customer service rant No. 123865425

Not the end of the world, but it pissed me off. I have a freelance design gig on the side of my normal job, so I have a pretty heavy workload from home, without the help of an IT department. I am in the end of a very heavy production cycle designing a magazine, and I got home, and tried to open Quark 7.3 on my laptop, and got an error message. No big deal . . . I have seen this before, I know I just have to dump my preferences folder and relaunch the program. Only problem is, the preferences folder isn't where it usually is. So I google it (always do this when I have a problem) and the solutions somehow didn't work for me and I still coundn't find it, so I gave up and called Quark Xpress customer service to have a person talk me through it. Except when I call, I get a message telling me to use the free online customer service, or, for $39.99 I can get a tech who probably doesn't speak English very well to help solve my relatively easy problem.

Seriously? I have to pay 40 bucks for a person? Hookers cost less in Vegas (or so I'm told)

Are we seriously trying to phase people out? This, then the local library is going to self checkout only, the local grocery is pretty much doing the same . . . OK, Rant over.

 

"Quark" and "customer service" don't belong in the same sentence.

 

Our Quark goes down more often than a drunk and horny sorority girl. Expecting it not to crash is like expecting to exhale oxygen rather than carbon dioxide.

 

I know things go wrong with the program, but v. 7.3 is working pretty well for me. It's more the fact that I have to pay 40 bucks to talk to a person. I just wonder if other companies are adopting this practice

 

CS4

 

You should deal with Charter Communications.

 

I have no problems with Charter. I have the regional supervisor's number and those of about half a dozen line techs after calling them for line problems for five months straight. They insisted there was no problem, I said there was. They eventually found the problem.

 

Only five months. That seems reasonable.

 

sounds a little bit like Apple if your iTunes crashes.

In my case, my iTunes got lost in a hard-drive crash. to go through Apple for the way to get my iPod loaded back into my iTunes, I have to pay to do it over the phone with one of their techs. I'm looking for other options first.

 

They still make Quark?

 

Dear Comcast,

Fuck you. I needed to configure my new computer with my secure wireless network. I forgot the password that you gave me YEARS ago, when it was initially set up. I called your customer assfucking line at 10:30a this morning. While bent over, I went through layers and layers of automated bullshit, none of which represented my particular problem. I appreciate that you are experiencing "higher call volume" than normal, but you have been lying to me about that for three fucking years. You know what to do. Stop making crappy products or start hiring more nerds.

I was also highly impressed with your suggestion that I call back at my convenience, when the wait time should be considerably shorter. I appreciated that particular proposition so much that I threw my phone down on the ground and stared at it for thirty seconds. When I finally retrieved the phone, you were gone. I will give you this one disconnect. That was on me. The other THREE are on you.

So I called back and waited thirty minutes to talk to a dipshit. When Bruce finally came on the line, I politely explained my situation. Bruce needed to verify my identity. This particular segment of our conversation lasted roughly ten minutes. Bruce suffered from an ability to comprehend words.
"Is this account under your name or your husband's name?"
"I'm not married. It's under my name."
"And what is your husband's social security number?"
"I'm not married. Would you like my lover's social security number?"
"Is he on the account?"
"No, she is not."
Then he really started getting flustered.

When Bruce and I finally hammered out my real identity, he diagnosed my problem by explaining that he couldn't help me, and I would need to speak with a technical representative. Well holy shit, Bruce!! What was all this foreplay about? Bruce answered my query by disconnecting me.

Twenty minutes later I get Sandy on the phone. Sandy apparently also thought I was Batman and littered me with twenty questions regarding my true identity. I attempted to cut her off by just asking to speak directly to a technical representative. Sandy was livid that I tried to resist her authority and also promptly hung up on me.

And, finally we have a person with an accent so thick, she could have been Russian or Chinese or Irish. I have no fucking clue. We got nowhere really, really fast and after ten minutes of me saying, "I'm sorry, what?" And ten minutes of @#%&^&* repeating herself over and over again, I finally asked for her supervisor. At which point, I swear to God, she suddenly wiped away about half of her accent, took me through a two minute process that uncovered my password and wished me a pleasant day. I now have high-speed, wireless internet access.

Fuck you, Comcast.