You aint shit - the customer service experience in the 21st century.

I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have great credit. I try to be financially responsible and as a general rule of thumb I try to always do the right thing. In contrast, most corporations I deal with have more money than I will ever dream of, don’t need credit and never feel obligated to do right by anyone but themselves. In between me and these giants lies a phenomenon - other people who are like me and are paid to argue and uphold the side of the giant as though it were "fair" and as though they weren’t going home from thier shitty call center job within hours to transfer back over the magical line to my side - the side of the insignificant consumer.

Recently a website charged my debit card - WRONGFULLY - $90 which resulted in $70 worth of overdraft charges on my checking account. The website refunded the $90 and after a little bit of a struggle, the bank refunded one overdraft fee of $35, but no one seemed to want to pony up to the other one. In the end I heard the exact same line from my bank as I heard from the website, "We are NOT refunding the $35, no one else will talk to you and if there is nothing else we can help you with, goodbye."

HUH?!

So let me get this straight - a website fucks up and charges me money they never should have which causes penalties from my bank and somehow all of this is MY fault? I tried reasoning with the banker by saying, look - Washington Mutual is not out any money here. Everything that was wrongfully taken out was put back and all you have to do is NOT penalize me for something I DIDNT do. I got the same robotic response over and over - "the fee wasn’t the result of a bank error" so basically, it isn’t their problem.

In reality, life will go on. I will end up being out the $35 and will have to just accept the fact that morals and principal are dead and gone from the consumer world.

Perhaps the most upsetting part of the whole deal is that I have been on the other side of the phone, sitting in a shitty call center, tethered to a computer and I know all of the bullshit lines that get fed to people regularly and conversely, I KNOW that most supervisors DO in fact have the ability to refund a person ANYTHING. They would like you to believe that the money only flows one way - into their pocket - and that it is simply impossible for them to give it back once they have it. And even if you aren’t one of these people who just buy into that and call them on their bullshit, often times, since you are just an insignificant consumer, they will then come straight out and tell you that they just aren’t willing to.
When I was on The Dark Side, I would hand out favors regularly and try to help out people who were in serious need (that is to say, they weren’t try to "scam" me out of a responsibility that truly should be theirs) because I am a HUMAN BEING and I have compassion.
I ended up telling the "manager" at the bank that I felt very sorry for him that he wasn’t allowed to be human at his job and that he was simply a robot for a corporation. I also pointed out how sad it must be to be in his position where he no doubt hears from hundreds of insignificant consumers like me daily, begging for his help and he can’t even give it to them.

How sad indeed. What isn’t sad, what is outright enraging is that companies get away with this all day, every day. Treating their customers like shit and continuing to be successful. When did people decide that this is acceptable? When did we decide that we would continue to give our hard earned money to these assholes who can’t even be bothered to be grateful for it? When did we decide to forfeit good customer service? And what will we do about it?

What will I do about it?