1.
My cell phone provider—a cheap “virtual” carrier that runs as a subordinate entity on the tower-based network of one of the major wireless companies—started hassling me via enthusiastic text and email a few months ago about its recent sale to one of the other “big 3” companies. They were offering a free month of upgraded 5G service if I swapped out my SIM for the new one they’d send.
Without much analysis, I went ahead and agreed, received a new SIM by overnight package, and then—because life got in the way—never got around to doing the swap. (Those of you who’ve been reading a while know that I’ve had to travel to California from Baltimore 7 times in the past 14 months to help my elderly mother through a cascade of near-terminal health emergencies.)
In late July I began getting urgent warnings that if I didn’t make the SIM switch ASAP, I might start experiencing dropped calls, service interruptions, and other problems. In early August I tried calling the toll-free number included in these warnings. It seemed to be the helpline of a third-party tech company. I went through at least 5 steps in the telephonic decision tree, never spoke to an actual human, and did a bunch of waiting “in line” for a customer service representative who never materialized, before finally being sent to another extension with a recorded message.
A cheery female voice said something like “You have reached a nonworking number, GOODBYE!” and then ended the call.
I tried this several more times over several days with the same results. Then I went online with my original provider to chat with tech support. In the past, they’ve been pretty helpful and not too hard to reach by chat or phone. This time the chat agent referred me back to the same problematic number I’d tried in the first place. When I explained that this number had repeatedly dumped me into nowheresville, they offered no explanation, they neither confirmed nor denied the threatened service interruptions, and then they rushed me off the chat.
WTF was happening? A scam direct from a once seemingly up-and-up company? The new system rolled out to customers too early with major kinks? Mere incompetence? And why the disinterest in addressing a problem that kept a customer from a seemingly urgent and mandatory upgrade? Why the bum’s rush off the chat?
I’ve found some vague references on Reddit to similar problems with this corporate merger, but still don’t know exactly what I’ve just encountered—nor do I have time for detective work. Like all of us these days, I just need reliable phone service at a reasonable price.
This should not be complex in the year 2022. I mean to drop this carrier soon and go directly with one of the other majors, even though they cost more and may not provide any better customer service. For now, at least, my phone service still works. A helpful thing when your mother is dying 2600 miles away from your home.
2.
For more than a decade I’ve been using Intuit accounting products (i.e. QuickBooks) to manage my own various solo or partner creative businesses, and to help entrepreneur clients and accountants who’ve hired me. (This may sound a bit sick emerging from the mouth of an artist, but I believe double-entry bookkeeping to be a thing of genuine intellectual beauty, logic, and blunt truth…when used by truthful people, anyway.)
Several months ago, my QuickBooks Online portal electronically pushed me into accepting their new QuickBooks Cash program without full disclosure or clear ways to opt out. A new QB Cash account suddenly appeared in my banking portal. It contained a $250 payment I’d received direct through QuickBooks from a client for a thirty-second voiceover. Normally I’d have directed the amount into my usual checking account.
Now I was being promised a debit card to access that cash. When the card arrived, I tried to activate it per the instructions. The system asked for my date of birth, claimed it did not match their records, and then shut down the call. This happened many times.
I did some digging to find a number for the card provider, Green Dot Bank. (I’ve since learned what a scammy, problematic company that is—Google it and you’ll see what I mean.) Several different human agents—I guessed from their accents that they were in the Philippines—also claimed I didn’t know my own birthday and rushed me off the phone. As if I were the shady character in these encounters.
There seemed to be no way for me to access my own money.
I went on Twitter several times to call them out and raise a stink. They’d delete my tweets and DM me with offers to help, but these often went nowhere. It took me many tries and many social media threats until I finally spoke with someone to learn that the company records had my birthday OFF BY ONE YEAR. It’s possible I made that typo myself, but I seriously doubt it. I now had to send them a scan of my driver’s license so they’d fix it.
After several weeks of this kind of BS, I was finally able to transfer $250 from that shady account into my regular business checking. I removed the automatic banking connection from my portal but it remains my chart of accounts. If I try to inactive it, I’m told I can’t because it’s “attached to one of my sales lines.” I have no more interest in wasting my time on this problem but it seems they’ve made it impossible for me to shut it down entirely.
Again…I probably should have checked Reddit first.
3.
We all have these stories, right? More of them every day. (Feel free to share yours in the comments section, if you’d like.)
Increasingly shitty customer service at major companies is old news, of course. We complained when we could no longer get a US-based native English speaker on the phone to help us with tech or billing problems; we complained when it became nearly impossible to get any human on the phone for any reason except sales. I feel as if we’ve entered a new phase where certain formerly high-functioning, relatively well-regarded corporations have become not just incompetent, understaffed, and virtually unreachable, but also shady, sketchy, and wildly irresponsible. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising in a country that’s corrupt to its core and rapaciously greedy top to bottom, a country that allowed a con man, grifter, and evident traitor to sit in the White House for four years, still hasn’t found a clear pathway to putting him behind bars, and may very well have him at the top of the ballot again.
This is a broad brush, I don’t have the details at my fingertips, but from what I understand: The USA stopped enforcing the anti-trust laws we’d put on the books starting in the late 19th century to combat the robber barons. Nor have our legislators and agencies figured out how to rein in newfangled Internet-enabled shenanigans like the Quickbooks shit sandwich I was served.
And then there are all the other “Reagan Revolution” methods by which the hoarder-investor class can ensure that shareholder value is the only important value—deregulation of the financial sector, devaluing of the public sector, corporate capture of public watchdog agencies, regressive tax policies, court rulings in favor of unfettered power for the already powerful…. Nearly every corporation is now a machine efficiently redistributing wealth away from mere customers and upward toward a small cabal of unaccountable owners and bloated investors.
Here we are again, a nation of rampant monopolies and monopsonies with fewer competitive incentives to offer quality products and services.1 With our stagnant or diminishing paychecks and our tight budgets, we aren't in a position to do much more than bitch and moan as prices go up and service goes down.
It’s not complicated. The plot isn’t thickening. The shit continues to shitten. There are no surprises here. All this was predicted—at the very least, by sane economists who weren’t uncritical enthusiasts of the Law & Economics movement2. But until there’s a broad cultural and political shift in the direction of ending oligarchy and Wall Street/corporate hegemony, and instead developing a sane version of social democracy and reasonably rule-bound capitalism, we have no power to demand better treatment.
4.
Two weeks ago, my sister and I were told that our mother—an advanced heart disease patient now in hospice protocol—had steeply declined after my recent visit. At the assisted living facility she has called home for 13 years, she was suddenly refusing things like help with showers and wheelchair trips to the dining room, she was losing orientation and the ability to speak logically, and she was lethargic to the point of being unwakeable. We were told was going to be removed from her meds and allowed to enter her final transition.
My sister and I made plans to rush out from the East Coast, assuming our mother might have only days to live. But by that time we’d also started hearing some contrary and confusing messages from different staff members: she seemed to have bounced back a bit. We flew out to the Ontario Airport anyway, needing to suss out the scene.
It turns out that a hospice visiting NP had responded to Mom’s neuropathic pain by putting her on Lyrica, even though there were still standing orders for Gabapentin in her chart. Her sudden decline seemed 100% coincident with the new drug.
The assisted living caregivers—some of whom have known my mother for a decade—had to argue with the hospice personnel (i.e. staff of another company entirely) to get the Lyrica removed. Within days, she had returned to her previous condition, or just a little worse.
My sister and I have just spent a couple of days with her and have confirmed she’s not in good shape—she is even more paranoid, forgetful, and belligerent, but can be calmed when her basic needs are met. That said, she does not seem to be at death’s door just yet.
Many problems were created by massive miscommunications between the two companies and within their respective staffs. We spoke with a dozen different people at all levels of authority in both companies until we finally could discern the truth-tellers from the CYAers from the lower-level individuals who have some important facts and observations, even if they don’t have a lot of authority.
The entire thing is still a muddle. My mother’s medication orders are a mess and need to be reviewed and reconciled. The traveling hospice NP who requested the Lyrica seems to have been a temp of some sort, one who weirdly bears a Tamil surname that we have on my father’s side of the family. The hospice manager I spoke to acted as if she’d never heard his name. The new health and wellness coordinator at the assisted living community is fantastically competent and responsible, but has only been there a month and still needs time to fix problems and retrain staff. The Lyrica order was removed but the Gabapentin was not immediately restored, and a former order for Tylenol 3 had mysteriously disappeared from her chart weeks ago. We still don’t know why. My mother spent several days in unnecessary pain while we had to lobby to reinstate the meds she needs.
I have learned the hard way that the hospice company is under no specific obligation to inform me, my mother’s attorney-in-fact, when they change up her meds. This is still a bit unfathomable and I need to research it further.
Again, though, WTF? How are these things happening? Yes, I know, staffing problems, post-pandemic system breakdowns, yada yada. It’s just more expensive shittification.
My mother grew up in an Indian slum but became an American MD; she worked entirely with poor patients in poor parts of New Jersey. After her early retirement due to chronic pain conditions and various joint replacement surgeries, she was briefly a rental property investor. Even after almost 20 years without work or income, she still has a higher-than-average net worth for her age, although her resources are not unlimited. Unless she stays alive a lot longer than anyone expects, she will be able to pay almost $5,000 for a simple one-bedroom apartment and another $1700 for significant additional services as she grows incapacitated. The company who runs her community is a three billion dollar corporation with more than 20,000 employees around the nation. I’m assuming most will never earn enough to save up for a place like the one that employs them.
The hospice company also bills Medicare about $185 every day for my mother’s account, even though they seem to be doing a pretty mediocre job with her care. Mediocre at best, potentially deadly at worst.
These dollar amounts are, yes, insane. And not even remotely the top prices a true modern robber baron might pay for an ultra-luxurious, ultra-comfortable passage toward death. Compared to most of us in this country and this world, our mother is extraordinarily privileged. She is liked despite her extremely ornery personality, she is physically helped by people who harbor no heated familial emotions about her, and she is safe.
Clarification: she’s safe until somebody who is paid to care for her ends up killing her by ordering the wrong med. As if dying in pain from multiple diseases isn’t shitty enough. Palliative care is great but involuntary acceleration toward the inevitable seems, um, rather uncalled for—unless the terminal patient actively seeks physician-assisted suicide. That’s not something I can imagine my floridly religious mother choosing.
But also—this being a country originally built on the greedy exploitation of other people’s bodies—why would any of her caretakers want her to die soon, anyway? They’d have to stop billing her, or billing the State of California. Everyone needs to get paid, even if the corporations hoard the spoils and the everyday staff paychecks are shit.
Substack author Matt Stoller covers history and news about the ills of monopoly power in his excellent blog BIG.
I tried to find a rationally critical search result to explain the problems with this movement. The first page of Google results showed only positive or neutral-seeming articles. The Wikipedia entry is intellectually incomplete and thus seems written by a supporter. Here’s one article I found that explains how this academic “libertarian” movement has resulted in a sharply rightwing court.
Green Dot... Oh Noooo!!! Yes, I think it was specifically created to help scammers get rich. I had one run in with it years ago and will never touch it again. Sorry you were apparently thrust into using it. Glad you finally got your $$.
As always, thinking of you and your sister as you do your best to care for your mother. 🧡
A great L.A. columnist , David Lazarus, used to do chapter and verse reports about the egregious customer service we get, like what you've written, and I was looking forward to supplying him with my TIVO story when he stopped the column. We could use some central source where his stories and your story and my story would go -- a whistleblowing from enraged consumers about corporate malfeasance.
As a longtime 2-TIVO person, my saga started when I discovered they hadn't cancelled my monthly service contract when one TIVO gave out -- adn I was forced to get something new. (No, my lifetime contract couldn't be transferred.) After a few years of monthly payments for nothing, I realized what was happening and contacted them. The policy is to refund for only 3 months. It's almost comical in that the newest TIVO was a lemon -- it was a whole other aggravation involving proving that to them -- and when I finally got a good one I asked for some compensation for the several months that process took. They didn't have a direct category to give me a courtesy like that so they mickey-moused and reduced the monthly charge on that non-existent set by half., so I only had to pay half the fee on nothing until I discovered what was happening and got offered the 3 month refund of that fee that had been cut in half. I could go on...