run customer service.

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Spam Wars

Back in April, I got an email from Cox Communications, my ISP, touting all the fancy new "features" they had installed on their email service. It included this at-first-glance seemingly innocuous passage:

Control over Spam: In addition to blocking millions of unwanted emails from reaching our customers, Cox heard your requests and now offers the ability to create personal spam filters. You control what ISPs and addresses you want to block by managing your own personal block lists. Because of these enhancements, emails that were previously marked as --Spam--and delivered to you are now automatically delivered to a spam folder you can manage with WebMail. All of this plus a new enhanced spam filtering partner should keep your inbox clutter-free.

OK, look, I never asked Cox to filter my email. For one thing, I already have a very effective spam filter on my own email client, which just puts it in a Junk mailbox on my computer where I can check for false positives. So the previous arrangement, where spam was marked "--Spam--" and delivered anyway was just fine with me.

Furthermore, in the year and a half since I started using the two Cox email addresses, I don't think I've gotten more than a dozen or so pieces of spam, total, whether the spam filter identified it as such or not. Not working for a company where your email address is freely available to anyone does have its advantages.

Finally, I don't use Webmail to manage my email, period. I use it to sporadically check my personal email from work, but I download all my mail at home and "manage" it there. The corollary to that is that I don't check my Webmail accounts from home (like, weekends and evenings). So I didn't welcome the prospect of Cox deciding what was going to get quarantined in a Webmail spam folder where I might not notice it.

So it was with some trepidation that I investigated just how this NEW! IMPROVED! spam control was going to muck up my email routine. My fears were justified. Oh, the new setup did offer an alternative to "automatic" spam sequestration; you could opt to just have it automatically deleted instead. And that was the only other option!

That's right. The SpamBlocker settings gave you exactly two radio buttons to choose from:

• Delete incoming junk email automatically.
• Deliver junk email to the WebMail Spam folder for later review.

Note that (a) you would never see the Spam folder at all if you never accessed Webmail and used a computer-based client exclusively; and (b) even if you check Webmail, there is NO visual indication that there is anything in the Spam folder, unless you mouse over the link slowly enough for the "tool tip" to pop up. Oh, and did I mention that "Messages in the Spam folder will be automatically deleted 21 days after receipt." What's wrong with this picture?

This might be palatable if indeed their spam filters were halfway competent. Yeah, right. The moment the "improved" system went into effect, email notices from online retailers like Lands' End, Amazon.com, and Circuit City -- which I had been getting all along without it ever being labelled as spam -- suddenly started showing up in the Spam mailbox. Sometimes. Meanwhile, the occasional missive with a subject line like "Son Skaggs what many carbonic" or "Every legs possible twist" blithely sails through their "enhanced spam filtering" straight into my inbox. What's wrong with this picture?

So I registered a complaint with Cox Customer Service. I don't want you to filter my email, I said. I don't want to have to check a Webmail box just because your filters don't work. I don't want to have to keep notifying you "This is spam" and "This isn't spam" (which, BTW, they want you to do by "Forwarding [the email] as an attachment", which apparently can be done with Outlook Express which I won't touch with a ten-foot pole, but certainly not with my email client). I don't want to have to set up a white list. I just want you to give me back the option to have it sent to my inbox where I can download it and filter it myself (i.e., intelligently).

My pleas fell on deaf ears throughout an exchange of emails, culminating in this less than satisfactory reply:

We have reviewed the best practices in the industry for handling spam and found that implementing a Spam folder option was preferred to simply marking messages as Spam in a customer's inbox. This will allow for better management of your inbox while still allowing you to review suspected junk mail. While we feel that the newer version of WebMail is a vast improvement over the original, we understand your concerns and appreciate your feedback.

Translation: Screw you, we know best.

And this is what they call "outstanding customer service." Nice try, Digital Max.

But y'know, maybe my complaint wasn't just an exercise in futility and a waste of time after all. Because the other day, in an attempt to find out if there was some way to make the damned Spam mailbox be more forthcoming about whether it was hiding anything, I went back to the Webmail SpamBlocker settings. And lo, it came to pass that a third radio button -- one that had not been foretold, or even mentioned in passing, by Cox -- did appear on my screen:

• Tag junk email with -- Spam -- in the subject line and deliver to your inbox.

And I did select that radio button and click "OK" And it was good.

"Best practices in the industry," my ass.

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Micro-size it

So I went to the mall after work and headed up to the Food Court to grab some supper. After making a circuit of the Food Court I settled on the Burrito Bell (names have been thinly disguised to avoid ads on my blog), where I ordered a burrito and (my exact words) a "small cherry Pepsi".

"What size?" says the order taker.

I wish I had had the ability to reply, with a straight face, "I don't know. What sizes does a 'small' come in?"

Meanwhile next door, at the place where Holsteins implore you to dine on badly spelled poultry, a sign declared that they were "Now Hiring Smiling Faces". I'm not sure what happens to the other parts of the people whose smiling faces they hire, but it's a good bet that Burrito Bell didn't hire the ears.

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What's the catch?

The A/C isn't the system in my house that's been acting suspicious lately. Two years ago I had to replace my water heater, which leaked water all over my utility closet (not to mention that it stopped heating the water, too). The replacement had something I'd never seen before: an electronic control box on top of the tank. All the previous water heaters of my acquaintance had nothing but a couple of inaccessible thermostats and a reset button inconveniently buried inside the tank insulation.

But this water heater is different. It's a smart water heater. Or so they would have you believe. The "Energy Smart" control system not only actually lets you set the temperature or reset it from outside the insulation (amazing enough in itself), it also lets you select a smart mode in which it supposedly pays attention to how much hot water is being used and bases its heatng pattern on that, or a vacation mode; and it has a self-diagnosis doohickey from which you can supposedly determine what's wrong by the number of times the light flashes (e.g., top element is dead, bottom element is dead, no water in the tank, etc.).

All well and good, except a while ago the light began to flash on and off slowly, with a loud click each time, and not in a discernable "number of flashes" pattern. This would go on for anywhere from 30 seconds to 15 minutes at a time, and then it would be OK for a while, maybe even days at a time. Resetting the controller sometimes seemed to help, and other times... not so much.

It's finally gotten to the point where it spends the majority of its time doing this. Mind you, it is still heating the water (knock on wood). But the clicking is driving me crazy, and the information I dug up on the manufacturer's website indicated that the control board probably needed to be replaced. So today I finally called the manufacturer and told the customer service rep what it was doing. I was expecting a lot of hassle and rigamarole to do a warranty claim, get it installed, etc. Here's what ensued:

He asked for my name and address and the serial number of the water heater, and how many times it was flashing. He then said it needed a new controller which was covered under the warranty, and if I'd give him a credit card to charge a $5 shipping fee he'd send it right out. It would come with instructions that anyone who was moderately handy could use to install it, and if there were any installation questions I just needed to call them and they'd go through the procedure.

That was it. No third degree, no proof of purchase -- or of malfunction -- required, no "you'll have to have that installed by a licensed plumber/electrician/nuclear physicist or it voids the warranty", no hoops to jump through.

It all seems too simple. What's the catch?

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Your friend in the digital age.

My brief statement that I called Cox on Saturday morning about my lack of Internet connection doesn't begin to convey the full flavor of that call. Oh, it started out normally enough -- request for last four digits of my SSN, identification of my account, then the usual damned "If your neighbor severed your cable feed with his lawn mower, press 1. If he used a Weed-Whacker, press 2." phone tree. Until I got to the point where they actually gave me an option to press 42 to speak to tech support. Then it got, well, weird.

Naturally, all the "agents" were busy (of course, did you think they were just sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to call? And when did they become "agents", anyway?). So while I'm waiting for one of them to get done abusing another customer, do I get to listen to music, or a Cox ad pushing digital phone service? No, they've got something new since the last time I called in: I get to talk to a synthetic female who is going to try to figure out what's wrong before passing me off to a warm body.

I swear I am not making this up. Digital Maxina asks all these questions about my setup (and takes verbal replies -- none of this "Press 1 for Yes or 2 for No" shit for her!) and suggests things for me to try, like resetting the modem, all of which I have already done, but I do them again because this damned AI doesn't really give me any choice. It's like, "Now unplug your modem and plug it back in, and when you've done that say 'Continue'. Oh, by the way, it's OK to put the phone down while you do this." And by God she's going to sit there (in a virtual sense) and wait for me to say "Continue", and she's watching the modem for some activity so she's going to know if I'm bullshitting her by saying "Continue" without actually trying to reset the modem, so what am I gonna do? I'm going to reset the damned modem again!

I kept waiting for her to say something truly helpful, such as "If you'd like to stop humoring me and just go on hold till a warm body is available, say 'Stop'!" Fuggedaboudit. Oh, once, while waiting interminably for the modem to resync, in between perky acknowledgements that it sure was taking a long time, she did say, "By the way, if you were talking to an agent right now, you'd just be waiting for this to finish like you are now." In other words, don't fret about being stuck talking to an AI, because you wouldn't be any better off with with a warm body.

Well, when the modem refused to resync (I could see it wasn't doing anything), she finally gave up and turned me over to a warm body. And guess what? I really wasn't any better off. To begin with, the warm body didn't know shit about Macs. He did fumble through an attempt to renew the IP address, without success, and promptly gave up and said my network card must be bad and I'd have to call Apple about that. Well, I knew damned well there was nothing wrong with the network card, because the Mac could contact the router. So then I told him I had a Windows machine there that also couldn't connect. So he perked up a bit because he knew how to renew a DHCP lease in Windows using the ipconfig command at the command line. Whoo-ee! So we tried that. And guess what, it couldn't see the modem either. So now I guess he figured it wasn't so likely that two network cards were bad and decided my cable modem was shot instead, and since it was obsolete and not on their supported list any more, why didn't I just run out and buy a new one? I thanked him not so politely and said goodbye.

All things considered, I think I'd rather just get put on hold for half an hour. It would accomplish about the same thing.

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So what else can go wrong? No, wait, I don't want to know.

Thursday 5/18 AM. I make a trip into Norfolk to get blood tests done (cholesterol and thyroid). The nurse can't raise a vein in either arm and finally has to get it from the back of my hand. Ugh.

Thursday 5/18 PM. I walk into the house after work and can tell immediately that the AC is off. It's stuffy and several degrees warmer than it should be. Repeated attempts to get the compressor to start fail. I finally shut it off at the thermostat and spend the night with the window open. Call an AC contractor and determine it's not an "emergency", but they'll call me first thing in the morning (i.e., 8 AM) to set up an appointment.

Friday 5/19 AM. No call by 8 AM and I need to leave for work. Call contractor who says the service group isn't in yet, maybe half an hour. So much for "first thing in the morning" being the same as "8 AM". I leave my cell number, and drive to work. No call by 9:30. I call the guy who serviced my AC once before. (OK, it's been two years. I wasn't working last year and didn't have the cash for it.) He tries to tell me it must be iced up because it's too cool out but finally says he'll come look at it. I turn around and go back home. He finally shows up after getting lost and calling me so I can talk him in ("You see the shopping strip on the corner with a Food Lion? Turn left at that light. Now take the second left, then the third right..."). After he runs over my ground-cover juniper at the corner of the driveway while trying to park his truck, we go inside and turn on the unit at the thermostate. It starts right up and runs like a top. Shit. He futzes with it for two hours, replaces a valve he says is leaking, and dumps 5 friggin' pounds of Freon into it. Costs me $310 and half a day of PTO. And I get to drive to and from work twice.

Tuesday 5/23 PM. My doctor takes me off my cholesterol meds after hearing about the muscle pains I'm having. That's one of those "rare" side effects that they always tell you to watch out for when taking statins. When I get home, the AC is off again (it ran fin all weekend, dammit) and it's around 77 in the house. I shut it down for a couple of hours and then turn it back on. It runs. It cools.

Wednesday 5/24, 5 PM. Fifteen minutes before my quitting time, my boss (who works out of California) calls and says she's just found out I need to move my office. Well, shoot, we're all moving July 1 to our new office building, so what's she on about? No, this is something different. They're hiring a new software developer who'll be starting Tuesday, and they need to have him at the same office as the rest of the developers. My office is the only place they have to put him, so I win the dubious distinction of getting to move twice: right away, to the other office, and then again in a month when we all move.

Thursday 5/25. I spend half the afternoon packing boxes and taking some things over to my new quarters.

Friday 5/26. I spend half the damned day moving the rest of my stuff, including my PC, monitor, UPS, and a dozen or so cables and peripherals, and getting set up. (Desktop PCs suck. Give me a nice laptop any day. No trouble moving them.) Early evening: I come home to a temp of 81 inside. No telling how long the AC has been off. I "reboot" it and it takes 5 or 6 hours to cool it down to a reasonable level. Late evening: My cable connection goes south and refuses to come back online.

Saturday 5/27, 9 AM. Still no connection. I call Cox and the upshot seems to be that my cable modem has taken a shit. 10 AM: I call a new AC contractor. Since I'm not already a customer, the earliest they could schedule me is week after next. Since the AC is currently running OK, I decline. Afternoon: A new cable modem, from Circuit City, runs me $80 (less a $20 rebate in the offing). I spend the rest of the afternoon getting it hooked up and online and getting my Mac and Toshiba laptops to talk to it. My wireless router still refuses to talk to it, leading me to believe I'm now going to have to replace that too.

And to top it off, I just realized that the DVD Netflix sent out to arrive Tuesday never showed up, so I had to report it missing.

So how has your last week and a half been?

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Today I learned...

... not to go to Subway too soon after it opens in the morning. At least, not the one on Kemps River Drive in Virginia Beach.

Usually I drop by Subway no earlier than noon, and mostly it's supper time. But today I walked in about 10:10 am, which is 10 minutes after the place opens. And, apparently, at least 20 minutes or so before they should have opened.

Two staff members visible. One is shuffling trays of bread around in the warming box. The other is making a 6" B.M.T. sub for a girl of about, I don't know, maybe 12 or 13 (I'm no judge of age). Sounds simple, but she (the Subway employee) seems to be making a hard time of it, and it doesn't help that the other woman keeps interrupting her with questions about what she's supposed to be doing with the bread. When she gets as far as the veggies, she asks the girl if she wants lettuce and tomatoes, even though the tomato bin is empty. Once she gets the sandwich put together, the girl reminds her she wants a combo.

Finally they get to the cash register, and the Subway woman goes all to pieces because, apparently, the register has reverted to some kind of startup display because they hadn't done anything with it for too long, and she doesn't know how to revive it. She fetches a calculator, and then tries to recall how much a 6" BMT costs. Clearly she normally depends on the cash register to supply this information for her. The girl rolls her eyes and points out that the price is on the big menu sign on the wall. Then the woman has to add on for the combo and, presumably, figure sales tax before announcing that it comes to $5.27. (I don't think that was right, but hey, it's none of my business.) The girl finally pays her and departs. So now she can wait on me, right?

Uh, no. The breadtray-shuffling woman has abandoned the rising bread dough to try to raise someone on the phone to find out how to wake up the cash register -- which turns out to be to press "S" -- and to try to scare up some tomatoes for the empty bin, so the first woman has to go finish sprinkling cheese shreds on the dough and putting it away. Finally, it's my turn, and she lays out a piece of paper and asks what I want. A foot-long ham and cheese on wheat bread, I say. She picks up some slices of ham and stares at the paper for a moment before realizing she needs to put some bread down on it first. Returning the ham to the bin, she finds a wheat bread roll, slices it open, and then asks me again what it was I wanted. Ham and cheese, I remind her. She lays slices of ham rather randomly on the bread and starts sliding the paper down to the veggies before remembering I wanted cheese and goes back for the provolone.

Now it's veggie time. I would like lettuce and tomato, I say, but the tomato bin is still bereft of tomatoes, which apparently the other woman has been unable to find. Sandwich-making woman heads to the back room to trap a tomato. By now the girl is back -- it appears her father is in the car and now she needs to get a sandwich for him -- and looking thoroughly disgusted with the "service". I have to agree with her. The woman finally emerges from the back room with exactly 5 slices of tomato, which she places on my sandwich. With vast relief I pay for my sub -- No, I do not want a combo -- and escape.

At lunchtime, I found she hadn't even put any napkins in the bag. For all I know, that poor girl is probably still trying to buy a sandwich for her dad.

Man, do I ever miss the Kwans' Subway on Granby Street.

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The line forms at the back

One of the "curses" I inherited from my mother is an uncanny ability to get in the one line in a store, bank, or fast-food joint that will bog down interminably due to a dimwit cashier, a nitwit customer who either can't make up his/her mind or has an unbelievably complex set of transactions, and/or equipment failure. If there is only one line, I will invariably get in it just in time for the convergence of some or all of the above circumstances. I think it must be a twisted form of Murphy's Law.

Case in point: my trip to Arby's to pick up supper tonight. When I arrived, there were no other customers at the counter. Zip. Nada. So I stood back and took the time to peruse the menu and decide what I wanted before going up to the counter to place my order.

Big mistake. While I'm perusing, this guy comes in and heads for the counter. Well, it's just one guy. It's not like a tour bus just pulled in or anything. So I finish deciding and walk up to stand behind the new customer (there's only one order taker) and wait.

And wait. I wasn't really paying much attention at first, but as far as I could tell he was having excessive difficulty making up his mind and was grilling the order taker about prices, specials, coupons... I don't know what all he was on about, just that it was taking an inordinate amount of time. Finally he got his order placed and the cashier tells him the total. Customer questions the total. Cashier explains that the price he was quoted was before tax. Customer expresses astonishment that there could be that much tax. (He must have been a tourist.) Finally customer pays and gets his change, and cashier directs him to the other end of the counter to pick up his order. Customer now requests a receipt.

At this point, the equipment malfunction kicks in: cashier tries to get the printer to spit out a receipt after the fact, and fails. "Is this thing working?" he asks another guy behind the counter. Other guy comes over and fiddles with the register and the printer, and finally gets a receipt for customer. In the meantime, cashier/order taker asks me if he can take my order. Yes! Dear God, yes!

I order my French Dip ("Do you want a combo with that?" No.), Loaded Potato Bites ("Regular or large?" Regular.), and small vanilla shake. He rings up my total of $6.14, and I give him a ten and 15 cents. Thank God for cash registers that tell the cashiers how much change to give back, because I don't think he would have figured it out on his own. He digs into the cash drawer and comes up with three $1's and a penny. Time to call other guy and ask him to get some more ones. "Unless you'd like four quarters instead?" No thanks. Other guy apparently has to dig them out of the safe. Finally I get my other $1, and my food. I think all told I spent 20 minutes for a 5-minute order.

Remind me some day to tell you about the time my checkout in a supermarket was interrupted by the total replacement of the cash register.

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Nothing is as simple as it seems

... or at least, not as simple as it should be. Case in point, my recent experiences renewing a prescription.

I take several "maintenance" prescription medications, one of which I am almost out of. I normally get it in 3-month batches by mail order through my prescription plan. The last time I had it filled, I was still on my ex-employer's insurance plan, through COBRA. Since I'm now on my new employer's plan, serviced by a different mail order provider, obviously I couldn't get a refill on the existing prescription. So, I needed a new 3-month prescription from my doctor for the mail order plan, and a one-month prescription called in to my local drugstore to cover me till the mail order gets here.

Monday, I call the doctor's office and ask to speak to a nurse about getting a prescription renewed. The receptionist transfers me to the "refill line," a voice mailbox where I'm supposed to leave my information. I dutifully deposit into the voice mailbox:

1. my name;
2. my work phone number, specifying that it is a new work phone number so please delete my old information;
3. the fact that I need both a 30-day prescription and a 90-day prescription;
4. the fact that I have a new prescription plan and a new drugstore; and
5. a request that they CALL ME to get all of the necessary information.
   

No response on Monday. No response Tuesday morning. Around 1:30 I call the doctor's office and ask for the refill line. The person who answered the phone says she can help me. I give her my name. "Didn't you call yesterday?" she says. Yes, I say, but I haven't gotten any reply, so I'm trying to find out what happened to my request.

She puts me on hold and goes off to check. After several minutes of an overly-loud radio music feed, she comes back and cheerily informs me that it was all taken care of -- that they called in the 30-day prescription yesterday. "Uh, where was it called in to," I ask. "I told you I have a new drugstore, but I didn't give tell you which one. That's why I asked to be called."

A pause. "Let me check on that," she says, and returns me to the radio broadcast. When she comes back, she says, "Where did you want that called in to? I'll take care of it right away," sidestepping the question of just where they did call it in. (I suspect the nice pharmacist at MacArthur Pharmacy may be wondering when I'm going to pick up my prescription.) So I give her the name and phone number of my new local drugstore, and she says she'll call it in.

"So how will I get the 90-day prescription?" I ask. "Oh, that was faxed in yesterday." "Uh, just who did you fax it to? I told you I have a new prescription plan. That's why I asked to be called." (Are we seeing a pattern here?)

Another pause. "Oh. Well, yes, you did say you had a new plan, but we thought we already had your new information." Mentally counting to ten and wondering just why in hell I would have told her I had a new prescription plan if I had already given them the new plan information, I proceed to give her all the ID numbers and group numbers and phone numbers and other crap off my new insurance card. "OK, we'll fax that in right away."

"But I haven't made arrangements for covering the co-payment with them yet. And they don't have my shipping address. This is the first mail-order prescription I have done with this company."

Yet another pause. "Tell you what, I'll call this in, and in about half an hour you can call them and set up your credit card payment."

Eventually I did call the prescription plan, where they did manage to confirm that something had been faxed in for me (but they didn't know what yet), and they took my shipping and credit card info. I forgot to ask how long it was going to take to get here, but I picked up the 30-day supply after work (Yay! They got that much right!) so I've got a bit of a cushion now. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of my prescription trials and tribble-ations.

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Chilling at Sears

Yesterday I went to Sears to buy a new freezer. I knew exactly what I wanted -- an upright, frost-free, 13.7 cubic foot Frigidaire -- having previously scoped out the (fairly meager) possibilities not only at Sears but also at Lowe's, Home Depot, East Coast Appliance (which has THE MOST annoying commercial on HGTV, and that's saying a lot), and Dr. Johnny's. My chosen model was on sale at Sears, with free delivery, so I decided it was time.

Now, I've done a lot of appliance browsing at Sears. When I bought my house a couple of years ago, I knew I was going to need a refrigerator, washer, and dryer, and since I wasn't moving in till about a month after the closing, I had plenty of time to compare models and decide what I wanted. Last summer I was checking out water heaters after mine turned into a dead, leaking storage tank. More recently, I've been browsing for the freezer (the 5 cu ft box I have is just too small when you want to stock up on frozen dinners, which I do), as well as a dishwasher (I have one, but it's a bare-bones model with decidedly poorly designed racks, so I'm planning to replace it eventually), but I had put off actually buying the freezer due to my unfortunate 6-month spell of unemployment.

My point is, whenever I have set foot in the Sears large appliance department for purposes of information-gathering, I am immediately beset by helpful salespeople intent on explaining to me why I should buy a Kenmore instead of a Whirlpool, Maytag, or Frigidaire. Thanks, I would say, I'm just looking right now. Even so, it could be hard to make them go away. (I have to wonder why they even carry those other brands, since it seems like all they really want to sell is Kenmores.)

But yesterday I was no longer "just looking"; I was prepared to actually give them money (well, plastic, but that's good enough for Sears) in return for delivering a shiny new 13.7 cubic foot Frigidaire (frost-free!) to my garage, where I can fill it with Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice and Haagen-Daz. I headed sraight for the upright freezer section and found my model, then looked around for a salesperson. Ha.

Not one in sight. At least, not in sight of the freezer section. I hung around by the freezer I wanted for a couple of minutes, hoping someone would appear. Nope. So I started looking around other appliances, and finally spotted three people with staff lanyards clustered around one of the cash registers in the kitchen range section. Two of them seemed to be dealing with a customer, but the third, who seemed to be just hanging out to make conversation, finally couldn't ignore me any longer and asked if she could help me. "I want to buy a freezer," I said.

"Well," she said, "let me see if I can find someone who works that section. I don't work in freezers." Presumably, neither did the other two, since they were obviously the Kitchen Range Salespeople. (God knows what section the woman who asked if she could help me worked in.) She wandered off to the refrigerator section, where I now saw there were at least two more lanyard-wearers, and spoke to them, then came over near (but not in) the freezer section, where I had returned, and said someone would be with me shortly. She then retreated to the fringes of the refrigerator section (I guess she was not a Refrigerator Salesperson either; maybe she was Dishwashers? Hell, she could have belonged in Lawnmowers, for all I knew) until another women came out from behind the fridges and asked her where the customer was. The Not-Freezer Salesperson pointed me out to the Freezer Salesperson, who came over and asked if she could help me. "I want to buy a freezer," I said.

She asked me if I needed any information, or did I already know what I wanted; I pointed to the 13.7 cubic foot Frigidaire (frost-free!) and said I wanted that one. Mercifully, she did not try to sell me a Kenmore freezer instead. She just led me to a cash register. (Oddly, it was the cash register in the refrigerator section. Evidently the salespeople can cross appliance boundaries to write up a sale, but not to actually sell you anything located on the foreign turf.)

On the way to the cash register, she asked me if I would be charging it on my Sears credit card. No, I said. "You can get a 10% discount if you apply for a Sears credit card," she said. I briefly contemplated saying, "Oh, good -- I've been unemployed for six months and my unemployment is about to run out, so another credit card will really come in handy about now." But I fought down the urge and instead just smiled and said, "No, thanks." (Incidentally, had I asked for the credit card and gotten that 10% discount, I wouldn't have been able to get the free delivery, which was worth more.)

Eventually the sale got written and rung up, and the delivery date set. (Note to self: better clean up the garage tomorrow if I want to have any place for the delivery guy to actually put the freezer other than outside on the driveway. Or, I could just leave the car outside.) Mission accomplished.

So why does Sears have so many Appliance Salespeople hanging around holding clipboards and doing nothing in sections that they don't work in? Here's a novel concept: Have the Freezer Salesperson(s) hang around the freezer section, the Range Salesperson(s) hang around the range section, and so on, where they can actually write up sales for customers who know what they bloody want and are prepared to fork over money for it. Or how about this one: Declare all of them to be generic Major Appliance Salespersons who can help any customer who wants any major appliance in any section. And have them hang out where they can see any customer who comes in with that "I want to buy an [insert appliance of your choice here]" look in their eye.

I miss the old Sears Roebuck catalog.

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Would you like vanilla with that?

The last couple of times I treated myself to some Kohr Brothers frozen custard at Greenbrier Mall, I seem to have had trouble getting my request across to the girl at the counter. I mean, I
thought I was speaking plain English, but maybe I was speaking in tongues without realizing it...

A couple weeks ago I asked for a petite chocolate in a cup, not a cone. (They don't have small, they have petite -- which is ample for me.) What I got was a petite chocolate cone. It wasn't that big a deal, so I took it and didn't say anything. Maybe I shouldn't have acquiesced.

I'm still trying to figure out what happened today. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I'd like a petite ice cream.

Ice cream girl: Would you like a cone or a cup?

Me: A cup, please. [Then, realizing I had not specified a flavor] I'd like vanilla.

Ice cream girl: (Pause) You just want one?

Me, non-plussed: Yes...

(Ice cream girl goes to the machine and comes back with a cup... of orange/vanilla swirl.)

Ice cream girl: That will be $2.63.

Me, confused: Um, I asked for vanilla.

Ice cream girl: (Pause) With orange swirl, right?

Me: No, I asked for a petite vanilla cup.

(Ice cream girl gives me a disbelieving look, dumps the swirl, and dispenses a cup of vanilla.)

Now, maybe the Kohr's employees are a little distracted by the recent case where a staff member (not at the Greenbrier Kohr's -- I probably couldn't stand the thought of eating there if it was -- but I don't remember where) severed his finger in the custard machine and somehow it ended up in some customer's pint of custard (and he wouldn't give it back so it could be reattached), but I still can't see how that could result in this clerk hearing "orange/vanilla swirl" when I said "vanilla".

On the other hand, I suppose I should be grateful that my order didn't somehow get translated to "vanilla with finger topping."

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