I’m Fixing To Get My Christmas Gift List Together

I’m fixing to get my Christmas gift list together.

After I got started I realized time was getting short and my list was getting longer and longer.

I also noticed that after just totaling up the immediate family down to grand children the number had escalated and then soared to 18, and I hadn’t even gotten to relatives, friends and hairdressers!
After I finally got through with the list, I found that even more frustrating was all the traffic, the crowded parking lots and the long lines at the doors and the checkout counters. After surveying that distasteful part of the Holiday Season, I turned around and went back home.

I did have another plan, and that was to be part of the savvy tech world and to order every thing over the internet.

However, I quickly found out that route had its pitfalls too. After I found this particular web site which had “stuff” my wife might like, I began maneuvering around it and after the fifth attempt I finally clicked on all the right buttons for my order, then typed in the address, shipping information and the credit card numbers with expiration date, and finally clicked on the “add to cart” button. That’s when a sign flashed that the item I wanted was out of stock.

The next site I went to really got me confused and frustrated.
Before it would let me buy anything it wanted me to give them all kinds of information to become a member in order to take advantage of their free shipping and handling, and every time I did that it would flash back and tell me that information I knew to be correct was not. I finally had to just abandon it.

I took a little break, breathed deep a few times, then returned to my computer with a new sense of urgency. That’s when I lost my Internet signal. I restarted the thing, and unplugged the power and the phone line from the modem several times all to no avail.

Finally I broke down and made the dreaded call to my Internet server. I listened to all the recorded voices telling me to push this button for that and that button for this, and of course, the last option was the one you wanted. Well after pushing that button it began to give you more buttons to push for other options. After all of this nonsense, about 10 minutes of it, it finally got down to the thing you could have told a real person in two seconds—”I have no Internet signal.”

Then the thing begins to tell you to all the things you have already done to attempt to get the signal back, so you just wade through all those and after about 15 minutes a reluctant live person comes on the line and begins asking questions about which lights are blinking and which are not, then put you through the same exercises you’ve already been through.

After about 25 minutes of this they put you on hold for five minutes before they finally come back and tell you they have been informed there is an outage in my area and it could be 24 hours before service is restored. Why couldn’t they have told me that up front?

Twenty-four hours later I went through the same process with the same result. Twenty-four hours after that 24, I went through the same process again, with the same results again before I finally got my signal back. Three days with no Internet service! Unprecedented! And in my opinion, it was because it happened on Friday, and this giant titan of industry, this grand and hollowed provider of communication services, refused to send a technician out to repair the outage until late Monday.

I figured I deserved some kind of compensation for my approximately three fruitless hours on the phone, for losing my weekend of Internet Christmas shopping, and for the funds I paid them to maintain my Internet service, so I called them.

It was back to pushing buttons for options again and after the necessary few minutes I thought I had the right person to talk to, but they transferred me to the home activation sales department, who had no idea what I was talking about. They also told me it was a blind transfer and they couldn’t transfer me back, so I had to start over again.

Okay, on the second attempt this person sounded like they represented some phase of customer service but when I was about halfway through my appeal I suddenly heard that dreaded recording “If you would like to make a call please hang up and try again—if you would like to make a call please hang up and try again.”

I believe they just hung up on me, so I tried one more time, and finally got to talk to a person who seemed sane and sympathized with my story. In fact they were so sympathetic they offered to credit my bill for $2.87!
With money like that, I knew I could get back to fixing to work on my Christmas gift list.