Are You Kidding? The Jack and now the Phone?

Sunday February 21-Monday February 22, 2016                                     Most Recent Posts:
Koreshan State Historic Site                                                                  Ups and Downs: Windows and Jacks
Estero, Florida                                                                                        Plans Go Awry

 

This post is dedicated to Jim and Gail who have recently been unlucky enough
to have had a similar experience.
Wish I had transcripts, although they would just make me more irritated.

 

SUNDAY

 

This morning starts out fine.  We walk over to the Koreshan Farmer’s market and buy some fresh produce and  four crab  cakes from the seafood couple.  Yum!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David stays for their wood fired stove cooking demonstration at the Cast Iron Cafe and samples their buckwheat pancakes but doesn’t stay long enough to wait for the sourdough bread, the peach crisp or the bread pudding they are also preparing.  This surprises me.

 

 

 

Love the wood smoke coming out the chimney.

 

 

 

The peach crisp and the bread pudding are in the oven of the cast iron stove oven.  The bread is being baked in a dutch oven with coals on top.

 

 

Silver Dollar pancakes go much further.  They have real maple syrup and local honey as toppings.

 

While David waits for the food to be ready, I carry the groceries back to the rig on the wonderful long walk between the campground and  the settlement.

 

 

 

And that’s where the fun ends.  The rest of my day is totally wasted as you probably guessed from the title of this post.  And I do mean wasted, all day long.  I make 10 telephone calls and in the end have a promise that someone from Samsung Technical Support in India will call me back tomorrow.

To make a long story shorter, I got a Samsung Galaxy 5 for my birthday to replace my aging HTC ReZound.   That was less than 3 months ago and this morning, for no reason at all, my screen went black and no amount of taking out the old battery and pushing the power button with the up volume button with the home button and multiple combinations of that would bring the screen back.  Neither would getting a brand new battery from Batteries Plus for $40.   FORTY DOLLARS for a battery?  I bought my Rezound ones two for $15. 

So my 3 months old phone is useless.   I can feel it vibrate, I can see a blue light on the upper left above the screen and white lights on the left and right under the screen but the screen is as black as the sky above the swamp last night.

 

I start with the first of the phone calls.  I spend the rest of the day making phone calls.  I make a total of TEN phone calls.  They cannot get the thing about not having a permanent address.  They simply keep repeating their request for my address so they can fill out their form.  It’s like a broken record.  What part of I’m not giving you an address until you tell me when you’ll be returning it do they not understand.

They want me to send them my phone, they will take who knows how long to fix it and send it back to me at my current address.  Yeah Sure.  I’ll be 190 miles away from here by then.

That’s the end of Samsung anything for me.  This experience has increased the probability that I will buy my next phone directly from Verizon so I can deal with customer support in this country.  It also pretty much assures that when my Dell Laptop dies I will replace it with another Dell so I can deal with Customer Support in this country.

At the least from now on I am certainly going to call the technical support for any company from whom I may buy any electronics to see if they are in India and forget about it if they are.   I haven’t had an experience this frustrating in a LONG time. 

I spend my most of my morning trying to fix this thing myself and the rest of the day talking with people from India and demanding to speak to their supervisors.

Call number 10, the final supervisor of a supervisor that I talk with is Jonathan and he promises to look into expedited repairs and how to make sure the company calls me before returning the phone to whatever address I give them which so far I have refused to do.  So my day is gone and there is no resolution.  He’ll call me before 1:00 tomorrow.  Really?

Beautiful day outside here if I could just have enjoyed it.  Between the phone and the jack problems this seems over the top in terms of Murphy visits.

 

 

MONDAY

This morning while I am waiting for my call from India I find out that with all the rain in Florida this year a serious environmental mess is happening.  To curb flooding officials “back pumped” 10 BILLION gallons of water from South Florida’s agricultural district into Lake Okeechobee.  Think about what that means?  All the agricultural pollutants that are fertilizers and pesticides that you eat as they are taken in through the roots into your food, are now in the lake poisoning the fish.   And it gets better,  now the overflowing lake water has been sent by the Corps of Engineers into the Caloosahatchee River and down to the Gulf and into the St. Lucie River and out to the Atlantic.   The polluted water kills sea grasses which feed the manatee,  it kills oyster beds and can contribute to harmful algae blooms and the red tide.  This is bad news for the beaches and tourism on both coasts and everyone is up in arms.  No one wants to swim in dark goop.

 

So much good news.  My phone obviously isn’t working so I have to carry David’s around with me all day waiting for “the call”. 

By 3:00 and no phone call I call them.  Of course I am talking to another fast speaking person from India who informs me that “No, there is no way she can connect me to Jonathan who promised to call me back today”.  But she can help me.  So I start all over with the problems and we go through the whole thing about no I don’t have an address and let me speak to your supervisor and repeat and let me speak to your supervisor.  90 minutes later the latest fast talking “service” supervisor from India tells me politely that I can decline to send my phone in for service if I like.  Yes of course I can and keep a phone that doesn’t work for which I paid a ridiculous amount of money,  very passive aggressive.  So again I ask her what will they do if the phone comes here and I’m 190 miles away.  She again tells me it won’t. 

What choice do I have?   I agree to send them the damn phone with the Koreshan address IF they will send me an over night shipping label to get it to them, guarantee me expedited service and send it back overnight.   I’m told by this 3rd level person that expedited repair means 72 hours to 3 days.  I laugh out loud.  72 hours is 3 days.   BUT she informs me, if they can’t fix it in 3 days then it will take longer and they will call me.  Of course they will.  And I have her word for all of this including her promise that Samsung respects my right not to send in my broken phone.

 

They will call me just like Jonathan did today.  I can see the end of this irritation is no where in sight but I remove the battery, the back cover of the phone and the sim card and with just minutes to spare before they close, I rush it over to UPS in a box where they graciously give me bubble wrap and seal it up and put it in an envelope with the overnight shipping label that was sent to me via email.

Whether or not I will ever see my phone again without more hours of hassle is anybody’s guess given that the return address on the label was only a part of the address I gave them and did not have the name Koreshan State Historic Site in it.  It took an additional 20 minutes for her to print out multiple labels where the last two lines either didn’t have the park name or didn’t have the park address. 

What it did have on the line where either of those should be is my phone number or rather David’s since of course my phone doesn’t work.

 

In my numerous phone calls about this yesterday I talked with Amazon Customer support who, although they could not help me, did do everything they could in a language I could understand.   I also talked with Verizon, my carrier, who also was as helpful as they could be and the customer support was in the United States.  As I said earlier, that is going to be more of a criteria for me than price from now on.  Before I buy something, I am going to call the company’s customer support and if they are not in this country providing jobs for Americans, they will not get my business.  The biggest vote I have is actually where and how I spend my money since money is the bottom line of everything in this country.

Sorry for the huge rant but as you can see, I am furious. This has been the polar opposite experience of how to treat the customer from my experience at Darren Thomas Glass recently.  I’ve had no time to do anything else in these two beautiful days. 

BUT in the evening, after the Samsung fiasco was put on hold by sending the phone off to Texas, I called Verizon.  The service person there was very polite and efficient about activating my former phone which I wisely bought directly from them and did not recycle when I stopped using it.  That phone is old and works poorly but at this stage it actually works and has never in 3 or 4 years given me a black screen or had to go in for repair.  I do have to switch batteries about every 3 hours since it won’t charge when plugged in.  But at this point, I have a phone and who knows how long it will be before my new broken one will be back.

A phone that has to be sent in for repair in barely three months is crap and so is the compnay who made it.

Now tell me your horror stories of cheap junk products that you pay serious money for and then get customer NO-service.  We can all commiserate.