What A Steaming Pile...

is my ISP ...has been for as long as I've been connected (since 1985). In the beginning, it was a great company, with efficient service, lot's of dial-up access numbers, and then later, a very economical and reliable DSL connection, and most importantly, local customer service. If you had a problem, with your account, your connection, or whatever, you could speak to someone who spoke your language, and if necessary, could communicate with other departments within the organization to get answers to, and rectify the problem. The only drawback was, depending on the time of day you tried to "call" them, you might have a little wait time. Ha-ha In retrospect, it was not really a drawback at all, but more than reasonable when considering some of the ridiculous hold times currently encountered.

But alas, Earthlink went the way of AOL. They got so successful and so big, they couldn't do the job well; they couldn't provide that one-on-one customer service at which they were so good. As is the custom with so many large American companies, and probably out of financial necessity, they automated everything, and outsourced all their so-called human contacts to call centers in India. (I won't even go into how wrong I think that is and how much I abhor this practice).

Now this may sound a bit racist, but believe me it has nothing to do with that. I have nothing against Indians, or any other ethnicity for that matter. Dare I say it, some of my best friends are of Indian descent. The problem is ... and this applies to any situation where the other person speaks English "as a second language" ... there is an obvious communication gap that no one wants to address for fear of being politically incorrect. The subtleties of the communication are lost. [Their] areas of so-called expertise are narrowly defined so they can only respond in routine ways to routine questions. Any problem of any intricacy or complexity is met with what can only be perceived as incompetence. And because they are only trained to respond in very narrow parameters, there is no cross-department communication, so you get one answer from one department, you get transferred, wait on hold, then have to start all over again with another department from which you get contradictory information, and they lack to ability to go beyond their limited responsibilities, so they refer you to another department, where you again get put on hold, get contradictory information, and in the end, no resolution to the problem. Oh yes, they apologize a lot... "I'm very sorry for your inconvenience". Obviously a key point in the training requires them to be "polite" at all times.

I'm extremely pissed over my recent communication ... well actually it's been going on for sometime ... with this piece of shit company. I won't go into the details of the problem(s) as that would require another 2000 or so words. My frustration arises simply from the fact that you can't communicate with anyone except one of these "automatons". Damn! It might as well be a computer with programmed responses. My only recourse is to terminate my service with them ...in favor of an American company, with American employees who speak Amercian. My reluctance to do so is because of my long-established web-site(s) and email addresses. So, in the meantime, while I decide what I want to do, I'm releasing a little of the pressure with this rant. "Recommend Earthlink to a friend?" Yeah, right! In fact, I'm on a bit of a crusade to inform anyone I know just what a steaming pile of crap this company has devolved into.