Have you noticed, or is it just me? Lately, we’ve been disappointed more times than usual from vendors not doing their job completely or correctly. It seems the customer is burdened with initiating said completions and corrections.
By happen stance we discovered the freight company that ultimately delivered landscape panels we ordered had the wrong phone number in their system. Turns out, if we didn’t proactively (aka preemptively) call them they wouldn’t have scheduled the delivery.
Oh, and the panel manufacturer? Turns out they didn’t have the correct phone number in their system for the freight company! After tracking down and correcting all of the important details each vendor’s response was merely, “Oh, we had a system glitch.”
As if that’s a new or acceptable apology; systems glitches. They used to call it “bugs” (customers use other, R-Rated labels). As a salesman, I was more creative:
GAP's Dictionary of Computereeze:
Bugs - Actually, we have no bugs; perhaps a few undocumented features, but definitely no bugs.
Speaking of those landscape panels. We couldn't install them until we received approval from the architectural committee of our Home Owners Association. HOAs can be notorious for slow, complicated, approval processes. I sometimes wonder if they’re actually hoping to find a “glitch” in order to reject requests.
When we called our HOA on the status of our application and were told they were experiencing… surprise, surprise… a “system glitch”. That’s why the approval took longer than normal. I suppose that’s what our world has come to. We’re overly dependent on computers (aka the “machines”). Dare we criticize?
Gallois's Revelation
If you put tom-foolery into a computer, nothing comes back out but tom-foolery. But this tom-foolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled, and no one dares to criticize it.
Unknown Sage
Even if we could track down the Programmers that originally wrote the code for these faulty systems, I don’t think we would garner much satisfaction. This explanation from the 4th richest person in the world (according to Forbes) says it all:
I was hearing stories like customers would call because the product didn’t work and the would get answers like, “Bummer, Dude."
Larry Ellison
As companies rely more and more on their systems I guess we’ll just have to take a more active role in ensuring our requests are handled correctly and completely. Bummer.
GAP
When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.
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