TV or not TV

Customer service fun time with Telus

man wearing brown suit jacket mocking on white telephone
No actual yelling on the phone took place. Also, I don’t have nice hair like this guy. Or hair. Photo by Moose Photos on Pexels.com

First, let me start by saying that I worked many years in tech support and have spent a lot of time trying to help people. I know a lot of people suck, but I also know that reps, whether for tech or customer support, are often obligated to stick to scripts, ask certain questions and say certain things.

I get it.

It’s still bloody annoying.

Recently, I decided to make some changes to my Telus Optik TV package. They allow you to make changes to your plan online–I had done so in the past. Now, all I would get when clicking the appropriate link from my online account is an error message. This one:

I tried again today…same error. So I called the 800 number and girded myself. My request was simple: “I don’t watch regular TV, so I would like to cancel my Optik TV package but keep my internet service.”

This is how it went:

  1. I call, and I am put on hold for a few minutes. This is not bad. However, extremely loud hold music plays while I’m waiting. I turn my phone volume down. Remember the olden days when your only option was to hold the receiver away from your ear? Dark ages!
  2. The customer representative (henceforth “rep”) greets me and asks for my account-related info.
  3. Rep audibly gasps when I say I want to cancel my TV service. I don’t know if this is scripted or just a dramatic bonus.
  4. Rep: “Please wait while I check your account” and “I’ll call YOU back if we get disconnected.” I never find out what exactly she was checking for, but I have theories1.
  5. 10 minutes of silence follows. No hold music plays, so I don’t think I’m on actual hold. About eight minutes in, she pops up to assure me it will just be a few more minutes (this is accurate).
  6. Rep moves to next stage: retention/talking me out of cancelling. Rep offers other TV plans/bundles, including one that vaguely sounds like I’d pay less for the internet part (good) but still pay for the TV part (bad). I decline all offers.
  7. Rep switches to offering other services, like security cameras, etc. I decline these.
  8. By now I am visibly annoyed. I tell her to stop trying to upsell me stuff and to just cancel the TV service, or I would ask to speak to a manager.
  9. Rep finally relents and tells me how to return the PVR after I get confirmation by email on the cancellation. She seems unfazed by the whole thing, as if we’d just started the call. Rep tells me service is now cancelled and tells me to have a wonderful day.
  10. Total time: Felt like forever.

I got two emails shortly after, one saying I’d been removed from the Optik TV service, and another confirming the cancellation. I checked the TV and verified that, yep, I no longer had access. Fast! In a day or so, I’ll receive another email with a waybill I can print in order to ship the PVR and remote back to them (no charge).

As I said, I appreciate that these people have to follow a script, but the whole process is repellant and a waste of time. A few clicks on their website would have worked, but it’s been broken for months (and I had a long chat with another Telus rep about it; she finally advised me to just call to make changes to my account if the site remained broken. Great show of confidence in your web team! And justified, as it turned out).

  1. Theory 1: Simply hoping I’d get tired of the silence, hang up, and the rep would “forget” to call back, ensuring no cancellation takes place. Unethical and probably illegal, so not very likely. Theory 2: She is checking past bundles and packages I’ve had in preparation for the next part of the phone call: convincing me to not cancel. ↩︎

The Twilight Zone ‘I’m a jerk’ episodes

I’ve been watching the original run of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) the last few months and recall that Rod Serling once divided up the episodes as pretty good, average and crappy in equal quantities. I think he was being unduly harsh as the number of outright clunkers is pretty low. Weirdly I managed to watch two back-to-back tonight and they both shared the same problem.

The first is What’s in the Box which is about a bickering couple, a weird TV and a creepy TV repairman. The husband watches on channel 10 as he sees himself fight with his wife, punch her out the window to her death, go on trial and then go to the electric chair for her murder. It’s like personalized reality TV. As one would expect, the all-knowing TV is correct and all the events it depicts happens. The episode ends with the TV repairman (Sterling Holloway, the voice of Winnie the Pooh) breaking the fourth wall by looking at the camera with a big ol’ smirk.

The problem here is none of these characters are likable. He’s a bastard, she’s a harpy and you really don’t care what happens to them. The framing device of the TV repairman giving them their just desserts isn’t fleshed out enough to resonate so it’s just 20+ minutes of bickering, weirdness and then BAM, out the window! This may be a rare case where an hour long episode would have worked better.

The next episode is Spur of the Moment, a fairly ridiculous effort from the otherwise reliable Richard Matheson. Here it seems he came up with a pun-tastic title then tried to hang some kind of story on it so we get a young woman on a horse being chased by a scary older woman dressed all in black, complete with black cape. As the story unfolds we discover that the black-caped lady is the woman’s older self trying to warn her younger self not to marry the guy without the bow tie. You see, the younger woman is all set to marry a nice man with a bow tie but is still in love with a ne’er-do-well who doesn’t wear a bow tie. He is also blond and you know that means trouble. The episode shifts back and forth between 1939 and the present (1964) with older lady realizing she was seeing her younger self but forever being unable to catch up to her. Possibly because if you’re going to warn something it’s best not to dress up like a cartoon villain, pose like a vampire and screech incoherently and charge at the person you’re trying to warn as if you are trying to kill her.

Seriously, if you saw her approaching, would you wait for what she had to say?

Diana Hyland plays the woman and chews the scenery throughout but especially as the older woman (she was 28 at the time), though the script greases the way for her, employing the subtlety of a jackhammer, right down to her character explaining everything that is happening and or has happened. Exposition ahoy! Apart from the nerd with the bow tie, everyone in the story is a loser, so you’re left wondering why you should give a flying fig about what happens to them. I don’t need a character to be virtuous or even all that likable but there has to either be something that lets me connect to them in order to to sympathize with their plight or the plight better be awe-inspiring in its scope so I can just enjoy the spectacle.

Here we just have a spoiled brat blaming her dead dad for being so screwed up and whose idea to warn someone is to act like someone auditioning for the part of The Wicked Witch of the (Wild) West. And they sped up the film in the horse chase scene to make them look like they were riding really fast. Convincing!

Anyway, it was odd that I ended up watching two bad episodes back-to-back, so I thought it was worth reflecting on why they stunk.