KAFKAESQUE
I am going to wonder about my recent interaction as a customer of large corporations, an experiences we have all had, and how this makes me feel,
The first example is my interaction with the Asheville Citizen Times, our daily newspaper. Kathe loved reading the paper every morning. I would bring her the paper and a cup of tea and she would read the paper through while still in bed. The monthly subscription and delivery fee was about $20 for life at one point, but I must have let my life time subscription expire somehow and the price began to rise. By the time Kathe died the monthly rate was up to $56. So I cancelled it and got the $10 digital rate. But I still wanted the daily crossword puzzle which Kathe had collected and given to Todd because he liked working on them. Ann Scoville, across the street, continued to get the paper for $56 and shared it with Betty Siviter next door to save them both money. And so I asked Betty if she could cut out Todd’s crosswords and put them in my mailbox.
But lately, since I had cancelled the paper delivery and was paying for only the $10 digital edition, the Citizen Times wanted me back. So they began making much better offers. Yesterday I took them up on it. It was for $18 a month and would include the digital subscription for which I had been paying $10. The problem was that the offer was only good until January 31. But I called in anyway, and when I gave the code that was written at the bottom of the offer that had come in the mail I was granted the new subscription rate for a year, at which point the rate will start to climb again. I’ve had this same issue with Spectrum TV and Internet. The introductory rate is low, the next year it is higher and the third year it is sky high. Most people automatically renew and end up with the sky high rate. So what Ann, Betty and I are doing is playing a game with the Citizen Times or the Citizen Times is playing the game with us. For right now I continue to have my $10 digital edition and Ann and Betty have the equivalent of an $8 subscription and Todd gets his daily crossword. All of us are coming out ahead. Except this is a painful reminder that Ann has been paying an exorbitant rate for years and so was I until Kathe died. It is a fight between big brother and us ordinary unsuspecting folks, we may have won this battle but we are losing the war.
But it turned out it wasn’t the Citizen Times that I was dealing with when I phoned in. The Asheville Citizen Times has recently abandoned their downtown office, an Art Deco Building that is a fixture in Asheville, which still has their name on it but has become a Music Store/coffee shop. I don’t know where the Citizen Times is. But I do know that they don’t even print the paper in Asheville just as the New York Times doesn’t print in New York. For all I know both papers use the same printer along with other papers in Greenville, South Carolina where the Citizen Times is now printed. The guy I talked to on the phone mentioned that we had snow in Asheville to show that he was locally connected. I asked him how his weather was, it was warm and sunny in the Philippines. And he wasn’t with Citizen Times at all, he was with the USA Network, as are some of the news articles in the Citizen Times. And yet my subscription started on Saturday just as he said it would and I got an email from someone in Asheville welcoming me, Rachel someone, she sounded like a nice person. It was all very personal, or was it? Maybe the woman in Asheville was a virtual woman in the Philippines welcoming me but using another name as she welcomed people to other papers in other cities. Maybe, just maybe, the nice man who knew my weather wasn’t in the Phillipines but just a virtual person in a computer somewhere. Maybe the whole game that we had been playing for years, the automatic rate increases, the offers after we cancelled were all programmed in by someone working remotely in Una Watuna, who checks in once a week to make sure the automated system is working perfectly, or maybe he has gone on to a different job leaving everything to a very virtually intelligent machine somewhere.
Yesterday, Saturday, was the day my paper was to arrive. I was up at 6:30 when the paper man drove by in his pickup truck. He put something into my paper receptor and drove on to the Collins next door. He hesitated there, then backed down the street to my paper receptor again, hesitated briefly and then drove on. Was he connected somehow to some virtual voice telling him what to do and was just checking to make sure he did the right thing. I didn’t look to make sure there really was someone in the paper truck. Was it all automated?
How did the guy in the Philippines, if there was one there, get the paper into my box? At first when I thought I was connected to the Asheville Citizen Times in Asheville everything seemed simple and straightforward, the world as I was used to it. But now I am confused.
But after being throughly confused by this local encounter and taking so long to work my way through it, I think I will leave my second example, my encounter with Vueling Airlines, until tomorrow which will give me a day to wonder about what was actually going on on with my newspaper and what might be going on with Vueling‘s odd non interactions with me.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 