Them Damn Bureaucrats

One of the common tropes of contemporary life is the inability of "the government" to do anything without submitting you to acres of red tape.  Well, friends, let me tell you that it ain't about the government.  It's about size and impersonality.

I've just spent 90 minutes online in two different chat sessions with Comcast, trying to start cable and internet service.  My landlord, who had been living upstairs and who is the current subscriber, has just bought a single-family house in nearby Arlington, and he'll be closing his service once I start mine.  Except... well, therein lies the story of my two different "live chat" sessions, with Jessica and with Gian Carlo.

Used to be that "live chat" sessions were for conversations with people named Crystall and Brandie.

Jessica (if that's her real name) was very friendly, with lots of canned answers.  I thought for quite a while that she was an automated respondent, equivalent to those voice-activated systems, but she started to reply to somewhat more difficult questions with real answers, so I think she's actually human.  I told her I didn't want to sign up for something with a two-year service agreement, because I probably would only be here for a few more months, so she got me a price on the same TV/internet plan without an agreement (only $5 a month more expensive, so that's fine).  Meanwhile, two or three minutes at a time are going by between responses because she's simultaneously handling probably a dozen or so chats with different customers.

If I'm lucky, they were all Comcast customers.  She might also be handling pizza orders and emergency calls, for all I know.

So after an hour or so, she'd walked me through several options, and then I started on the online registration.  Step 4 of the online form said I had to choose a 2-year service agreement in order to go to Step 5.  But Jessica, bless her heart, said that I'd just have to click on "I agree" and then start a second chat with the Service Origination Specialist and then tell him I wanted the package without the agreement.

So I've entered my information, chosen my plan, and agreed to the service term that I didn't really agree to.  (Remember when ATMs were a new idea?  The banks sold it on the basis of convenience, which it is, but what it also is is a way for the customer to do her or his own data entry, thus relieving the bank of having to hire tellers.  Internet registration sites are the same thing.)  I bid a fond farewell to Jessica, and began my new chat with Gian Carlo.

But we had to cover some of the same ground, because Jessica and Gian Carlo weren't on speaking terms.  He didn't know that I hadn't just moved in, or that I needed a modem.  And he certainly didn't know that I needed a plan without a minimum service term.   (Jessica and Gian Carlo sound like a couple who should be in love by the end of the movie, but one of them was probably in Terra Haute and the other in Galveston...)  It was only a few more minutes until he discovered that this address already had active service, which of course I had written in a prior chat sentence, but that information wasn't on the script for that particular moment in the scene, so he hadn't caught it.  Once he discovered that service was on, he informed me that I couldn't order a service origination until there was a service cancellation already scheduled.

So I logged off from that chat after having assured him that he'd done well ("It was a pleasure to work with a customer as pleasant and kind as you, sir," he replied, which might have been Gian Carlo and might have been keystroke set Alt-Shift-F9.)  But before the chat window closed, I was shunted to a four-question survey about my satisfaction with the service I'd received.  I did my best to indicate that my questions had not been resolved while at the same time not casting blame or accusations on my friends Jessica and Gian Carlo, who had done their utmost.   They need their $11 an hour jobs, and it's not their fault that Comcast (whose CEO, Brian Roberts, made $31.1 million in 2010) was unable to provide a more fluid and individualized set of options.

So any time I hear some wingnut complain about the DMV or the Postal Service or government-service unions, I'm just going to reply:

• Comcast
• Blue Cross Blue Shield
• Dell
• Wells Fargo

Those systems make the DMV feel like Jack the corner grocer.  And there is no CEO in any government agency who makes $31.1 million a year.