A quarter for your troubles,

published at 5:05am on 05/17/07, with 1 Comment

Customer service is difficult. I understand this. What I don’t understand is how some companies can seemingly go out of their way to make things difficult on their customers.

Let’s take my recent experiences with Bank of America, which I have now decided is the worst bank in the country. It all started when I wanted to start getting my checks Direct Deposited into my Citibank savings account, which I have been using since I was a kid and which has been the recipient of many Direct Deposits in the past. We were told by our Bank of America representative that we could not do a transfer from our BoA business checking account into the Citibank account. Well, inconvenient, to be sure, but easily solved by opening up a Bank of America account at the branch across the street from me. With a referral, I even got $25 for opening an account with them, so I was pretty happy.

So the first thing that happens is that I have a paycheck lying around that I would like to deposit into this account. This is a check drawn on a New York Bank of America account being deposited into the same. I am assured that the check will clear in two days. Two days into the waiting process, I am told that because this is a new account, the check will take longer to clear. Maybe three or four days. Also fine. Inconvenient, but fine. A week into the process, I inquire again as to the availability of my funds and am told that because it’s a new account, the funds won’t be clearing quickly until they “determine my spending habits,” or something of the sort. Not only that, but I am reminded that if I really need the funds quickly, I should cash the check and the turn around and deposit the cash which will be available immediately. Say what?

All of this is moot once I get my Direct Deposit set up though, right? In reality, not. Because what we discover is that our business checking account does not have a feature that lets us do those kinds of transfers. My sister’s checking account, which she uses to transfer money to her roommate to pay her rent and bills, has this feature. But our business account? No dice.

All of this is made even more frustrating by the interplay between Bank of America the centralized corporate entity and Bank of America my friendly local neighborhood branch. Take, for example, the situation where I needed to set up an electronic transfer between my checking account and another bank account (one of those nifty, high interest rate online thingers). I went into my local branch and had a very nice conversation with the representative who told me that I would have to call the bank’s toll free number to get the paperwork that I needed faxed to me before I could set up the transfers. Well, I asked, could I just do it in the branch? After all, I was standing right there. Well, he explained, the branch doesn’t really do that kind of thing normally, but if I really needed the documents quickly, then they could mostly likely accommodate me. So I called the toll free number and was told that the document that I wanted (to set up this transfer, because I didn’t have any checks on my checking account – another bit of absurdity) was going to cost me fifteen dollars. So back I went to visit my friendly neighborhood branch to try to explain in no uncertain terms that I was not going to spend the money just to get a document faxed to me, whereupon I was told that, in fact, the original representative was mistaken, that I did not need this fancy document faxed to me, that they could do it all at the branch and it wasn’t going to cost me a dime.

Total time spent dealing with their misinformation? Three days.

Oh, and finally, finally, to top it all off, I went in to get a roll of quarters the other day and it was clear that it was just a roll that someone had rolled himself and traded in for a ten dollar bill and this person did what we all do when we roll coins to the bank, we leave out a quarter or two because nobody will really notice. Oh, but I noticed. Believe you me I noticed. And I went right back to the bank and told them that I wanted my twenty-five cents that I had coming to me. They looked at me a little funny, asked if they heard me right, that I really wanted to get a quarter back from them that I thought I was due? Oh, I sure did.

And they gave it to me. Wonder of wonders, shocker of shocks, they gave me my quarter.

Now I may just be unlucky. Or I may just be a whiner, but as I walked out of that branch that morning whistling my happy little twenty-five cent tune I thought to myself “You know what? I never want to deal with these fucks ever again.”

Of course I still have my account. Bastards have more ATMs than anyone else after all.

Filed under: Observations, with 1 Comment

We recycle around here. Not!,

published at 2:04am on 04/05/07, with 5 Comments

Recycling does not happen in Las Vegas, as far as I can tell. I’ve been spending some time out here in the past several months, and the home I am staying in has a large garbage bag in the kitchen, and no form of recycling receptacle at all. When I asked about this, I was told that there is supposedly some magical recycling center somewhere in the city, but that it remains completely hidden to mere mortals (and those wanting to not, say, throw out all of their glass and plastic). The dumpsters outside of the apartment are constantly full, and while New York is working on recycling a quarter of its residential waste in the next several years (and has a fully stocked section of its website devoted to the topic), it seems like Vegas would be simply content to landfill anything and everything that was consumed within the city limits. In fact, a search on the city’s official site for anything resembling information for the concerned citizen interested in recycling is a one-pager on Barriers to Recycling in Las Vegas Hotels and Restaurants. No helpful solutions, just a report on why it’s so hard to keep things out of the landfill.

Of course it’s not just the official policy thats the problem – this city, like everywhere else in the US it seems – lives off of plastic bags. Just the other night, I told the woman at the register at Walgreens that I did not need the plastic bag into which she she had just placed the items I had purchased. First came the initial shock of the idea that I wouldn’t want a bag. Next came a fairly aggressive move involving a mock backhand with her hand raised up over her head and swiping down at me. And finally, the nail in the coffin of this planet, when she handed me my items (shaking her head as if to say “my God, the terrorists have already won”) and tossed the bag into the trash can behind her.

I died a little bit inside at that moment.

On the other hand, I have to remember that I am not living on an island here, as I am when I am in New York City. Space is almost limitless, as anyone who has ever driven to the outskirts of this city and seen the acres and acres of condo developments going up out there, stretching out into the desert, can tell you. According to the aforementioned “Barriers” document on the Vegas DEP website, there is actually no market for recycled glass in Las Vegas, and any glass that wants to be recycled needs to be shipped to California for processing and sale. In light of that, it seems to make perfect sense to just throw everything in a hole and cover it with more sand.

I’ve often said that people won’t actually participate in a recycling culture until either a) they are fined for not doing so or b) it becomes part of a product’s life cycle and they don’t even realize that they are recycling. Anything outside a purchase and dispose situation is too foreign for Americans to understand. Fortunately, some companies are actually taking this to heart. I recently learned that Continental recycles the little plastic trays and little plastic containers that hold their salads as part of the salad and cheese pizza snack that they serve (or at least that’s the line that their flight attendants are told to deliver when asked why they are separating out the plastics from the other trash).

Now I understand that it’s a bit counter-productive to talk about recycling while hurtling across the sky in one of the most polluting contributions our society has given to this planet, but given the realities of modern life (which includes at times, the occasional airplane ride), it’s nice to see a company making small strides towards something resembling an environmental good deed. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “sustainable” by any stretch of the imagination, but just imagine if everyone took a cue from Continental and began to do their part.

There might actually be something left of this planet for my kids.

Filed under: Observations, with 5 Comments

Stranger than Angels,

published at 8:03pm on 03/14/07, with No Comments

I have recently watched two movies that have made me think. That have made me realize once again that there is power in the arts. That have made me understand that we have the ability to think, to feel, to hurt and laugh, all without leaving the comfort of our chairs. And they have made me understand, once again, that these feelings are important. That we, as people, are supposed to feel. Are supposed to think. Are supposed to laugh. And are supposed to hurt. That these are all part of being human. Of being people. Of living life. And that the moment we forget that there is beauty in the world outside of what we ourselves can produce, then we have missed out on the best part of life.

I used to be involved, desperately involved, in theatre. I grew up around art. Oh, not to the extent that many people do, attending the opera, visiting museums, with nightly conversations about expressionism, modernism, or any other -ism that they may be exposed to through their education or their family life. No, my involvement with the arts was in the form of my involvement, from my early teenage years through college, in the production of live theatre. The art of telling stories, on a stage, to an audience. To attend a performance of a powerful piece of theatre is to give yourself over to a story, to empathize with the characters, and to go home with a bit more understanding of humanity (or possibly the lack thereof).

When I was in college, I was involved with a production of the play Love Letters. Traditionally staged as simply a reading, our production was a full-blown play, the two actors performing their roles on opposite sides of the stage, without scripts, in full character. The story is one of unrealized love as it traces the lives of two people, from childhood to death. At the close of the play, we would drop the lights to blackness and in the darkness, begin playing a Sarah McLachlan song. And in that darkness, under the melancholy melody, an audience member would begin to cry. And fueled by the raw emotion of that first, a second would follow, sobbing in the darkness. It was inevitable, it was predictable, and it reinforced in me the ability for the arts to reach in to our chests and rip out our hearts. And it reinforced in me the idea that we, as audiences, do this willingly.

We all like stories. We like telling them and we like hearing them. It is easy in the face of the stories that we are told every day on weekly dramas, on the evening news, on summer blockbusters, to forget that the purpose of these stories, is to learn a bit more about life and the world in which we live. As we gorge on the cultural equivalent of junk food, it is easy to assume that our culture has lost the ability to tell a good story. A compelling story. An important story. A heart-wrenching story. But sometimes, as the credits roll and the lights come up, as the players take a bow and the audience leaves the building, we leave thinking. We leave looking at life through a different lens. We leave wondering, pondering, hoping, and inspired. Or merely introspective. But we leave changed. Not just amped up on adrenaline, and not just chuckling, but truly moved.

Whether or not our future actions are affected by these influences, we remain changed. With the recognition of humanity in the world, we are made that much more complete.

If you have the chance, go see Snow Angels and Stranger Than Fiction. I think you’ll like them.

Filed under: Observations, with No Comments

Complaints on an industry that probably doesn’t need more grief,

published at 11:03am on 03/07/07, with 3 Comments

The problem with most complaints about anything is that they come at moments when we are at our most irritable, our most frustrated, our most inconvenienced. When things go according to plan, when we attempt to operate within the system (for whatever system it maybe in which we are operating) and come out clean on the other side, we have nothing bad to say about a given experience. We asked, we received, and we moved on with our lives. It is most often when we try to deviate from that norm, when we ask the system to be flexible to our needs, that the true nature of the service we are requesting is truly realized.

I am referring, of course, to the state of air travel in the United States today. Over the past several months, I have had the good fortune to sample the offerings of no fewer than three of our nation’s air carriers and have managed to make it through the ordeal with nary a scratch. Of course, in keeping with the original thesis, the trauma comes not from situations where things go well, but when things go, well, less than ideally. The apparent problem that I have encountered recently is that there is no one carrier that can be all things to all people.

Take, for instance, the flight that I am currently on. I am on a United Airways flight from New York’s JFK airport to Maui, with a stop in San Francisco for good measure. Remarkably, from a flight perspective, this one has been relatively painless. After my own brief moment of panic this morning brought on by a malfunctioning alarm clock and an overnight snowfall, I arrived at the terminal to find no line at all at the self check-in. I retrieved my boarding pass and made it to security where I was told that I only had the boarding pass for the first leg of my trip. I hurried back to the ticketing machine where I saw my other boarding pass sitting there, waiting for me. Brilliant planning on the part of the machine manufacturer, I must say, to spit out the second leg boarding pass first, effectively preventing passengers from boarding the first leg without the second leg pass in hand. At security, my luggage required a hand check, and the gentleman handling my belongings was kind enough to put the 10 rolls of film that had looked suspect in the x-ray, right back where he found them when replacing them after inspection. At the gate I was able to change from a window to an aisle seat further up in the plane on both legs of my journey, and once on board, the overhead bin accommodated my roll-aboard suitcase without a problem.

Getting to this point was much more of an ordeal, however. This flight was booked using frequent flier miles and as such, had the benefit of being changeable at any point as long as destinations along the route remained the same. The trouble began when I called to inquire about the possibility of adjusting my flights to return home from Hawaii a few days earlier in order to make a brief stop over in Las Vegas (which is another story all together). The trouble, of course, comes from outsourced phone operators, and the cause of this trouble is a lack of cultural empathy. While call center operators in India and the Philippines have a fluent grasp of the English language, they do not at all have the context in which that language is spoke in the United States, and as such, seem unable to understand which parts of the situation are urgent, which are flexible and when to adjust their tone and inflection when speaking with someone who is already frustrated by being locked into the arcane rules of the airline industry.

In this particular instance, I had never been made clear the difference between a layover and a stopover. From my understanding, as long as I didn’t change any of my travel points, there would be no problem in changing the dates. What I did not understand, and what the representatives were unable to convey to me consistently at all, is that changing planes in under four hours is considered a layover, and over four hours is a stop over. These are different in the computer system, and one is unable to change from one to the other without effectively changing the entire flight. The first representative I spoke with was willing to make the change for me (and did not explain this difference), but I was unable to commit to flight times yet, and told them I would call back. The second representative told me that it could not be done, and berated me for trying to make that kind of change. The third representative finally took the time to explain the difference and the applicable fees.

When I decided to abandon my stop over aspirations, I moved on to the seemingly simple matter of moving my flight earlier by two days. The representative I spoke with informed me that, in fact, those flights were available, and that there would be a one hundred dollar change fee because I was making the change within seven days of travel – another restriction that had never been disclosed when I had asked, explicitly when I booked the flight, whether the dates were changeable. I was further informed that if I waited until my travel was underway, that is, if I waited until after I took the first leg, then there would be no fee, but that there was no guarantee that the flight would be available any more.

I told the representative that none of these fees were disclosed, and that I was certainly not going to pay for this change. Without hesitation, she went to speak with her “resources” and returned a moment later informing me that “we do not charge that fee” and changed my flight without further delay.

In retrospect, the situation was not nearly as bad as it could have been. But it is upsetting to know that these interactions are, by default, judged on how poor they are, rather than how good. I had to speak to at least five representatives before finalizing my itinerary, none but the last who seemed actually interested in helping me come to some kind of positive end to my (albeit outside the ordinary) travel situation.

In contrast to this, just this morning I booked and paid for a JetBlue flight before I realized that I had booked the wrong dates. (A note to JetBlue: please include the full itinerary on the final purchase page of your web site, or at least provide a confirmation before making your customers pull the trigger.) I phoned JetBlue and after only a minute of voice menus, was able to speak with a live human being who first offered to help me find a flight on the day that I actually wanted to travel and, when that search yielded no results at the price I was willing to pay, was able to cancel my purchase completely with no questions asked. It was a brilliant customer service experience if I ever had one.

However, while waiting to take off from JFK on my United flight, we were held at the gate for much longer than anticipated. As the passengers were getting antsy, the pilot came on the intercom system and informed us that a JetBlue flight was “doing that thing that they do” (a reference, of course, to all of their canceled flights on and immediately following Valentine’s day this year) and was preventing our flight from pulling back from the gate.

Immediately, all of that goodwill that they had built up with me evaporated when I was reminded that they have infrastructure problems that they seem to have not fully worked out yet.

Continental has been fine, but really, what the hell is up with that last plane I flew on where the aisle was so narrow that my suitcase didn’t roll through it without scraping each seat as I walked to my seat?

It’s a wonder to me that the airplanes stay in the air at all. That for the cost of a couple of billable hours I am able to fly across the country and back again, with two week’s notice. It’s a wonder to me that the industry is so fragile that one minute a fare can be available and the next moment it will be gone. I think about how the value of an airplane ticket increases and increases until the moment the flight takes off, at which point it is worth nothing.

The airlines would do well to remember that the customers, the passengers, the paid seats are all just people, and people can be remarkably loyal when they are treated nicely. They should remember that there is a fine line between the bottom line and satisfaction, and that the former will suffer with the latter.

There are many complaints to be had, but mostly I am glad that the industry exists at all, for my life would be so much more boring if I couldn’t see the world.

Filed under: Observations, with 3 Comments

Shutting it down,

published at 7:01pm on 01/21/07, with 2 Comments

It’s almost impossible to shut it down these days, at least for me. She’s threatened to take me out of town for a week, to the mountains where there is no Internet, where I can’t check my email, or get phone calls or watch tv. We’ll have to play board games and read books, and this sounds absolutely amazing. I tried to stop my subscription to the newspaper this weekend. I, like many New Yorkers, like to read the weekend New York Times. It makes me feel like I am a part of the world, and it makes me feel like I’ve gone to the gym, just from having to carry it from my front door to my coffee table (ha ha). But even though I told the Times’s web site to suspend my subscription for the weekend so I catch something of a breather, there it was, all thirty pounds of it, staring at me as I went out to check on the washing machine on Saturday morning.

Mercifully, there was no paper waiting for me there this morning or I may have completely lost it.

See, I have a problem. If the paper hadn’t showed up on Saturday, I could have gone through my week, blissfully unaware of the outside world. I would have gotten my news from the local NPR station, I would have read the blog posts that my friends sent to me throughout the days, and I would have been free. Now, though, the paper is sitting on my coffee table, on top of last week’s unread newspaper, calling out to be read. Though, actually, it’s more of a whisper.

“read me.”

It sits there, wearing its own magazine section like a blanket, stretched out across my table like a cat, waiting to be stroked. I could move it, but an object that size demands attention. I had cleared out all of the newspapers from previous months, but since just before the new year I’ve fallen behind again. Work has taken over my life, and when I return home all I want to do is shut down. To make it all go away. But there’s always more to pay attention to. The bills need to be paid. Clients need attention. Projects need work. My desk, for a brief moment a zen garden has once again become that vacant lot, strewn with articles to read, reference materials for my job, catalogs of curtains and mirrors I will never buy, because I am unable to actually take the time to clearly articulate, to myself or Crate & Barrel, what exactly it is that I want in an ottoman. Just today I found the reply card for a wedding that is taking place in March. The plane tickets have been purchased, the hotel paid for, but the reply card, requiring only my name and two check boxes (“attend,” “attend”) was still tucked away in the sealed envelope, to be dealt with “later.”

And the newspaper, all week, demands to be read.

Two dollar rentals from Blockbuster (“what a great deal!”). A bill from Fast Company (“need to get the startup to pay for that”). My membership to MoMA (“I will go to more museums this year if I have already paid for it”). They are all sitting on my desk, requiring attention of some sort. All of my 2007 receipts are sitting in front of me, waiting for me to clear out my 2006 receipts from my desk drawer, the 2006 receipts waiting to be filed away in my closet. Why do I save all of my ATM receipts? I have no idea. Burning Man tickets have been purchased (what the hell was I thinking?) and I am all of a sudden struck with the reality of needing to actually prepare to spend a week out in the middle of the desert, where I will definitely be unable to check my email and where I will be forced to cart around all of the water I need to survive. Someone, please, help me with that, or I will most definitely drop dead on the playa.

The apartment is getting renovated this quarter, that much I’ve decided, and an email is going out to some architects tonight, but that will just open me up to another flurry of emails. It’s getting ridiculous at this point though – my stop top is broken and the oven door doesn’t actually stay closed any more. The minute the refrigerator starts heating my food I’m just going to cry.

Sometimes I think that I might be better off if I just threw out everything on my desk, trashed my inbox, threw out all of the newspapers and started over again. I would probably lose something important, but at this point I just need to stem the inward flow so I can actually start sending things out into the world again.

Just as soon as I finish this one thing…

Filed under: Personal, with 2 Comments