austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

You made some new friends who live far from you

And then there's my other venture into customer relation satisfaction phone queues: this one over the Mifi device which my father found perfectly unsatisfactory during his trip out west, since it only worked when he was in a Starbucks with free Wi-Fi. I phoned their support line and left their guy perfectly confused in that I wasn't reporting a current service problem but rather one which had happened the previous week.

This wouldn't stop The Script, of course, as nothing but tactical nuclear weapons will. So, yeah, we went through the ritual of turning it off and back on, and even the variant of stepping outside to see if that does anything, because Virgin Mobile noticed that I was calling from one of the cell phone black holes of the universe. But through repeatedly pointing out that whatever the problems might be in my corner of central New Jersey, they could not be the same problems affecting Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State the previous week. Eventually the voice on the phone conceded there might be something to my deduction.

Just what, though, we don't know. There wasn't any real hope of tracking down the cause from such a remove, really. But they did give a credit for the full month of service even though it was only a week my parents didn't get what they had paid for. And there's even a happy ending: the Mifi worked perfectly for the trip my parents took to my brother last weekend, and served their Internet needs throughout the birth of their second granddaughter. My father was even delighted that it worked in the car. My other brother, apparently, has a Mifi that only works when stationary, and my father assumed all were like this.

So my father's quite pleased and we have something to point and laugh at my brother about now.

Trivia: When Afonso de Albuquerque arrived in India to be the second Portuguese viceroy in 1508, the first viceroy, Francisco de Almeida, refused to recognize Albuquerque's commission, and threw him in irons for months until another fleet from Portugal arrived to confirm the appointment. Source: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped The World, William J Bernstein.

Currently Reading: Highway Of Eternity, Clifford Simak. Man, even for late Simak, when nothing happens, nothing happens.

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