Good organizations gone bad
Sep. 14th, 2006 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwex(Rant edits thanks to wifey; Chase Card Services are still an oligopoly but they're no longer a target of this rant.)
Once upon a time there was a really cool little alternative long distance company (remember when long distance on your landline was relevant? And competitive?). If you signed up with them you got a coupon for a free pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream once a month for a year. Plus they gave money to good lefty liberal environmental and women's rights-type organizations. They were called Working Assets and they were pretty cool.
Well, they still exist. You can still get Working Assets long distance and I'm told they run the same coupon promo now and then. But in the meanwhile they got really big. When their long distance service became rebranded Sprint I cringed and went along with it because, well, OK Sprint sucked really large hairy rocks and besides sometimes they were rebranded MCI anyway, and wasn't it worth dealing with crap service organizations because it was for a Good Cause? I've no idea who they are these days. I technically still have their long distance on my landline, but who uses that anymore?
Working Assets got bigger, too. Wireless and credit cards are now their big money-makers. And like all these other "use our card/service" things, it's just a rebranding of a big-name company's service. Working Assets really doesn't have anything to do with it. They market it and funnel the cash to organizations that I still think are worthwhile.
So last night we canceled our "Working Assets" card. We canceled because the card processing house (MBNA) managed to bork things up in a horrid way and wouldn't fix it.
Basically, they failed to deliver us a bill last month, so we didn't pay it. This month's bill showed up with a huge balance due and craploads in charges and interest. Attempting to pay the thing off on the spot led to an argument about why it would take them 48 hours to "post" our tele-check, at a cost to us of $15/day. I honestly don't know the details - in our household Pygment deals with these kinds of things because she's capable of speaking to these people and not shouting things like "DIE, YOU FUCKTARD!" at them, which is more or less my second response to stupid people and inflexible bureaucracies.
Somehow Working Assets has a worse processing house than everyone else. I've missed payments before, with more than one vendor. You call them up, give them a check and routing number over the phone, and it's done. None of this "forty-eight hours and $30 more in charges" BS. But I have no way to communicate to Working Assets that their end service sucks. I can't demonstrate to them that their idiot processor just lost them a customer who's been with them for 15 years. And I doubt they'd care, anyway.
(On the other hand, United Mileage Card are COMPLETE INCOMPETENT FUCKTARDS. These people could screw up a wet dream, I swear. We've been trying to cancel _that_ card for going on three months now and they've got such a case of recto-cranial inversion that even Pygment is losing patience with them.)
Once upon a time there was a really cool little alternative long distance company (remember when long distance on your landline was relevant? And competitive?). If you signed up with them you got a coupon for a free pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream once a month for a year. Plus they gave money to good lefty liberal environmental and women's rights-type organizations. They were called Working Assets and they were pretty cool.
Well, they still exist. You can still get Working Assets long distance and I'm told they run the same coupon promo now and then. But in the meanwhile they got really big. When their long distance service became rebranded Sprint I cringed and went along with it because, well, OK Sprint sucked really large hairy rocks and besides sometimes they were rebranded MCI anyway, and wasn't it worth dealing with crap service organizations because it was for a Good Cause? I've no idea who they are these days. I technically still have their long distance on my landline, but who uses that anymore?
Working Assets got bigger, too. Wireless and credit cards are now their big money-makers. And like all these other "use our card/service" things, it's just a rebranding of a big-name company's service. Working Assets really doesn't have anything to do with it. They market it and funnel the cash to organizations that I still think are worthwhile.
So last night we canceled our "Working Assets" card. We canceled because the card processing house (MBNA) managed to bork things up in a horrid way and wouldn't fix it.
Basically, they failed to deliver us a bill last month, so we didn't pay it. This month's bill showed up with a huge balance due and craploads in charges and interest. Attempting to pay the thing off on the spot led to an argument about why it would take them 48 hours to "post" our tele-check, at a cost to us of $15/day. I honestly don't know the details - in our household Pygment deals with these kinds of things because she's capable of speaking to these people and not shouting things like "DIE, YOU FUCKTARD!" at them, which is more or less my second response to stupid people and inflexible bureaucracies.
Somehow Working Assets has a worse processing house than everyone else. I've missed payments before, with more than one vendor. You call them up, give them a check and routing number over the phone, and it's done. None of this "forty-eight hours and $30 more in charges" BS. But I have no way to communicate to Working Assets that their end service sucks. I can't demonstrate to them that their idiot processor just lost them a customer who's been with them for 15 years. And I doubt they'd care, anyway.
(On the other hand, United Mileage Card are COMPLETE INCOMPETENT FUCKTARDS. These people could screw up a wet dream, I swear. We've been trying to cancel _that_ card for going on three months now and they've got such a case of recto-cranial inversion that even Pygment is losing patience with them.)
Re: Sort of Random
Date: 2006-10-06 01:55 am (UTC)You can add it to your station and when it comes up they'll give you links for iTunes and Amazon.
Re: Sort of Random
Date: 2006-10-06 02:17 am (UTC)Yeah, i heard the song on Pandora too. That's how i found out about it. When you click the links for Itunes and Amazon, it comes up with no results.
What makes everything even more frusterating is i cant even find the song on limewire or any of the other popular downloading programs...
What i wanna know is. How the hell did Pandora get a hold of it...
Re: Sort of Random
Date: 2006-10-06 10:27 am (UTC)