Customer Service and Back to School

Customer Service Stinks

My co-worker decided to take his daughter shopping (back to school) for a laptop, so they invited me along for the experience.
Adolescence is tough
We should start with fellow customers. At this time of the year, you see a lot of parents with their kids. The kids are not kids, as in toddlers. They are adolescents who think they know more about their needs than their parents do. Toddlers with a purpose in life, to be precise.
“I like this one”, the girl says, pointing to one shiny laptop.
“Why?” asks the mother.
“Its cuter”
Well, then, what more is there to be said? If a 15 yr old (my best guess) wants a cute laptop to start Grade 10, who can argue?

A Mugs Game
We …. You, me, everyone …. Are our worst enemies. Perusing laptop displays and wondering which one is for you, is a mugs game. Each and every one is lovely, clean, functional and loaded with more stuff than you will ever use in the 12 months until next year’s back-to-school sale.
It is akin to us grown up people, the ones who pay for these things, standing in the middle of a Mercedes showroom and asking the salesperson, in the hand painted silk tie, which car is the good one.
An older gentleman asks the laptop salesman “What does it come with”?
(Yeah, obviously a pound of Ethiopian coffee beans and 20 cents per litre reduction in your gas bill for the next 100 kilometers)
“Lots of stuff,” is the response.
“Can I do Internet?” is the second question. Do Internet?
“You’ll need a high speed connection.” replied the salesman.
“Oh, so it doesn’t?”
“Well, it will if you are connected”
“Oh, but not if I’am not.”
“Right.”
“I’ll take it”
The dash to splash cash extends well beyond the actual hardware, of course. Back to school means your laptop will need a security cable, a mini mouse, a thumb drive and carrying case.
Whatever happened to the pencil case, a box of coloured pencils and an eraser of ink and lead?
Anyone who thinks he’s going to leave the store with just the laptop is delusional.

The salespeople provide a different kind of angst and amusement. Since they know what they are usually dealing with, they really don’t need to display their intellectual and technological brains.
My co-worker noticed this, and even his smart daughter expressed “Most of these guys don’t seem very with it” she remarked. This came after one “salesman” failed to rise to my challenge, when I said “She is torn between this Toshiba model and that Sony”, and I pointed to the two machines. Without a hint of smirk, I flung down the gauntlet “Explain briefly why she should choose one over the other”
He looked blank for a moment. Obviously nobody in the training program told him that he’d need to give details. So, he dashed over to the Toshiba, read the specs card, and did the same with the Sony. Then he repeated the specs to us.
“We know” I told him “We can and did read the cards. But what is your professional opinion, as one who knows these models so thoroughly?”
“They’re both kind of good” he responded.
Good Lord ... another moron
We thanked him and sent him on his way. We saw him later. ‘helping’ another customer into abject confusion.
Evidently back to school is a broad term with angst and anticipation.

Where is customer service these days……

Upcoming Canadian Election

Politicians are a strange bunch.

It's everything but official.
Stephen Harper says we have to have an election. It's because Parliament is dysfunctional. Hard to argue with him on that.
But if dysfunctional is the test - they'd drop the writ every single day after Question Period and twice a day during any session of the superbly entertaining Ethics Committee hearings.
I think what dysfunctional really means here, in Prime Minister Harper's private dictionary, is: "I don't think our chances are going to get any better going on, so we may as well get this thing over with now." Dysfunctional then, is less a hot psychological state than a response to a cold reading of the polls.
But before we get to the actual election there is one burden Mr. Harper and his Conservatives have to clear. It's this matter of a law, put on the books by the Prime Minister, fixing, in statute, the date of the election for October 19th -- next year.
The Prime Minster, early in his term - when, we presume, Parliament was roaringly functional - changed was he regarded as one of the most retrograde features of Canadian politics: the power of a Prime Minister to call snap elections when the opposition was most off guard. His own words: "Fixed election dates would prevent governments from calling snap elections for short-term political advantage."
And he knew what he was doing. Jean Chretien, most wily of partisans, used that power to devastating effect, on Stockwell Day. Stockwell, as I recall, was hardly off the Okanagan lake, wet suit glistening in the afternoon sun, when Chretien pulled the plug. Opportunistic? You bet. Unfair to the then opposition - absolutely.
So Mr. Harper when he promised in his last campaign to fix this 'weighting of the scales' wasn't operating blindly. And when after, as Prime Minister, he did something that politicians so often fail to do - translate a promise into a law - he was setting a golden example. He changed the system, and he transmuted a campaign pledge into a statutory obligation.
But here we are and suddenly, all that doesn't count. The fixed election date collapses in a partisan breeze. The statute has no more force than an ad lib wish in some town hall candidates' free for all.
What are we to make of this? If statutes can disappear on a whim, what hope can we have for mere campaign promises? If the fixed date law came into existence on the back of a pledge to take opportunism out of the electoral process, what can we say of the opportunism that kills the very law that was to rid us of …. opportunism?
It's one thing to take politicians promises with a grain of salt. Mr. Harper is proposing a much sturdier challenge: how to believe them when they take a promise and make it the law of the land, and then ignore it, nullify it, bury that law, just because it suits them.

Canadian politics. I'd call it dysfunctional - but that word is already taken.

My thanks to Rex