Customer Service Chronicles: Bank of America

Consistent, straight answers are really all I ask from any business I patronize. I’m not always going to be able to get what I want, and that’s fine; just tell me that at the beginning of a situation and neither of us will waste our time.

I’ve got two Visa cards, one from Bank of America and one not. I’ve had both cards for several years, and been reasonably happy with them; two from two different banks seems like plenty to me. A couple years ago, though, I started to notice the odd merchant that only took MasterCard; conveniently, though, BofA offers MasterCards as well, so I decided to inquire about whether my Visa could simply be converted. Same credit line, same account age, same bank, same everything but the account number and logo at the lower right. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Best Buy: Absolute Freaking Morons in Appliance Sales, Delivery and Installation

Thursday, 5 July: My landlord orders a dishwasher on BestBuy.com for delivery and installation on Wednesday, 11 July. In an e-mail message to her after the order is placed, they claim that delivery and installation must be done on separate days: Wednesday and Thursday.

Friday, 6 July: Not wanting to take two separate days off work, I call Best Buy and speak with a gentleman in Appliance Installation and Delivery who helpfully reschedules both to the same day; timeframe’s still not available until the day before, but at least I’m limited to only 8 possible hours off work. Apparently stores can schedule same-day installation and delivery, but the website schedules them separately at first. No harm done, though; everything’s set for Wednesday, and I’ll get the timeframe call on Tuesday.

Tuesday, 10 July, noon: The Baltimore delivery warehouse leaves a message: they’ll be delivering between 5:30 and 7:30 PM Wednesday. Obviously, this is not compatible with same-day installation. I call them back; they can’t reschedule, but inform me that installation will in fact take place on Thursday, as originally stated in the e-mail. In this amusing saga, I’m told that store orders are always scheduled for same-day delivery and installation, BestBuy.com orders are always scheduled for separate days, and no one is capable of making a change to convert the two post-order placement. The warehouse associate freely admits to this being silly, and claims it’s being worked on at corporate. We scramble to rearrange work schedules so one of us can be home on Thursday instead of during the day on Wednesday.

Tuesday, 3:45 PM: An auto-dialer from the installation department calls to inform me that installation is scheduled for Wednesday between 2 and 6 PM. Installation before delivery, eh? Neat trick. I call the installation department back; they suggest getting delivery to reschedule. I try delivery again; they say no dice. I call installation back, they say they can’t reschedule until Friday. In case you’re counting, this is now the third distinct installation/delivery schedule offered. Told that I’ll be able to get a Friday slot no matter when I call back today, I decide to hold my 2-6 Wednesday slot for the moment and see what a few phone calls can do.

Héros ou bouc émissaire ?

Yet another chapter in the long dramatic history of the French-language Montreal sporting press neatly wrote itself this morning, when La Presse’s Stéphane Laporte posted a blog entry entitled “Daniel Brière a refusé d’être un héros”: in English, “Daniel Briere refused to be a hero.”

You see, Briere, French-speaking native of Gatineau, Quebec, and former co-captain of the Buffalo Sabres, had the audacity to sign a free-agent contract with a team that wasn’t the hallowed Club de hockey Canadien. For this sin against the pur laine, Laporte proceeded to all but insult Briere’s manhood in a screed bemoaning the recent lack of Quebecois stars on the Habs’ roster.

But why, Daniel, why?

“At the end of the line, I asked myself where I’d be the happiest, where I could best develop myself…”

You could have been happy in Montreal, Daniel. You could have developed yourself. Maurice Richard developed himself in Montreal. Jean Beliveau, Guy Lafleur and Patrick Roy too. They also became heroes of a people, something you can never be in the United States. […]

The pride of playing for your gang, for the people that speak your language, didn’t play into it. Nor the challenge. Nor the great hopes. Is there a great Quebecois player left who wants to raise these passions, not just to live a quiet life in the Philadelphia suburbs?

What Laporte doesn’t seem to understand is that it’s precisely this attitude, and those like it, that keep smart French-speaking stars like Briere from signing in Montreal.

Read More »