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Good Corps, Bad Corps…

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The other day, Budgeting in the Fun Stuff remarked on Frugal Scholar‘s rant about the excruciating customer service emanating from Virgin Mobile. Both bloggers asked readers which corporations are best and worst in the customer (dis)service department.

Apparently they touched a hot button. They each got a slew of responses. Among them, we see that Comcast is roundly hated. Free Money Finance is locked in combat with that worthy organization—as his saga unfolds, it’s hard to tell whether Comcast is merely incompetent or deliberately obnoxious.

Yesterday while I was driving up to the optometrist’s office, what should I hear on NPR but this interesting story. It suggests a new tool for hacking through thickets of bad customer service, at least in some instances: small claims court.

Dartmouth Professor Charles Wheelan was subjected to United Airlines’ latest insult to passengers, a $25 charge for checking his bag. When they lost his luggage, they refused to refund his money. So he took them to small claims court. So far, he has yet to see either the bag or the refund, but, as he notes, even though the action cost him $72 in court fees, revenge is sweet:

Turns out that it’s [the $72 trade-off] actually really important in terms of economics. It’s essentially vengeance, and vengeance has a technical definition, which is you’re willing to harm yourself in order to impose harm on somebody else. Now when we do that, what the behavioral psychologists have learned, is it makes us feel good. It lights up the pleasurable parts of the brain just like doing other things that make you feel good. So vengeance might actually be quite rational.

United crossed the wrong guy when its baggage handlers threw musician Dave Carroll’s expensive guitar across the tarmac, with predictable results. His revenge came in the form of a hilarious (and infuriating) YouTube video that, says he, “became one of YouTube’s greatest hits and caused an instant media frenzy across all major global networks and sources (including the likes of CNN, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone Magazine & the BBC to name a few)” and spawned two more videos. He may never have extracted the $1,200 it cost to repair his guitar from United, but the resulting publicity boosted his career, probably returning that much and more in increased revenues.

Well, most of us don’t have Dave Carroll’s talent. But it’s not hard to put up a talking-head video on YouTube describing some egregious example of customer disservice, and the idea of taking the SOBs to small claims court over money owed has its charms.

My own strategy is first to bypass the CSRs by tracking down the names of upper management at the corporate headquarters and firing off a dear-sir-you-cur letter. Often this will get results, or a simulacrum thereof.

If the go-over-their-heads gambit fails, then I head for a regulatory agency or an attorney general. Many of these customer service fiascos amount to fraud or theft—when they stonewall you or outright lie to you, they’re ripping you off. The trick here is to go to the AG in the state where the company is headquartered and send a copy of your complaint to the AG in your own state.

When a company operates across state lines, as most of the faceless monsters that have developed immunity to customers do, then a fraudulent action becomes…yes…a federal case! Corporate America, as we have seen by the vast corporate donations to doctrinaire Kill-the-Beasters’ political campaigns, really dislikes dealing with federal regulators and attorneys general. So if you can’t get any action from a state attorney general, kick it up to the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, or the U.S. Attorney General. You’d be surprised how fast a call from any of these entities will settle your complaint.

Frugal and Budgeting ask readers what are their choices for best and worst customer service. My all-time worst customer service nightmare is Qwest, an outfit with whom no one should ever do business. Videlicet:

Back Again—Temporarily?
“We Value Your Business”
Unbundled! Qwest Strikes Again
What Happens When a Live Qwest Guy Shows Up
Qwest Redux: How Do These Companies Stay in Business?
Qwest: The Saga That Will Not End
Qwest Update

The best? It’s hard to think of many, since retailers and service providers now will openly tell you that the old saying to the effect that “the customer is always right” is dead wrong. CSRs apparently are encouraged to be rude and trained to bounce off complaints like tennis balls hitting a concrete wall. In my experience, the only outfit that’s consistently shown excellent customer service is the Mayo Clinic.

My question to you is this:

What has worked best for you to cut through a customer disservice fiasco?

Free at last…to work some more

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A vast haystack of deferred work around the house has piled up while I’ve been struggling to get out from under the mountain of paid work. (And though grades are now posted, I still have paying work to do for two clients, but today I’m playing hooky for a few hours.)

Last night I managed to shovel off and clean the biggest counter in the kitchen. The stove and counters and cabinetry around it remain to be done, but at least the main annoyance was dealt with by 10:00 p.m. Sharpened the knives, which had dulled so much they could only mash the food apart. Repaired the knife sharpener first. Realized the next kitchen purchase will have to be a new knife sharpener. The one I have is a Chef’s Choice Multi-Edge Diamond Hone Knife Sharpener, and since it’s lasted about 10 years, I guess I’ll probably get a new one—they’re cheap enough, assuming the new model survives as long. Did all of the ironing that had stacked up atop the rocking chair in the TV room: 12 pairs of jeans, two pairs of shorts, a linen jacket, and three shirts. Fell into bed at midnight.

cape-honeysuckle

At five this morning it was off to do battle with the cat’s claw vines, which have decided to cover the pool equipment beneath an exuberant mound of jungle vegetation. First, though I had to replace the plastic panels that shelter the equipment to some degree from the sun and from the depredations of another jungle vine, the big cape honeysuckle that hides the ugly pump and filter from view in the backyard. This contraption, which was secured to the wrought-iron fencing with plastic tie gadgets, had broken loose in the winter storms. It’s now wired firmly in place—that should hold it for at least another couple of years.

It’s a big job to put that thing up by oneself. It really takes two people.

Onward. By 8:00 a.m. the vine that ate Philadelphia was hacked away from around the equipment and pulled down off the palm tree. Its incursions across the CoolDeck and into the water were beaten back. Satan & Prosperpine’s strange little bell-bedangled poolside decoration was freed from the mass of plant matter that had enveloped it, as were a couple of decorative boulders that had almost disappeared beneath the greenery. Raked up bushels of fallen leaves and twigs from beneath the vinery. Trimmed the powdery-mildew-infested rose by the pool and cut back the blue plumbago that wishes to push the rose into the next world. Picked up the fallen lemons, dodging angry ant myrmidons in the process. Put out some stale ant bait for the ladies; made note to buy fresh stuff. Hauled a gigantic mountain of trash out; put my neck out lifting it into the shoulder-high garbage bin. Cooked a steak, its freezer bag dated 11/3/09,  for breakfast.

As soon as I get up off my duff here, I’ve got to get back out there and treat the roses with powdery mildew meds. This winter’s El Niño rains brought forth a burst of joyful rose exuberance, but the almost daily leaf-soaking also brought forth more powdery mildew than I’ve ever seen. Even the David Austin roses, which allegedly resist this annoying disease, are covered with it. From there it will be on to…

• do the bookkeeping
• clean the stove, counters, and cabinetry
• pick up the house
• dust
• clean the floors
• clean the bathrooms
• water the plants inside and out
• get back to work on the client’s arcane tables
• get back to reading page proofs for the other client
• test and adjust the pool water.

A house is an ongoing project, that’s for sure. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who remarked that home is a girl’s prison and a woman’s workhouse. LOL! I think of it as a black hole into which to pour money and labor.

That notwithstanding, I love my house. It’s so pretty, inside and out. Satan and Proserpine did a few nice things to it—the new kitchen cabinets, the out-of-code mantelpiece in matching pine, the tilework in the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hall, the travertine shower, the nifty deck off the dining room. Then I did a lot more stuff to it. The skylights in the kitchen, family room, and master bath really  make the place, IMHO. So does the tiling Mike the Bosnian Tile Genius put into the rest of the house, and the remake of the kitchen counters he accomplished. The relandscaping job added the glorious fruit trees (on which I’ve largely subsisted all spring), the spectacular emerald paloverde, the beautiful desert willow, the climbing roses around the deck, the attractive front courtyard…to say nothing of xeriscape that doesn’t need to have treated city water poured on it.

PF bloggers like to ruminate now and again about the cost-effectiveness of upgrades and renovations. Very little about fix-up is cost-effective. Unless you manage to buy a house for next to nothing, it’s unwise to imagine you’re fixing up a place so you can sell it for a profit. Obviously, you should keep up its maintenance and replace things that break or wear out. But really: renovation is for the pleasure of the present occupants, not for future buyers to pay for.

I don’t expect ever to recover the money I’ve put into this house when (or if) I sell it. When I bought the place, I bought it intending to live here until they carry me off to the nursing home or the mortuary. So the money I spent on the house went to make it a pleasant place to live.

It worked. Now, so do I. Work, I mean.

Time to get out and treat those roses! Bye…

w00t! School’s out!!!

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Heaven has arrived.

Just climbed out of the pool—the first dip in the water of the season. Soooo heavenly! It’s still a little on the brisk side, this spring having been unusually temperate. Even today, it’s not hot enough outdoors to turn on the air conditioning. Weather has been mixed: a day or two of 90-ish temperatures will warm the water almost to the tolerable range, and then the temps will drop back into the 60s and 70s.

With the afternoon at a balmy 92 degrees, cleaning the pump pot and fiddling with the plants left me warm enough to think…oh, what the hell. Into the drink it was!

What a splendid, refreshing experience is that first dive into the water! I love it. The injured arm was not pleased at pulling through anything thicker than helium, but the rest of the body really enjoyed it.

Speaking of bodies that are happy to be alive, SDXB called this afternoon sounding like his old self. Barely two weeks out of major cardiovascular surgery, the man is walking 30 to 45 minutes around his neighborhood fairly briskly (for him, that means none of us could keep up with him). He’s already lobbying to be allowed back behind the steering wheel and planning this summer’s trips to see his daughter in Texas, New Girlfriend at her Colorado digs, and Sister in Oregon.

It’s such a joy to hear that he’s OK. We were all very alarmed when NG spread the word of the scary condition he was in. His medicos (according to His Nibs) seem to concur that, since he sustained no damage to his heart, he should recover fully and expect to live at least another 15 or 20 years. One of his doctors said he should be able to do “more” than he has… Heh heh heh… But does the guy know what SDXB has been doing? “More” would be on the order of superpowers.

So I told him I expect to go along on his next hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And well, yes…he’s already planning that, too.

Godlmighty. I’d better start getting into shape.

At last, all of my final grades are filed in the college’s system. Except for one change-of-grade form, which I’ll do next week when I get around to it, the semester is now officially over.

And even though I won’t get the three-month totally work-free vacation I coveted, things will slow down enough to allow some substantial loafing. Maybe I’ll take the Cassowary up to Sedona or Payson for some walks in the forest—that should be kind of fun. Dogs like walks in the forest.

First, though, it’s off to finish a book for one of the clients, and then back to work on the young psychologist’s dissertation.

Enjoy!

View from the Mogollon Rim near Payson

Image: Doug Dolde. Public Domain

Another Day at the Grade Inflation Factory

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Hm. This is retirement, eh? Interesting experience.

So I started grading 50,000 words of student efforts after breakfast this morning, right around 7:00 a.m. Racing along as fast as I could read, making no comments except for a few overall observations attached to the electronic rubrics I post in the terrifying BlackBoard, I finished sometime after 3:00 p.m. That would be eight (count’em, 8 ) uninterrupted hours of grading.

Then their scores had to be entered in the rubric forms, each of which has 20 items, and each had to be added up for this assignment’s total number of points.

Thence to Blackboard. Oh god.

Snailus blackboardiensis

It took an hour and 45 minutes to enter all the points for all the students and then upload all the forms to all the students through BlackBoard’s arcane communication system. It is soooo…slooooowwwwwwwwww.

It took another 45 minutes fill in zeros for all the assignments that students didn’t bother to do, to copy out their total numeric scores, to compare each one to the grade equivalences, and to figure their letter grades.

None of this was helped when FireFox developed a hitch in its pants and decided it would not, no way, NOT enter anything in the ever-aggravating BlackBoard. So I had to go over to Safari, which is OK but slightly more cumbersome to use. No degree of extra cumbersomeness was in any way welcome at that particular moment.

If you are a parent of one of my students, you’ll be pleased to know that all our children are above average. What we have here, in the afternoon section, are 12 As, 4 Bs, 4 Cs, 1 D, and 1 F.

How, you ask, could so many young geniuses cluster in one classroom? Well…obviously, birds of a feather flock together!

In the community colleges, large numbers of students drop. At the first whiff of a D or F (or, among the most ambitious, of a C), the young things shoot out the door like frightened cottontails. After these clear out, the students who have a shot at success remain in the classroom.

Then we have all the devices designed to get them to show up in class. Understand, many of these students are bright enough young men and women who, at the age of 19 or so, haven’t imbibed the best of all possible learning skills. One learning skill is, as you might imagine, showing up in class. To get them there and to address the attention-deficit problem (they can’t stay awake through a full hour of lecture), I fill the days with interminable in-class activities and exercises, each of which racks up 10 points here and 20 points there. Plus, because we’re required to keep roll, they get one point for sitting in a seat and breathing—36 points (for this section) shows the young scholar surfaced in class every day.

Because I’m required to assign only three major papers in English 102, that is all I do assign. So…that’s only 300 points.  By the time the semester ends, the total number of points including the three papers and the drafts and the peer reviews and the quizzes and all the exercises and doohickies adds up to something between 650 and 800 points. For this section, the total possible points came to 766. Thus over half the available points consist of busy-work and breathing exercises.

Consequently, even a kid who can’t write his way out of a paper bag can get a B in this class, if he (okay, or she) bothers to turn in the papers. To get a C, you have to cut class with some regularity; to get a D you have to work very hard to prove your incompetence, and to get an F, you have to be brain-dead. Really, when you think about it a D is a greater accomplishment than an A, because it reflects a great deal more effort.

I hate this. In the first place, I hate flunking students, some of whom do try very hard but are just not up to snuff. And in the second place I hate handing out A’s like Hallowe’en candy.

One of the things you should know about these students is that most of them are pretty bright. Some are very smart, indeed. If they’re not great at academics, it’s because they’re distracted by other concerns, because the state of Arizona’s K-12 system leaves much to be desired, or because they haven’t the temperament or patience to sit through interminable mind-numbing courses.

The best student writer I ever had the privilege to meet got a gentleman’s C in my course. OMG, could that guy write! Given half a chance and a degree from Princeton, he could give John McPhee a real run for his money. So…how come he didn’t get an A in freshman comp? He told me he simply could not bear to sit still through an hour or 90 minutes of class. He said that when he had tried, he would feel so restless and so antsy it made him physically uncomfortable.

True to form, he cut a fair number of class meetings, and he flat refused to jump through the busy-work hoops I’d set up to insure that as many students as humanly possible would rack up enough points to pass the course. Last I saw of him, he was on his way to fight fires in Montana. He promised to take a journal along and think about writing articles or essays about his experiences.

This was a man that…well, any young woman in her right mind would fall all over herself to land him as a husband. If we were still living in the cave, he would be bringing home the mammoth steaks for us all. And he also would be keeping the peace in the clan: he was a natural leader. The course, in the first place, wasn’t challenging enough for him, and in the second place, the classroom experience asked him to do something he wasn’t really suited for.

The next time I teach this course, there’ll some changes made! We’re required to assign two 750-word papers and one 2,500-word paper to the 102 classes. Twenty-five hundred words is more than three times the length of each shorter paper, and so next time around, I’m going to make that gigantic hunk of a paper worth 300 points. That will devalue all the in-class activities, so that assiduous presence and faithful hoop-jumping will not, of themselves, carry one through to a passing grade.

In addition to that, they’re starting the semester with annotated bibliographies. They. WILL. Learn. A. Style. Manual. If. It. Kills. Us. All. This activity will occupy great wads of time and also will give them a running head start on their research paper.

Next semester we’re using the “Assignments” function in BlackBoard, which (if I’m informed correctly) speeds the exchange of papers, automatically creates a grade column in the online gradebook, flags you when one of the li’l thangs has submitted a paper, and enters your grade when you’re finished reading the thing. This will speed matters along to some degree.

It also appears that BB will let you enter a letter grade instead of a numeric score and, possibly, create a running averaged letter grade for each classmate. If I can figure out how to make that work, then next fall we’ll be reverting to my old, unreconstructed SchoolMarm Grading System, whereby each hapless student starts with 100 points and gets two to six points dinged off for each crime and misdemeanor that I have told them (a thousand times!) not to do. This, oh fellow pedagogues out there, is an effective way to teach students grammar, style, thematic organization, paragraphing, and sentence structure, theories to the contrary notwithstanding. By the end of the semester, they’re all writing coherent copy with very few grammatical, punctuation, and style errors. It also has the advantage of letting you see their equivalent letter grade at a glance.

If university juniors and seniors who are mostly transfers from the junior colleges can do that, I’ll bet junior-college freshmen and sophomores can do it, too. You have to work with them, but you can get almost all of them to that level, with a few LD and ESL exceptions.

The Eng. 101 students got off too easy, too, though their grades were not quite so skewed to the higher range. Next semester, all four of their papers will be researched, including the two little Mickey Mousers that are not so required by the district. They also will start out with a cold plunge into MLA style, and in fact, I’m going to make them buy the MLA Manual, a great improvement over the half-baked composition textbooks we have in hand. I’m also going to make them learn Strunk & White, which I probably can’t make them buy but which I sure as hell can make them read online. In all its sexist pre-1970s glory.

The little pistols are going to come out of 101 knowing how to write a bibliography and enter an in-text citation, and, not only that, knowing how to write tight. And what a pronoun antecedent is. Maybe even what a subject and a verb are.

They are going to do a lot more work, and I am going to do a lot less work.

Surprise! Money happens again

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Yesterday while I was laboring through a client’s large project, in comes an e-mail from the dean of academic affairs at the college where I’m teaching adjunct for handsful of pennies and no benefits. She reminds me that I’m supposed to make an appointment for web development coaching with one of their online curriculum staff to discuss the feature writing course I’m supposed to teach online in the second eight weeks of fall semester (done that—great experience! This place has the most incredible staff!). In the boilerplate list she’s sent is a mention that I’m supposed to be paid for the course during the development phase, half upfront and half when development is done.

Huh?

Well, being a veteran of GDU, I figure that means they’re not going to pay the usual $2,400 for the three-credit course. This looks a great deal to me like a reason to cut the pay for teaching online: if you don’t have to show up in the classroom, why should you be paid the $50 an hour one gets for entertaining students on the campus?

I need that $2,400. This fall I’ll only be teaching two sections, and the full pay for both will not be enough for me to get by on comfortably. Any less, and I’ll be in deep trouble.

The main reason I dropped back from three to two sections next fall was that teaching six sections this year plus freelancing and blogging will put me over the Social Security earnings limit. The way I understand what two Social Security factotums have said is that to extract the 50% tax on income that exceeds the limit, the government withholds an entire SS check. From that, the amount they figure you owe is extracted. You get the rest back…but not until the following January!

Well, I can’t do without a Social Security check for a month, much less for several months. That’s a pretty stiff penalty for daring to earn a living.

However, what I’ll earn from teaching two sections will barely keep beans on the table. There’ll be no more frolics at J. Jill for the rest of the year…or even at Goodwill. And one unplanned expense, even a minor one, will dig into the emergency fund.

So, it’s going to be a difficult balancing act. I can’t do without full pay for one of the two three-credit courses I’m slated to teach. This news from the dean promised to knock me off the highwire.

Forthwith, I e-mailed to inquire: Soooo… How much less are they going to pay for the course?

They’re not going to pay less at all. What she was saying is that the community college district pays adjunct faculty for their time time to develop a course! And they pay the entire amount of the contract stipend for teaching the course—not instead of but on top of the pay for teaching. In other words, I will earn twice as much for teaching the online course as I would have for teaching an ordinary face-to-face course.

Holy mackerel! When we say “money happens,” we’re not kidding. This summer, instead of having no income except Social Security, I’ll have enough extra to carry me through the months when utility bills hover in the stratosphere. It’s far from what I’ve been earning teaching three sections, but it’s just about the amount extra that I figured I’d need to get through the summer without diving into the emergency fund.

And averaged out over the whole year, it in fact does provide annual pay equivalent to teaching six sections.

You realize how unheard-of this is. GDU would never in a million years pay anyone, especially not adjunct faculty, a stipend for “developing” a course. That’s course prep—it’s part of the job. It’s why I try to get each semester’s prep done before the previous semester ends. When I built the West campus’s first online course in “writing for the professions” (read: “freshman comp for juniors and seniors”), I spent the entire summer working for no pay. Three months of eight-hour days for zero dollah. And zero appreciation, too. Not so much as a f***-you-very-much. That was one of many events and conditions that led to my deep disaffection for My Beloved Former Employer.

I’d figured to spend two weeks slapping the course together and then table it. In fact, since the course doesn’t start until October—it’s an eight-week session—I planned to put off working on it until the fall and use this summer for building FaM and writing a book. This development changes that: if the district is really going to pay me (!) to prepare this course, I suppose I’m going to have to do a decent job of it. That means (gasp) actually work.

Of course, it also means I’m going to crash through the earnings limitation.

Upon reflection, I wonder why I’m worrying about that. Who cares if Social Security withholds a munificent $900? Over $16,000 is sitting in my emergency fund.

On the one hand, I don’t want to diddle away that money on living expenses. The budget is so tight that one good-sized house repair or car repair bill will gouge a hole out of that emergency fund. That stash is there to cover a major emergency that puts me in a position where I can’t work: a car accident, a heart attack, a stroke, cancer…all highly likely at this time and in this place. It is, in effect, a year’s worth of disability insurance.

On the other hand, the emergency fund has grown by almost $2000 since the first of the year, because I’m not spending all my income. I can afford to forego a month’s Social Security “benefit.” (Some of us would call that a “paycheck,” it being a payback of earned wages confiscated over a lifetime in the salt mines.) Most of the money will be returned in January, anyway. Even if it’s not returned, it won’t make much difference.

Money happens. And it’s happening at a good time—when I need it.

The Cat’s-claw That Ate Philadelphia

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Good grief! This winter’s El Niño rains have so over-excited the cat’s claw that it’s decided to take over the swimming pool.

The hanging garden that inhabits the back wall and adds about three feet to its height—quite spectacular at certain times of the year—has sent out a battalion of tendrils, which are marching steadily toward the pool. This one is especially bodacious. It’s grown about an inch a day, and today it made it into the water.

Amazingly, the chlorine doesn’t seem to be harming its growing end. It has a certain weird charm, but it can’t be allowed to keep that up. Besides not being very good for the pool’s chemical balance, cat’s claw is named for its sharp claw-like appendages with which it grips rock and masonry. It can do a fair amount of damage to masonry, and so one would not like to have it residing on the CoolDeck, which is porous, fragile, and prone to staining. As soon as I crawl out from under the avalanche of work that’s landed on my head, I’ll have to get out there with a pair of scissors and cut the plant back.

Meanwhile, it’s mildly entertaining just to let it grow and see what it’ll do.

Uh-oh…