My grandmother bought a waffle iron right after the 1929 financial crash. Family tradition was to have a big Sunday lunch then either waffles or French toast for supper.
Eventually my mother inherited it and then I did. Not necessarily every Sunday night, but my daughter and I had many waffle meals, before I surrendered the machine in 1989 when I moved from my loved Riverway Boston condo to France. I don't know if anyone, who shopped the Salvation Army charity store where I left it, bought and used it. I have no idea how much longer it worked. I can only vouch for its first 60 years.
Fast forward to my purchase of a Cannon camera. It worked beautifully for three days when the shutter decided to stay half closed. Neither the store nor the company made good on it.
As a writer before email, I sent tons of manuscripts to publishers. My printer did thousands and thousands of pages, albeit in black and white, within a five year period. Maybe once a year I had to replace the cartridge. I would still love to use the printer, but when I had a new laptop with a Microsoft upgrade they were no longer compatible. All subsequent printers decided working more than a few months was beneath their dignity. As for colored ink cartridges, they deign to spit out a few drops before demanding a replacement.
When we tried to return a food processor that never worked, the clerk at the store where we bought it told us we had to talk to customer service. He did place the call.
Place! After 15 minutes a human still hadn't picked up the line. We left the defunct processor without a refund or substitute (against store policy) and bought another from another store.
Almost every day some product goes wrong. It can be simple such as the steam iron doesn't want to steam. Thursday's problem was the internet. As writers a non working internet is serious.
A call to our service provider: although shifted from customer service to tech support (?), that produced canned responses some of which bore a relationship to our problem, some who thought the colors on our box were not real.
It was not SFR's fault the call was in French, which left me translating. A couple of terms I couldn't find in our paper French-English dictionary. If I'd had internet, I might have been able to look up the words on line.
After more than an hour we gave up. Husband Rick wrote that their service was "merde" and went to bed. At least we'd been working as a team with me as translator and him as the person describing to me what I needed to translate.
In the morning we had a message from a human. We called. He fixed the problem within minutes.
I'll admit I'm not a patient person, although my patience has increased to maybe five nanoseconds. When I deal with a human, I have mastered being polite and appreciative. I do prefer dealing in English, but can manage in French although I find requests to speak lentement works better with women than men who remember to speak slowly for three or four sentences. Women stay in the slow mode.
What is my fantasy?
I buy something and it works for a reasonable amount of time. If something goes wrong, I can deal with a customer service and/or tech support who can do something about it.
Silly, silly me.

No comments:
Post a Comment