BS blogs blogs just like your mother used to write

Part four in a series. Part three is here.

Here's a new twist I found on customer service. A certain satellite television provide advertises on their web site that they have "Better Customer Service for All" and on their contact page it says "Superior Customer Service". So can you guess what it is like to call them?

Part three in a series. Part two is here.

After a lot of promises to have it installed by Friday, and a few Fridays, they finally were able to install my service last Saturday. Of course my phone is disconnected now for no particular reason that anyone at TPC (the phone company) can fathom. Perhaps Monday will bring another visitor to fix that. I cannot bring myself to recount all the horrible "customer service" I experienced since my last entry. But in the end a few people were unrelentless and with their help I am back online.

Part two in a series. Part one is here.

My phone company, The Phone Company (TPC)*, has a whole bunch of customer service numbers. They have the latest in voice recognition technology. It asks you to speak your phone number and asks for the last four digits of your social security number and repeats it all back to you in a nice pleasant voice. It works well if you want to find out how much money you owe them. That's what customer service is all about, right? But if you speak the magic word "representative" then you get put on hold. There is a really neat song that loops without any perceptible break and you get to listen to it over and over again. I think one time I counted 78 loops before I gave up.

Maybe God was punishing me last Friday. It wasn't Friday the 13th. At least not on any calendars with which I'm familiar. And I don't think I've offended any witch doctors or voodoo queens. Sometimes I think that when I have extra cash, my house or my car can smell it. Still that doesn't explain everything that went south.

As an entrepreneur I learned to hate these words. But I never thought I'd hear them in my home from my kids. Yet my son said this the other day when asked to do something. Apparently what I asked him to do was something his sister usually does ergo it wasn't his job.

People can give new meanings to words. Weaning is usually used to describe the process of convincing a baby to give up breast feeding. But being a father and an observer of human behaviors has led me to the conclusion that weaning is a life long process. I'm not suggesting that it takes a lifetime to give up suckling a breast, and many men never do. I am suggesting that "giving up" is a process that continues throughout growth and development. In fact, you could say that we are ultimately weaned from the tit of life itself.