I hate corporations. If you knew me in college, this is no great surprise. The difference is, I've gone from one of those neo-hippies, who smash the starbucks window with their 200 dollar, sweatshop nikes, to taking, very very personally, every single interaction that could possibly be construed as negative. For example: Every time a flight on United Airlines is late...which they always are...i might as well have written, every single flight on United Airlines is late... in fact, let's go with that. When I fly United Airlines, and they have told me that the flight they advertised as leaving at 9:15 will in fact, be leaving at noon, I have revenge fantasies that range from slapping the surly ticket agent (racial tensions be-damned), to imagining plausible reasons why i could conceivably sue them. I've gotten into the habit of calling their complaint line just to hear what fake name the Indian call center representative is going to give me.
Another example: the automated customer service for my cell phone company. Let's call them Shmerizon. I can't believe how difficult these people make it for me to give them money. I long ago gave up trying to jump through the hoops of any voice recognition system and just start muttering threats anytime I hear a computer say the words "let's get started!" This has only bitten me in the ass once, when I thought I was waiting on hold to pay my Shmerizon bill, and was, in fact, telling "Jeremy" how I was going to shit in his optical drive if he didn't get a human being on the horn A. to the S.A.P.
But one company has recently melted my ice-cold heart, if only just a little. And this is a love letter to Samsung.
Samsung makes all kinds of crap. Their website is extremely flashy (and flash-y) and therefore incredibly dull. They make TV's, smartphones, camcorders, printers, microwaves, and (pertinently) mp3 players. Now, I, for a period of about 6 months, was the owner of one of their low-end models, (the m230). Just a little 512MB jobby that i'd use for jogging, or when I didn't wanna "lug" my 30Gig Cowon Media Center around. I got it on clearance for something like 10 bucks so when the thing stopped working i'd written it off as another casualty of the planned obsolecense era. I'd popped the thing opened and monkeyed around with it to see if i could fix it, but no such luck. Seemed to be a software problem and that's out of my depth.
I did a quick google search to see if anyone else had had a similar problem and it turns out that someone else had. Buried in some random forum from 2004 (when the m230 was spankin' new and probably cost 8 times what I paid). The author of the post had the same problem i had and was directed to call samsung.
So I screwed up my courage and dialed the 800 number. To my surprise i got a human being on the phone. "Beth" was helpful, but to the point: "Give me your model number and your email address and we'll send you a UPS slip to send the player back to us." Seriously? "Yes sir."
And she wasn't lying. Within minutes, a UPS shipping label appeared in my inbox. I stuck it to an envelope, mailed the thing back, and i got the damn thing sent out, free of charge.
I haven't received the new one yet, but it's sitting waiting for me at work. How do I know this? SAMSUNG CALLED ME! That's right. UPS tried to deliver at my house when i wasn't home. They left one of their special brand of incredibly weak and streaky post-its telling me they were gonna try to deliver 2 more times, but I wasn't home, so they'll try twice more before I have to travel to their warehouse in B.F. Egypt to pick up my package where they'll hold it for 20 minutes before feeding it to a junkyard dog. Or whatever it is they do. But, out of concern, Samsung called me up on my cell and said "Hey, UPS said they couldn't deliver....they're going to try two more times before blah blah junkyard dog, and we just wanted to see if you needed us to schedule a different delivery time.
Samsung, not UPS, made this call.
It should be noted that I'm not writing this in order to confess a change of heart. In fact, it pisses me off a little that this isn't the norm. Why is it shocking when you immediately get a human being on the phone within 30 seconds of calling? Shouldn't that be the norm? Shouldn't I lead some sort of uprising against the computer voiced customer care centers? Did we learn nothing from the Terminator? This is the first step in a skynet uprising! Still, let's not other companies misdeeds (and genocides) ruin our current warm fuzzies for Samsung. I'm sure there's people out there that have horror stories that'll make my little wet dream a nightmare. But still, I'm shocked at how easily this all went down, and how well they treated me. After being treated like a used wet-nap at the penny slots by United, Verizon, Sony and Comcast, it's nice to finally be treated like a lady.
