I think I have experienced being a victim of the dumbing down of America, and it was not pretty.
A few weeks ago I received a letter indicating my condo would be hiring a new management company after a disastrous year with the original one. The old company did not have much time working on Staten Island and was primarily working with buildings in Queens, Brooklyn New Jersey and Maryland...yes, Maryland. Complaints fell on deaf ears; problems mounted; tempers flared, and the board decided to part ways with the present management company and search for another.
Now, I did not have a problem with any of this. I was recently elected to the board myself and will be meeting with the new company in two weeks. My problems began about three weeks ago when I began to figure out how to end the electronic funds transfer from my bank to the old company and establish an automatic payment plan with the new company. Should be easy, right? Wrong....dead wrong.
First thing I did was to speak to the current board members who assured me that this would NOT be a problem, and suggested I call the new management company. Which I did. I had a lovely conversation with the new property manager; he suggested I talk to my bank...which seemed logical, so I decided to do just that the next day.
The bank service guy turned out to be a former student of mine...nice kid. He was attentative in looking up my account online. I pointed out the entry that sent funds through the cyber-space from my account in the "cloud" on Staten Island to the management company's "cloud" in Manhattan. Unfortunately, I could not cancel the payment from the bank. I had signed up through the management company and had to go through them. So the next part of my quest began.
I called the management company's Brooklyn office; they had sent me a notice about owning me $.40 in overpayment charges. I called at 4:30pm on a Friday and was told, by a recording, that the office closed at 5:30 on Friday...I was early, but obviously too late to actually talk to a real live person, so I innocently left a voice mail knowing they would return my call. Oh, to be so naïve!!
Three days later, I called again. This time I got the receptionist who was there by herself at 9:30 am. She directed my call to the property manager who directed me to email her. I left a message and emailed her. The next three days I did the same thing: I left her a message and emailed her. I never heard from her. I then called the Manhattan office, who said I should go online and leave a message for the same woman who was not returning my calls. I than called the Staten Island office and was put on hold, given an other email address and directed to the same person's voice mail...voice mail that she did not listen to , or if she did, did not reply to. I then called the Brooklyn office again and was directed to a guy in Maryland who informed me that he did not handle any property remotely near Staten Island.
I called the new agent, who, guess what, gave me the old agents email address and voicemail number...Oh, did I mention I had called her at least five times and left at least five message? Everyone to whom I spoke had a canned repertoire that included" I am so sorry you are being inconvenienced...", but offered no other information than "...you can get that information from the website."...No you can't. Especially if you don't give me the website, which happened three times, or if you directed me to the wrong website...that happened twice.
One gentleman who told me proudly that he had been a Wall Street banker when talking about the two management companies," You have to tell them that they are the one, or maybe they are the other one." I thought I was in the middle of an Abbott and Costello routine. I had to ask him four times who was "they" and who was "them". He wasn't sure; I thanked him and hung up the phone shaking my head. How have we produced a population of people who cannot explain a process that makes sense to people who do not know the particular jargon of their work environment?
I finally got into my car and drove to the office of the original management company. They keep telling me I had to make the bank stop payment. I asked the receptionist, "Are you a banker?". She told me she wasn't she just thought I should do that. The other woman at the desk told me,"We can't help you. We are not in charge.".....Okay...who, I wondered, was in charge? I came home and signed into the website they gave me. I hit contact us and finally got a phone number. No one answered. I called the Manhattan office again and got the office manager; she transferred a nearly ranting me to her boss. She actually walked me through the process in less than five minutes.
So my question is why I had to take three weeks and at least ten hours worth of time to get the correct information? Because I finally got someone on the phone who was able to logically think through the problem as I described it; she asked pointed questions and knew how the internal system worked. I was not dismissed, and was treated humanly.
Most of the other people I was dealing with seemed angry with me when they realized they did not know what steps I had to take. They were not able to deduce the next steps from what I had done in the past. They keep repeating over and over again prewritten canned directions that clearly did not work in my situation. Many were confused when the information put into their computers did not compute.
So one more time: The solution is often not to "go online...." Sometimes it is use your noggin!
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