MY HERO, AMERICAN AIRLINES. YEP, YOU HEARD ME!

Say what you will about American Airlines, but they pulled through for me this time. Here’s my story:

I was going through my emails the other day when I saw one from American Airlines saying that I can go ahead and check in for my flight. Hmmm, that’s strange, I think to myself, since we’re not flying for another month for spring break. So I look more closely at the itinerary and apparently I booked the flight for FEBRUARY 19th instead of MARCH 19th. CRAP! Yes, we would have been in Miami for 5 weeks instead of 1!

So I immediately got on the phone with AA and explained my situation to the rep, who told me no big deal, she can change my flights, but of course there’s a $150 change fee for each ticket. WHAT??? That’s $600 for my little family!!!

Listen (or read in this case) how the rest of our conversation went:

CSR: I’m sorry, that’s our policy.

Me (almost sobbing): Isn’t there anything you can do for me? That’s $600.

CSR: I understand Ma’am, I’m sorry.

Me: Is there somebody else there I can speak to about this?

CSR: So you’d like to speak to my…

Me (slow on the hints): What? I’m just looking for somebody who might be able to work with me on this.

CSR (CLEARLY trying to prompt me): So you’re asking to speak to my…

Me: Um, your boss?

CSR (thinking I’m a complete idiot by now): YES ma’am. Let me get a supervisor for you.

Me (wondering why in the world we had to play that little game): Great, thanks!

So her supervisor comes on the phone and I pleaded and begged and whined and she actually waved the entire amount for me. I was shocked!!!

So while I still think American Airlines nickel and dimes us on baggage fees, meals and anything else they can think of, I am grateful that they did this one thing for me, and I just may fly them again. You know, as a second choice to Southwest!

Karen

NO TV OR INTERNET FOR 4 DAYS…THANKS AT&T!

Yep, my family went without TV and internet for 4 days, thanks to AT&T. Normally, I love their service. The customer service is great on the phone, the techs are great when they come out. But this time, well, they blew it. BIG time! And not just once. No, they blew it over and over again.

So without going into too much boring detail, I’ll just tell you that somehow they (“they” meaning the people NOT in St. Louis, where I am) decided I was part of a system outage, which I most definitely was not. One guy even told me that all of Missouri was out! So they kept canceling my service calls. Without telling me. Or calling me.

So after each missed service call, I’d call them, they’d tell me there is an outage, I’d tell them there isn’t, they’d call the dispatcher and tell them that information and reschedule the call, and the whole cycle would begin again. And again. 4 times, in fact. Until I finally got fed up enough and smart enough to demand that whether there is an outage or not I wanted a tech out there NOW and let me talk to a manager NOW. That worked!

Now I will say, that the guy that came out here was awesome and finally found the problem (thanks, dude!) and wouldn’t leave until he was sure all of our computers and TVs were working properly.

So our family is back to normal. The boys and I laid in bed this morning and watched Young Frankenstein. LOVE that movie! And even though most of the jokes went over their heads, they loved their first Mel Brooks movie, too!

All I have left to do is to call AT&T back and demand some compensation. I’ll have to get Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder out of my head and muster up some of that anger again!

Karen

OH, THE DRAMA OF A NEW PHONE!

I am not one to get “obsessed” with technology. But I got a new phone this weekend, and have literally not stopped playing with it since I brought it home. Well, maybe “playing with it” is not the correct choice of words. Perhaps it’s more like, I don’t know, trying to figure out how to make a telephone call and send a simple text. And then moving on to the next step of trying to import my Outlook contacts into the phone, which I was ASSURED by SEVERAL salespeople that it was an extremely easy process to do. Lastly, putting my music and photos on.

So let’s start at the beginning: making a call. Okay, I exaggerated on this one. Yes, once I figured out how to bring up the dial pad, I was good there. Then texting. Nope, kept getting an error code. Well, I decided to skip that and move onto getting my contacts in there. Hmmm, didn’t see anything in the book on importing anything from Outlook. Okay, got my emails set up, but my contacts aren’t in my email accounts. Kept reading, but no, nothing there. So I decided to wait until morning and call them.

I was on the phone with Sprint for (and I am NOT making this up NOR am I exaggerating on this one) OVER 2 hours. The end result? After going up FOUR levels of technical support, I finally got my texting fixed, and I found out (now get this) that there actually is NO WAY to import anything from Microsoft Outlook. Really! The only thing I can do is export my contacts to my newly set up Google account (which you must have for these new Android phones, because Google actually designed the software) and then Google’s address book will sync with my phone.

Now truly, this is a pretty easy process, but WHY did the salespeople tell me it could be done directly from Outlook and WHY did it take 4 technical support reps to come up with this solution? One of the reps actually even conferenced in Samsung, the maker of the phone! (Which, by the way, I thought was very service-oriented of him to try to find a possible solution for me. Who would have thought that the Samsung rep would know even less about the phone than the Sprint rep?)

Okay, so I get over that hurdle, and attempt my music. Coming from the iPod world, I’m a little worried, and sure enough, I can’t figure out how to manually transfer songs from iTunes to my phone. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that all my music was also in my Microsoft Media Player. No playlists, but at least it’s all there. I’ll work on playlists later.

Lastly, I try to put photos on, but find I’ve already run out of memory. Crap! So now I have to get a larger SD card and pray that when I change cards, I don’t lose everything that’s on there already. Maybe I’ll call them to ask them to walk me through it. Any guesses on how long I’ll be on the phone?

Oh, and by the way, if you call or text me and I don’t answer, sorry. I haven’t learned my new ring tones yet!

Karen

HACK, HACK, HACK…OY!

What in the heck is this world coming to? With every new product or service, come new criminals. And they are SMART! I’m on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, not to mention Ebay, Paypal and a few others. So far, my accounts on Facebook and Twitter have been hacked into, as well as my husband’s Ebay accounts. And not only do we have to deal with the actual hacking, but then we have to encounter CUSTOMER SERVICE (play Jaws theme music here).

So I’ll tell you a bit about the scams. On Twitter, it wasn’t so bad. Well, except for the personal violation of it all. But all the hacker did was pretend to be me and advertise some stupid “Get More Followers” system. Whatever. I deleted the tweets and changed my password.

But Facebook was WAY more personal. The hacker, posing as me, went online, found a friend who was also online and started IM-ing him. He tried to convince my friend that I was stranded in London and needed him to wire me $900 immediately. Luckily, my friend isn’t a total idiot, and called me first. But apparently this scam is so popular, Facebook has it’s own name for it – The 419 Scam. Here’s an article from MSNBC’s website on it. It also goes into how difficult it is to talk to Facebook’s Customer Service. Woops, did I say TALK? Forgive me for that blunder. Facebook has NO telephone support, only email support.

Okay, the business side of me says, “Well, it IS a free service after all.” But the personal side of me wants to know why, when they even have special names for scams, do they not have telephone support at least for these?

So let’s move on to Ebay. This has happened to my husband TWICE in a month. Somebody hacks into his account, sells a bunch of stuff under his user name, collects the money and never sends any product. So my DH gets bad feedback (and if you know anything about Ebay, you know that feedback is UBER important) and the threat of Ebay shutting down his account. BUT AT LEAST THEY HAVE TELEPHONE SUPPORT! (Okay, it’s in another country, but that’s a whole other blog post.)

Okay, I’ve ranted and raved enough about this. Thanks for indulging me. I do have a point to this though, and here it is:

To Hackers: You are so smart. Why not use your intelligence for good? You could be so successful in this technical world. I bet any of these sites would LOVE to hire you to protect themselves against people like you. I’m just saying…

Karen