Yesterday, two men came to install our European shower door and another man came to install our window treatments. What they had in common was that they were all representatives of local businesses eager to satisfy their customers. They did a wonderful job.
Today, Comcast was scheduled to install our cable boxes so that our new televisions could be hooked up. In addition, AT&T was scheduled to turn on our new phone lines. What these companies have in common is their bigness and their lack of interest in satisfying this customer.
Comcast, at least, showed up but couldn’t complete the installation because there was some missing wiring. It means that we will live in our new home a week without connections to the Internet or television until the wiring can be installed and the rest of the job finished. Nobody was even apologetic about it.
As for AT&T, which stands for Always Tacky and Tardy, nobody showed and nobody even called to say why. I waited five hours, hours I should have been at work. If I didn’t have so much on my plate I would have handled this tardiness immediately, but I was juggling a variety of other circus balls during that time.
Never fear, however. I will be on the phone tomorrow morning expressing my displeasure. Not that I expect it to do much good, since AT&T has a lock on land line phone service in this area and can be as lackadaisical as it wants.
I am reminded of the pecking order in the medical profession. While it’s unspoken, it suggests that the closer the medical specialty is to healing the heart or brain, the more those physicians tend to view their roles as omnipotent. Frequently, they treat their patients accordingly. But as the specialties become more and more removed in distance to vital organs and life-threatening issues, those physicians are correspondingly more down-to-earth and communicative.
Given this analogy, Comcast and Always Tacky and Tardy view themselves as heart surgeons, while the shower door installers and the window coverings installer might be only foot doctors or dermatologists. I wonder if the FCC would be interested in this comparison.
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