Things That Don't Work

Have you noticed in the last 10 years or so that things don't work? Way too frequently, you get something home and, some incredibly ridiculous short amount of time later, it stops working. Or you buy a service and, when the first monthly bill comes, it has some charge on it that was not explained to you.

The most recent incident of this kind in my life has been with a cell phone recharger that had to buy in Washington. (I somehow lost the one that came with my phone two years ago or so -- no idea where it went.) I got a recharger that was not the same brand as my phone, but was supposed to work with it. And it did. For about five days. Now it will go in the recharger slot, but it doesn't do anything. There's $27 down the tube. (I haven't decided yet whether to fight with Cingular about it.)

Unfortunately, this is just way too common these days. After The Muse and I switched cell companies (so I could get the phone that needs to be recharged), the first monthly bill had a $20 charge on it to have a second phone on the account. Was this explained to us when we signed up for our whiz-bang, new and improved, 1,000-minute a month plan? Hell, no. I screamed at several representatives of the cell phone company about this. They were apologetic. Did anything change? No.

As you may know from reading The Muse's blog, the hinge on her old laptop broke after less than two years. When I called the computer company about it, they said that it wasn't under warranty anymore and, even if it was, the warranty wouldn't cover the problem because we must've let something get into the hinge and that's not a mechanical problem. When I asked the representative how she could possibly know this given that she had never seen our laptop, she said that they build their laptops to withstand being moved around a lot. So the warranty wouldn't cover the broken laptop because the laptop was made so that it wouldn't break. (It reminded me of invading a country, allowing a bunch of terrorists to move in and then saying that the whole thing was justified because the country is the frontline in the fight against terrorism. Okaaaay.)

It's just unreal how things don't work. Our toaster doesn't toast. One upstairs TV has a yellow spot in the bottom left corner of the screen. My old car, a Toyota Solara that I bought because it was supposed to never break down, blew its water pump out about 2,000 miles after the warranty ran out and the ABS warning light flicked on and off periodically for no apparent reason. My Toyota, for God's sake! Our 2004 Mazda minivan makes a funny sound when the car is cold and you're backing up. The CD drive on our desktop broke less than a year after we bought it (the rewriter drive will run CD's though). The "p" key on my firm's laptop stopped working less than a year after we bought it.

When these things happen, I call the customer service and yell at people. Our office manager does the same thing at work. I know that customer service people aren't the ones responsible. I know that they are cannon fodder meant to receive hostility and not provide any solutions. I'm sorry, customer service people (especially the ones in India), but your bosses stink and they hired you.

Why are we willing to tolerate this kind of BS? It's because everything has gotten cheaper. You can buy desktop computers for something like $300 or $400. They just give some cell phones away when you sign a service contract. I think our upstairs TV cost something like $50. They give AM/FM radio headsets away with magazine subscriptions. You can buy burnable CD's for like $20 for 50. (You remember that scene in Sixteen Candles when Farmer Ted asks Samantha if he can borrow her underwear because he bet his friend a box of floppy disks that he would sleep with her and needs her underwear as proof because floppies are really expensive? It is for to laugh.)

At some point, we culturally decided that we want things to be really cheap and are willing to sacrifice a great deal of quality to get cheap things. The technology industry in particular seems to have taken that to heart. They keep pushing the price of computers down and keep pushing the quality of customer service down too.

For example, our firm just bought new computers. This is, I think, the third time we have done this in the six years since I started there. Did law firms change computers three times in six years 15 years ago? Uh, I think not. Computers are much cheaper now. My new computer, however, basically was a piece of trash as soon as it came out of the box. It basically didn't want to start some mornings. It would lock up so badly that I couldn't give it the three-finger-salute (Control-Alt-Delete) -- not the third-finger-salute, though that is what I wanted to give it -- and couldn't even turn it off by pressing the CPU's power button. I had to turn off the power at the surge protector. What was our computer provider's response? They wanted me to sit on the phone with them for some undetermined amount of time conducting troubleshooting exercises before they would agree to do anything else. Now, as you may know, attorneys' services are monetized by the amount of time that they work on a matter. So, our computer provider, having made a lemon, having not caught that lemon in their QA/QC process, having allowed this computer to be installed in our office, now wants me to blow off my billable work time talking on the phone with them before they spend any money fixing the problem. This made me rather angry. I refused. I was out of the office the next day. Our very kind office manager agreed to try to do the phone troubleshooting while I was out. The day I was out of the office, however, our office manager couldn't even get my computer to turn on. When she called the troubleshooting line, she told them she couldn't do what they wanted because the computer wouldn't even turn on.

This gave me a great deal of enjoyment. Their attempt to foist the burden of their ineptitude on to our firm was thwarted by the very extent of their ineptitude.

Is this cycle of things get cheaper and lousier unstoppable? I sure don't see it stopping. We like things cheap. We -- I -- will stand in gigantic lines at Costco because things are cheap. Communities welcome WalMarts, though they know they will hurt local businesses. WalMart sells things cheaply.

Don't know quite what to say about all of this, except that I will really try hard not to be nasty to Indian customer service representatives.