A Letter to Glenn Britt

(5/24/07 update below)

Time Warner Cable CEO
Glenn Britt

CC: his Technical Service Staff

Dear Glenn,

I have decided that the only way to balance the equation of my getting what I pay Time Warner Cable for and what I actually receive is to reduce the dollar amount paid to $0.

You're fired.

Why? Oh, let's just talk about the last few months (going back 3 years and over 30 on-site service calls would be somewhat tedious.)

Since last fall, I have had a dual-cablecard-and-tivo3 setup. Every time something goes wrong (say, the cablecards suddenly stop receiving premium channels, while the broadcast channels are perfectly OK) I am forced to make an appointment for an on-site service call, usually over a week into the future, during which I have no TV service. During said service call, all the technician does is dial in to the tech service center (the same one I dialed into a week prior to make the appointment), give them the serial number of the cable cards and we hope for the best. I could have done that myself.

My point, and the source of my frustration, is that whatever may or may not be wrong with the technology is moot as far as customers receiving the service they need if you hire uneducated, untrained, unmotivated, unempowered drones to do the job of a voice-response system and call it customer service ("I'm sorry sir, but we can't do that over the phone; you'll have to schedule a service call", etc etc).

Well, I can't hold my full-time job of tending to the animals at Neverland or whatever it is I do for a living and jump through hoops for the amusement of the cost-effectiveness analysts you hired that told you that paying tech support technicians $15/hr and just throw quantity-over-quality brute force at the problem is the way to serve your customers (yes, that's what I was told you pay them, you bastard; meanwhile your compensation for the year leading to April '07 was enough to pay for 304 field technicians for one year).

I'm looking forward to FiOS becoming available in my neighborhood (soon enough; they have it barely a mile away). To quote one of your tech people letting me know about the setup he himself had at his house as we were killing time in my living room on hold with a service center operator: "FiOS is the shit". I'm sure he knows.



In the meantime, maybe I'll get some reading done... (my in-shelf is quite full, and I've got a small stack of New Yorkers to get through...)



(for folks of the same mind as me, especially if you live in Brooklyn, please do drop your comments -- or, if you prefer, my personal address is j u a n m at p a n i x . c 0 m ).

05/27/07 Update: When the technician came to collect the cablecards -- something I was categorically forbidden to do myself because "it requires expertise to remove them and if they become damaged as a result [I] would have to pay for them" he first (1) tried to unscrew the coax from the back of my Tivo thinking that it was a cable box and he was supposed to take it with him, and (2) had to be told which/what the cablecards were, and (3) I had to remove them for him because he didn't know how. This is the fun one has with Time Warner Cable.

Letter to US Postal Servicere: Douglas Adams Stamp

I had a great idea for a US Mail stamp, so I wrote a letter to the USPS to let them know. Appropriately, they don't let you send them email; you have to send them a letter (link goes to the how-to-not-to page). Their response is below my letter.

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Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee c/o Stamp Development U.S. Postal Service 1735 North Lynn St., Suite 5013 Arlington, VA 22209-6432

To whom it may concern,

I read today about the proposed cost increase of first-class postage to 42c per unit. (This is not a complaint; please read on).

It immediately occurred to me that this would be a terrific opportunity to honor with a stamp an author known and respected by all lovers of satirical and science fiction – Douglas Adams.

Among other respected works (including some non-fiction environmentalist research and reportage), Mr. Adams wrote several books in his series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the style of Lewis Carroll, his intricate parodies of modern life were simultaneously timely and timeless and have touched millions of lives in the English-speaking world and beyond.

While not a native-born American, like Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand he very much chose to live in the U.S., and wrote several passages in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish that attest to his love of the California surfside lifestyle. He loved it to death, in fact (Santa Barbara, in 2001 at age 49, of a heart attack).

The reason an opportunity presents itself related to the price of a 42c stamp is that “42” was his favorite number. In any case, he decided to use it as the absurd answer given by a mythical, colossal computer when asked for the Answer to “life, the universe and everything” (in his book of that name). All of his fans – and many who have not even read his books, as this is now part of the general popular culture -- are aware of this in-joke and share it freely.

I think it would be a fantastic opportunity for the US Postal Service and for fans of literature everywhere to take advantage of this. Has there ever been a subject of a stamp intimately related to the price of the stamp..? I certainly can’t think of anything that would be a funny joke related to a 47c stamp, the next likely increase price.

Sincerely and honestly hoping this will pan out,

Juan Molinari

ps, I realize that the general deadline for idea submissions is three years prior to the expected date of release/publication, but as Douglas himself once wrote:

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

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Their response:

Complaint Letter to Yahoo

To whom it may concern,

This is in regards to trouble ticket # 4607540 | Yahoo ID: juanolator.

Today I am canceling my Yahoo Mail Plus service.

I am going to take the time to tell you exactly why. This is something I rarely do, as I have little faith that it makes any difference -- if a company really wants to provide good service and / or a product of value to their customers it seldom requires that letters like this be written in order for it to happen from the outset.

On Tuesday, December 12th I noticed that emails I sent through the Web interface were taking an unusual amount of time to be delivered to their recipients. "Unusually", at that time, meant 1-2 hours. We are talking about short, plain-text emails with no attachments, each sent to different recipients with accounts on different mail systems (thus strongly suggesting the problem was not on the receiving end)

I have been using the Internet for over 15 years. I have never heard of a lightweight email taking more than 3 minutes to be delivered. Still, the Yahoo technician I spoke to insisted that it was "normal" for an email to take up to 24 hours to be delivered. I told her how insultingly incorrect that was. Furthermore I told her that the problem only manifested itself when using the Web interface; that using the Yahoo SMTP server from Outlook did not result in any delays, and that thus the problem seemed to be localized not only to the Yahoo network but specifically the Web interface.

So much for trying to be helpful in solving my vendor's problems. She then directed me to submit my concern to reportabuse@yahoo-inc.com which I thought was unusual since (a) this was not an abuse situation, and (b) she could have done it for me (she gave me a trouble ticket number -- it was already in her system, she wouldn't even have had to re-type a description, as I had to do). She also said they would get back to me within 24 hours. In my experience with ISPs and other online service providers, a mission-critical problem such as this is dealt with (or at least the customer is reassured that a human being is working on it) within 24 MINUTES, not hours.

24+ hours later (about 6:30pm Wednesday), I called in again as I had yet to receive anything beyond an automated reply and the problem had become exacerbated to the point where emails were taking 4-5 hours to be received. The person I spoke to gave me the same milquetoast, scripted responses I had received on Tuesday, except now said that I would receive a response within *48* hours of my having submitted it.

It is now over 48 hours since I first submitted a report of this system failure. Emails are simply not being received at all. The Yahoo customer service person I just spoke with not only asked me the same questions I had already answered twice in each of the preceding two days (she claimed the ticket record didn’t have much salient information), but then went on to say

Y: "Well, we need to report this to our engineers."
JM: "I reported it two days ago -- I sent email to reportabuse@yahoo-inc.com as I was told."
Y: "No.. we need to do it internally, through our system here."
JM: "Why wasn't that done two days ago? Why wasn't that done yesterday? Why do you wait until the third time I call in with a showstopper of a problem to do that?"
Y: (unintelligible)
JM: "OK, when can I expect somebody to address this?"
Y: "Within 3-5 business days."

And so we must part ways. I like your interface; I think it is vastly superior to Gmail's (although I imagine they will leap-frog you soon enough). The Gmail service, however, allows me to send email. If it ever came to fail, the worst I could say is that I got what I was paying for.

Your service doesn't cost too much money ($25/yr I think it is). A user like me, who appreciates a useful tool, would probably gladly pay 2 or 3 times that if they got a service THAT ACTUALLY WORKED. Please try to remember that when you are selling your customer service operators’ headsets secondhand in order to pay your bankruptcy lawyers’ fees.

Sincerely,

Juan Molinari

Letter to Richard Dreyfuss

I wrote a letter to Richard Dreyfuss to thank him for his comments spoken as a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. (please click here for the video; it's a must-watch).

Letter to Roger Rosenblatt

I recently wrote a letter to PBS NewsHour columnist Roger Rosenblatt. I wanted to tell him how much I enjoyed his novel Lapham Rising. Here is the text of the letter:

Dear Mr. Rosenblatt, I recently read your book Lapham Rising. I want you to know I found it very pleasant. I especially enjoyed how Mr. Lapham’s assistant’s name is an anagram for “A random tele ink”. My only concern is that I enjoyed your book to an extent slightly beyond that which is justified by the purchase price. In order to resolve this, I have enclosed $5. You may enjoy this without sharing it with your publisher. If you would rather not receive cash, perhaps for tax purposes, feel free to drop by my home in Brooklyn any time and I will feed you a hamburger and a coke. In that case, please don’t forget to bring the $5 with you. Sincerely, Juan Molinari

This is what he wrote me back: