From Thoreau, who lives nearby and who I really ought to meet someday:
I’m probably just dwelling on the trivialities of my comfortable suburban professional existence, but my basic grievance against big companies is that when they screw up they take 6-8 weeks to fix it, usually after multiple phone calls and whatnot, but if I screw up a penalty is immediately levied. This happens on every scale, from billing snafus with $7 fees, to cases of people being foreclosed on even though they had never missed a payment and spent money on lawyers to prove this, to “Oops, we broke the global economy, could you send $1 trillion to our Nigerian accounts?”
The latest snafus on my end are (1) I’m getting a bill for water service in an apartment that I moved out of, for a billing period that doesn’t overlap my last month in that apartment and (2) I set up autopay with another utility, or at least tried to, something didn’t go through, and now I’m paying a $7 late fee….It’s not the $7, it’s the asymmetry of the responsibility. If I screw up (and I still maintain I did everything necessary for autopay!), I have to pay a late fee. If they screw up, they give me runaround. As long as it’s $7 at stake, fine, but they do this at every level. I think of the hassle I had to go through to get the title for my car after I paid off the loan (early) and I can’t even imagine the hell it must be to have your house foreclosed because of a snafu that they didn’t even notify you of (because of another snafu).
So, I say that we should be able to put large companies on hold when they want something, send them through phone trees, and ask them to re-submit paperwork that we may or may not lose track of.
All in favor, raise your hands. Motion carried!
