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Lost a Day to Email Problems and the Miss Gulch of Customer Service

While looking for the name of the character in the Wizard of Oz who wanted to take Toto away from Dorothy ( Miss Gulch, played by Margaret Hamilton) I found out that there is a wonderful Wizard of Oz website and blog. (This photo is from the WOZ blog.) I was looking for that info because I wanted to describe the Miss Gulch of support people whom I had the misfortune to encounter at Time Warner today. He tortured me for hours this afternoon and failed to figure out why my email wasn't downloading.

"Ah ha! You have a wireless router that isn't from the company!" he said. "Disconnect it!"

"Delete all your cookies! Clear your cache! Disconnect your firewall Re-install Outlook! Call Microsoft!!" he practically shrieked. "Time-Warner doesn't support Firefox, Outlook, or the Internet," he snivelled. "The problem is on your end."

Of course it wasn't. It may have been a problem with Outlook. Or not. And after wasting the entire day trying to figure it out, and close to tears, I enlisted the aid of the fabulous Komra Moriko, my friend and colleague, who got my email finally working again. Nobody knows exactly why it didn't work, or why it does now.

So, I'm back, but I gotta go take Benny Bix to doggie charm school now.

See you on Wednesday. Sigh.

Categories: Commentary, Internet

BL Ochman | Jan 17 06 5:46 | TrackBack (0)

Comments

You have my fullest sympathy. I had a similar afternoon today being passed between Apple, Verizon, and Linksys. Unfortunately, I am a bit of a pro at this and had only moderate hopes from the outset.

Apple customer service was good.
Verizon was good-ish. It took a long time to persuade the tech support that the problem was not on the line but once I convinced him, he was helpful.
Linksys? Never again will I ever buy a Linksys product. Oh no.

The moral to this tale? You pay peanuts--you get monkeys (Linksys). Big, old, fat companies like AOL and Verizon have no imagination and work to a script. They are therefore difficult to deal with when the problem is slightly out of the ordinary.

Posted by: EiNY at January 18, 2006 12:25 AM

I'm sick of Time Warner too. They are good for cable, but I think that Verizon is a better choice for Internet. Not that they are known for their customer service either.

Posted by: Adam Saunders at January 18, 2006 9:39 AM

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About BL Ochman

Blogger, social media strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and sought-after corporate speaker B.L. Ochman heads the creative team of whatsnextonline.com. She also publishes the Ethics Crisis blog for SRF Global Translations

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