I’ll make this short. My wife was having trouble with cell-phone reception inside our house. So she calls US Cellular. The representative tells her to power down her phone once a day and this will help. (At this point, may I mention, I have the same phone and same provider and no problems. Also, the suggested solution did not work.)
Soon after this, we got a call from a US Cellular call-center. The caller wanted to survey us about our customer service “experience”. I handed the phone to my wife. She spent the next ten minutes or so on this survey, the kind where every question has five possible answers, each of which must be recited by the survey taker before you offer your answer. At the end of it, my wife asked if she could make a comment. The representative replied, go ahead, except I have no way to write down anything you say.
My comment would have been: if you spent as much time solving (or preventing) customer problems as you spend on surveys, you wouldn’t need to do surveys.
This is the kind of post I might have made on Facebook, if I hadn’t stopped posting there. (Today’s Facebook reminds me of AOL in the mid-1990s. Something new will replace it sooner than we think.)
Anyway, I’m pleased to report that I am happy helping folks prepare their tax returns at the local financial counseling agency. I like the staff, the teamwork is great, it feels good to deal directly with people, and taxes are complicated enough (no thanks to the Congress) to keep me intellectually engaged. It also helps that I think I will be good at this. Being good at something is a lot less stressful than trying to measure up.
So the days are getting longer and they also seem a little brighter.