Something to think about

Have you ever thought about your morning coffee? I don’t actually. Mostly because I drink tea in the morning. Coffee is an afternoon pick-me-up. A time to bond with coworkers, complain about what we do, get over-stimulated on caffeine, then go back to our desks and do stuff we hate.

Coffee is great for doing stuff you hate. Most of the world has coffee in the morning, just so they can go to a job and regret it. Hey, that’s a great slogan for some restaurant, “Bob’s Coffee. Great for doing stuff you hate!” Wow, that’s brilliant. I’m dazzling even when I’m not trying. Actually, I should be drinking coffee right now, because I hate to tell you, but this post isn’t about coffee. Perhaps I should start again.

Try again Something to think about

Have you ever thought about you your morning hot beverage? Now this I’ve done. In fact, I’m going to talk about it right now. No, this is not a Zen thing. It’s a size thing. Yes, when talking about coffee, Size Matters! Any more, unless you love the taste of Styrofoam, coffee comes in mugs. These are getting bigger and bigger all the time. This is a major problem.

Think about it; You pour a mug of boiling hot liquid. Naturally, it’s too hot to drink. Therefore, you wait. After some time, you take a drink. At this moment the brew is perfect. You set the mug back down. You might get one or two good drinks out of that oversized container, before the stuff is too cold. Invariably, you waited too long to drink the stuff and now you’ve got cold coffee.

Now that’s just cold

Cold coffee is the worst. Even places which serve cold coffee have to throw in a bunch of French Vannilla Cream, and sugar, just to make it tolerable. We can put a man on the moon, but can’t keep coffee at a tolerable temperature for the whole time it takes to drink a mug of it.

A device for this just doesn’t exist. Coffee becomes a waiting game. How long do you wait for that first sip? When is it time to chug that last bit to avoid brain freeze? It’s too complicated. That’s why I drink tea. If you mess up the waiting game, you throw in an ice cube, and tell folks you wanted iced tea the whole time. They may not believe you, but at least they can’t argue the fact without reasonable doubt.

The thing is I hate waiting, and everyone seems to be completely intent on making me do it. I don’t want to wait for my coffee, or tea. I don’t want to wait for my kids. I don’t want to wait for my cat to stop sharpening her claws on my left leg. I want these things now. They say patience is a virtue. Sadly, all it’s ever did for me is to make me think horrible thoughts, and start swearing. This in not virtuous. It’s pretty much the opposite.

Activation Frustration

The worst cases of people wanting to make me wait are various customer service centers. These call centers provide many services. Sadly, the one service they don’t provide is customer service. Recently I purchased a device for taking card payments for my small craft business. I was told, there were two fast and easy options for activating it. Neither was easy, or fast for that matter. Let me explain.

The first way was to call their friendly CS line. Or if I didn’t want to wait on hold, I could activate it online. I hate to wait so I went to the internet. As a new user, I had to create an account. Easier said than done. I input all my information and selected a password. It didn’t like that. I had forgotten to check the little box stating I accept their terms and conditions. After, I found the box and clicked it, I hit enter again. No luck.

Now it hated my password. My favored password was eight characters and it wanted twelve. After selecting a password it liked, which I would never remember, I pressed ‘Enter’ again. No good. Somehow, in the process of changing my password, their site unchecked the little box. I checked it again and hoped.

Password un-protected

It told me to wait a minute for them to process my request. In the meantime, Google asked if it should remember my password. Sure, I agreed. Then the computer came back and told me it could not verify my identity. I jumped through more hoops to get them to agree that I was me, and tried to finally log in. You’d think that would do it. You’d be wrong.

Apparently, in the process of proving myself the computer changed my password. I had to go through it all again. I selected something even less memorable, and ran into Google again. Google told me this wasn’t my password and should it save the new one. I said yes, but was extremely bothered. Passwords are supposed to be for security. If every computer in the Google universe knows my password, then it’s not very secure is it. I’m just saying.

Anyway, after trying again twice, (yep, that stupid hidden box showed up again) I managed to change my password and get to the Log In page. It didn’t let me. There was something wrong with my identity, again. Their computer activation sucked. Admittedly, I didn’t have to wait doing nothing. But I couldn’t activate the darn thing either.

Was that you who called?

So, I called the help line. It asked if I had an account. I said, “No”. it asked for my activation code. I gave it, and waited a full five minutes for it to tell me I already had an account. It sent me back to the first place. This time I said I had an account, so it asked for my number. I didn’t have the number I didn’t even know I had an account. I asked to speak to a real person. It asked, what desk I wanted to talk to? I said, “activations.” It told me my account was incomplete and I couldn’t activate anything. It suggested I go to their website and complete my account. I just kept screaming, “Representative” until it directed me to a person.

I waited seventeen minutes for that person to answer the phone. I was hot and screamed at them. I was told they didn’t appreciate my language, and would hang up if I didn’t stop. I informed them, I had been working on this for more than an hour-and-a-half and they were going to have to suck it up.

They understood my frustration. Boy did they understand! They told me six-hundred times how much they understood. After another twenty minutes of them reading their script and me trying to get them back to my issue, they pressed a button and I was up-and running. Yea me, but no!

Tell us how you really feel

They wouldn’t get off the phone. They wanted to take a survey about how their service was? I told them. Their response was total shock. But not shocked enough to stop them from asking me to purchase something else.

Like that’s gonna happen!