Month: August 2003

TBOGG and Jim Capozzola have posted a couple of fine experiences in customer service they’ve been lucky enough to experience.

The strangest CSR experience I’ve ever witnessed was not even something that happened to me. It happened when I worked for Pizza Hut. At one point, the company decided to implement a 1-800 customer service line, under the theory that people not inclined to “voice their concerns to a member of our management team at the point of sale” (i.e., “complain in person” — gotta love that Business English) might instead wish to complain to an impersonal operator on a telephone hotline, and those operators were authorized to give the customers gift certificates as they saw fit or, perhaps, even pass the contact on to an Area Director for further resolution if it was really horrid.

Well, one day a shift manager I worked with had the unfortunate experience of having a person who was clearly “three sheets to the wind” come in and try to order a pitcher of beer. Quite properly, she denied the request, and the customer stormed out; later, the customer called the complaint-line to report that she had been denied service. The 1-800 operator, who actually worked for some third-party call-center to which PH had outsourced the whole operation, showered this customer with gift certificates and whatnot, and if I recall correctly the Area Director was referred in this case — all because the Shift Manager in question had done her job correctly. The poor woman was utterly incensed because, in her eyes, this was as if the company was not backing her up.

I’m not sure what the moral here is, but it illustrates some of the pitfalls of business today. Outsourcing is a fact of life, but surely it says something about what companies today think is important when they’re outsourcing customer service. “We value you as a customer and we value your business, so in the event of a problem, please feel free to call this number and talk to someone who not only doesn’t actually work on our company’s payroll, but is in all likelihood not even in the same state as you — and might even be in a different country entirely, since a lot of these jobs are going to India these days.”

Share This Post

This just in: Akira Kurosawa’s RAN is an amazing damn film.

I’ve already requested The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress from the library. (You just have to love big, metropolitan library systems where each branch is part of one, giant shared collection, and where you can thus request materials from anywhere in the library system, have them delivered to your local branch, and then take ’em home.

Share This Post

O! for the quick passing of tort reform, that we might finally end the scourge of frivolous lawsuits….

Share This Post

I had my first experience with Internet hackery yesterday, in the form of the worm du jour. So I got to spend much of my day downloading and installing patches and doing all manner of other wonderful, scintillating stuff — instead of writing, of course. Between that and my attention being constantly drawn to the mucous draining into my throat, I got nothing of note accomplished yesterday. Damnable hackers.

Share This Post

Via Matthew Yglesias comes this report of sex-crazed squid, which may be of interest to readers of Christopher Moore’s novel Fluke, which is partly about sex-crazed whales.

Share This Post

Happiness is a trailer to Return of the King. Enjoy.

(Via Greg Harris.)

Share This Post

Kevin Drum reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger is already dictating to the press. When did our press decide that its reaction to the policy of “You’ll get nothing and like it” would be, “Yes sir! May I have another!”

Share This Post

I actually missed my writing goal yesterday, only coming up with 700 words toward my 1000 that were expected. Ugh. I’ll chalk it up to the fact that I spent the time when I was planning to be writing, actually sleeping in my recliner. I’m feeling a bit better today — still stuffy, but less groggy — so I’m sure I’ll be able to make up the difference.

(BTW, what’s the point of having a recliner when we can’t recline it, since the second we do one of our cats goes underneath it and falls asleep? They don’t get hurt when we close it, but they won’t come out until they’re good and ready, either. Weirdos. Oh, and another sucky thing about getting sick in August is that when it’s mid-afternoon and it’s 80 degrees in the apartment, I can’t summon up the urge to drink green tea with honey, which is my favorite beverage when sick during the winter.)

Share This Post

Via Matthew Yglesias, I see that Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich — whom I have not allowed onto my radar screen, since he’s got less chance of winning the nomination than Dick Gephardt — thinks that we should have a federal Department of Peace.

I don’t know…this seems to fall in the category of “Well-intentioned, but incredibly goofy” political ideas. Surely a candidate for President should look at his or her policy ideas and decide, “Is this something that Lisa Simpson would propose, if she were President?” If the answer’s yes, then, well, maybe it should be left on the drawing board.

Share This Post

“Captain Solo, it’s possible that this mountain is not entirely stable.”

Mt. Ranier, which looms over Seattle, has long been known to be a dormant volcano, and scientists now believe its chances of awakening are greater than they’ve previously feared.

This brings back some childhood memories. Back in 1980, when Mt. St. Helens erupted magnificently, I actually lived in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, about ninety miles or so away from that volcano. I recall a few Sunday drives into the Washington wilderness to see the mountain, and this is what it looked like:

On the first day that eruptions started, it wasn’t much to look at — basically a big hole opened up in the summit, and steam poured out of it. Those of us in the third-grade classroom watching this on the TV were slightly disappointed, as we had expected something like those ultra-violent eruptions of Hawaiian volcanoes, with gouts of molten lava spraying everywhere. A volcanic eruption without lava just seemed, well, pretty lame.

Until, of course, May 18th.

May 18, 1980 was a cloudy day in Portland, as I recall, so we couldn’t see this eruption from where we were — but several weeks later, on a clear day, there was a series of follow-up eruptions that likewise spewed ash miles into the atmosphere, and I recall standing around with a bunch of friends on our bikes, gazing northward at a sky much like the one above. It was utterly astonishing, and I’ve never forgotten it. Even though we were far enough south that we could not see the mountain itself, the tremendous ash clouds were clearly visible. There were other eruptions as well, and one occurred on a wet and rainy day when the winds just happened to be blowing south, so the ash settled directly on our town and those around it. Believe me when I say that shoveling six inches of snow from one’s driveway is nothing compared to shoveling a mere one inch of volcanic ash. The stuff is heavy and simply does not move. Luckily, as I recall that was the only day when we got a lot of ash — there were other days when we received a dusting, but little more than that.

My other memory of the Mt. St. Helens eruption was of news coverage of an old man named Harry Truman who operated a lodge on Spirit Lake, in the shadow of the mountain. When the eruptions began and officials began clamoring for the evacuation of the locals, Truman refused to leave. He died, along with his cats, on May 18th, killed by the mountain that had been his home. I recall news footage of Truman’s sister being flown over the ash plain in a helicopter, wanting to drop a wreath on the site where Truman’s lodge had been, and the pilot saying something like “I think this is as good a spot as any.” Of course, with today’s GPS technology, they’d be able to pinpoint the exact spot, I suppose. But back then, all they could do was make a rough estimate. I’ve always wondered if Truman’s sister found any closure in watching that wreath bounce along on a featureless plain of ash.

Finally, there is Spirit Lake itself, which has made a remarkable recovery in terms of life since the eruption virtually sterilized the slopes of the mountain. A few years ago I watched a Discovery channel documentary on Mt. St. Helens, in which I learned that the geological upheaval of the eruption was such that the current bottom of Spirit Lake now lies higher than lake’s former surface. This is Spirit Lake before the eruptions:

And here is Spirit Lake just three years ago (from this excellent general site about the mountain). Note that one end of the lake is to this day choked with floating timber from the trees flattened in the eruptions:

But the most awesome indicator of the destruction, the sheer power, that was unleashed in 1980 — and a chilling indicator of what the environs of Mt. Ranier may one day look like — can be seen in this image of Spirit Lake, just months after the eruptions:

The Lord of the Rings fan in me can’t help but see this as Mordor. And that mountain in the distance? That’s Ranier. Sleep well, Seattlites….

Share This Post