Coffee heat rising

“We Value Your Business”: Reaching a person at a company that doesn’t want to be reached

by

As we saw in yesterday’s encounter with Qwest, many companies—often those with a vested interest in customer service—do not want to deal with the unwashed masses with whom they are forced to do business. They make it as difficult as possible to reach a human being, because they don’t care about their customers and do not wish to waste time speaking with them.

There are several avenues to get their attention.

You can often get through to a live human by calling a phone number listed at Get Human. This useful site lists telephone numbers and strategies for getting past the punch-a-button maze.

Failing this, try googling the company’s name + “corporate headquarters.” This often will bring up a snail-mail address and a viable telephone number; sometimes a working e-mail also will appear. Invest in a stamp to send your comments or complaint by snail-mail. This was how I got an address for Steve Jobs, during the late, great MobileMe fiasco. I printed out my post, “An Open Letter to Steve Jobs,” and mailed it to Cupertino. Interestingly, an underling in Apple’s corporate offices telephoned me –several times! –to discuss the matter. Didn’t succeed in fixing things, but at least he pretended he cared, which was comforting.

Apple Computer
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA
408-996-1010

A search for Qwest’s corporate headquarters gives us this intelligence:

1801 California St.
Denver, CO 80202
For general inquiries: (303) 992-1400
or (800) 899-7780
Fax: (303) 896-8515
Customer Service

Investor Relations
(800) 567-7296
email:investor.relations@qwest.com

Qworst’s customer disservice link takes you to another infinite loop, wherein you have to register and reveal private information before you can wander through an off-putting maze in your attempt to get some help. However, in a past experience I learned you can reach a high-ranking P.R. officer by contacting investor relations. So, that’s where I sent a link to yesterday’s rant about the company’s execrable DSL customer service.

When you believe you’ve been treated unethically or actually cheated, think about what regulatory agencies and trade groups govern the offending corporation. For example, banks and credit unions are regulated by a national banking commission. Insurance companies are to some degree regulated by state agencies. The U.S. Attorney General is interested in frauds and scams that cross state lines. The state attorneys general in your own state and the state where the company is based also may be helpful. Even if they can do nothing, management in general does not enjoy receiving a telephoned or written inquiry from an attorney general’s office; often a simple notice from a regulatory or law enforcement agency will spur a response to your issue.

Also consider contacting companies whose employees have to do business with a wide variety of vendors. Your complaint probably isn’t the first; if you get in touch with agencies or companies serve as intermediaries, you may find a way through the maze.Your credit-card issuer, for example, may have a telephone number that will reach a person at the problem company.

It takes ingenuity and persistence to get past the ramparts erected by megacorporations, which are specifically designed to repel all comers. But keep at it: if you can’t get through, try to enlist the aid of an agency that can.

Back again…temporarily?

by

What’s more annoying than a punch-a-button phone maze? A robot that answers the phone!

Qwest’s DSL connection went down around 8:00 this morning, just before I left for work. After dinner tonight, I called the Philippines in hopes of finding a tech who could figure out how to fix it.

Make that “I tried to call the Philippines.” All of Qworst’s online tech help appears to be based in Manila. But you can’t get to them without trudging past a robot gatekeeper animated with a peculiarly infuriating smug voice. By the time I reached the first live human — get this: after the oily robot actually cooed “hold on while I make a note of that”!!! — I was so enraged I could barely speak.

So now I have this Filipina techie on the phone and she’s asking me how the DSL contraption is acting. Following what is clearly a canned routine, carefully enunciating a script, she guides me through a number of little tests: disconnect and reconnect this, that, and the other. These require me to climb on top of the desk and fiddle with the gadget, because I can’t pick the gadget up easily because the cords, which are too short to start with,are snugly tucked in along the back of the desk to keep all that junk off the floor. Many of the connections are invisible to me, even with my head upside down and jammed up tight against the wall. But none of these experiments work, anyway.

Next she gets me down on the floor, upside down under the desk. “Unplug the telephone line from the wall socket and plug it back in,” she says.

Ohhh-kayyyyy….

Not surprisingly, this strategy disconnects me from the Philippines.

I call back and get the same enraging robot. By now I’m so angry I’m choking and so the robot doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say, possibly because some of it isn’t printable. I slam the phone down and dial “0.” Applying a superhuman effort, I stay polite long enough to ask the operator if she could please connect me to a human being. “Sure,” she says: and connects me right back to the same effing robot!!!!!

By the time the robot ran me through another 8 or 10 minutes of the same enraging hoops (asking questions that the live human would soon repeat, again), I was so furious I found it extremely difficult to be courteous to the poor wretch who finally picked up the phone.

He now starts to repeat the same series of instructions, word for word, that his compatriot so recently fed into my ear. I explain that I’ve already done those things and none of them worked. I also explain that unplugging the telephone from the wall causes the phone to disconnect. He, being smarter than the average bear, says, “Well…do you have another cordless phone in the house?’

Uhhmm, yeah. Duh!

“Go get it,” he says.

So now we disconnect the phone line from the wall socket and reconnect it, to no avail. DSL is still nonfunctional.

He concludes the unit is broken and says Qworst will send a new modem, which is to arrive on Friday. Once this wonder gets here, I have three weeks to return the old one or be charged a hundred bucks for it. I express my appreciation for this charming demand and the graceful terms in which it is couched. I also suggest to him that if he is earning less than $20 an hour, he is being underpaid and he and his workers should unionize and demand a decent wage.

He says he’ll make a note of that.

I say, “Here’s how you spell it: h-u-e-l-g-a. That’s v-i-v-a l-a h-u-e-l-g-a!“ Then, so infuriated am I at the maddening robotic hoops and the barely competent customer service, I remark that after three interactions with Qworst’s smug robot, I’m beginning to understand what motivates people to wrap themselves in explosives and blow up corporate headquarters.

So, I expect the next post you read from this blog will come to you from Cuba.

All this notwithstanding, the DSL mysteriously came back online, which explains why this last post is reaching you from Arizona.

How hard is it to have a human being pick up the phone? And what makes the executives of a faceless corporation think a) that anyone on the planet wants to be run in circles by a smug-sounding robot voice, or b) that even one of its customers is so stupid as to believe “your business is important to us” when they can’t spring for the subminimum wage required to have a nice citizen of the Philippines answer the G.D. phone?

Tomorrow, assuming I’m not riding a black helicopter to Guantanamo Bay,I intend to find out what’s involved in switching to Cox. Can I even get a cable internet connection without having to sign up for cable television that I’ll never watch? If so, can I get out of Qworst’s nonservice? We shall see.

Social Security as Investment Account?

by

Sunday while I was wrestling with the indexing project,PBS mumbled away, background noise that I wasn’t listening to. My attention was snared, though, by a personal finance program identifying itself with Kiplinger’s, whose guests were going on about ways to finance one’s retirement. In the course of conversation, they reminded me of something I’d heard before: if you start taking Social Security early, there’s a way to engineer your way into the higher payment bracket you’d have qualified for if you’d delayed collecting Social Security payments. You can repay the entire amount the government has doled out through Social Security, and that will allow you to start over.

This provision in the Social Security code allows a person who retires early, changes her mind, and goes back work to stop collecting Social Security, remit the funds she collected, and then later restart payments at the amount she would have had if she had not tried to take early retirement.

One of Social Security’s several catches is that if you retire before the so-called “full retirement age,” the government giveth and government taketh away. For every buck you earn above a certain very low threshold, they take back 50 cents, meaning that if you dare to earn a living wage, you get $0.00 from your “entitlement.” This policy ends when you reach “full retirement age” — for me, that’s age 66 1/2 — and after that you get to keep your Social Security, though you have to pay income tax on it. So, if you quit your job and start collecting Social Security at age 62, then go back to work at age 64, your payments are “disappeared” as long as you’re earning more than about $14,000 a year.

Second catch is that the amount of your Social Security payments depends on the age when you start collecting: the younger you are, the less you get. If I had retired at the age of 62, for example, my payments would have been $857 a month. According to the latest statement, retiring right now would give me an income of $1,019. If I wait three and a half years before collect, my monthly Social Security income would be $1,394. But if I can hold off retiring until I’m 70, my payments will be $2,094. These figures are based on actuarial statistics that estimate how long Americans in a given age range will live. The government plans to pay out a specific amount to each participant; assuming you live out your full life expectancy, you would get about the same total distribution no matter when you started collecting.

You can recover from the error of continuing to work after early retirement by canceling the SS payments and returning the money you were already paid. Then when you reach the next age plateau (or when you decide to quit working in earnest), you start collecting at a higher rate.

The speakers on the PBS program pointed out that because only earned income counts against the amount you’re allowed to keep when you start collecting early, if you have enough to live on from dividend income, pensions, and annuities, taking Social Security at the earliest possible moment can be made to amount to an interest-free loan from the government, one that you can use to generate extra income. Here’s the strategy:

  1. Retire from your job and start taking your Social Security payments.
  2. Pay the required income taxes on the Social Security gross.
  3. Immediately place the net Social Security in a fairly low-risk interest-bearing instrument.
  4. Collect until you reach the next highest age plateau.
  5. Repay the government the amount it has doled out to you. Note that no interest is charged on this amount!
  6. Collect the tax refund that the government will now return to you. When you repay Social Security funds to the government, the taxes you paid on them are refunded!
  7. Reapply for Social Security and collect a significantly larger monthly payment.

Effectively what you’re doing is funding an investment with an interest-free loan from the government. If for some reason you decide not to go through with the plan, you still end up with a nice kitty in the bank.

Now, that’s all very well and good if you have plenty of money: enough invested to put you past the crossover point (where passive income = amount needed to live on) without benefit of Social Security. I don’t, of course. So far do I not that my present plan is to continue working until I’m 70 or until the Great Desert University cans me, whichever comes first.

Let’s suppose I actually do manage to cling to my job for another seven years. That would allow me to collect “full retirement age” Social Security for 3 1/2 years. By the time I turn 70, I will have collected $1,394 x 12 x 3.5 = $58,548. The tax rules for Social Security income are, like all tax rules, stupefyingly complex, but from what I can tell they do not amount to the rate for ordinary income because some part of the Social Security income may be exempted. Presumably, then, I would pay something less than 28%. Let’s say it’s around 20%: $58,548 – 20% = $46,838 net income over three and one-half years. At a 6% return, interest income on that would be roughly $2,810 of free money.

When I reach 70, I return the Social Security lucre to the government. The Treasury Department refunds $11,710 to me, leaving me with a total of $14,520 to go back into my retirement savings (at 4%, that yields a munificent $580 a year, just slightly better than a hit on the head). But now I collect $2,094 a month: $700 a month more than I was paid when payments were based on my starting age of 66 1/2.

Seven hundred bucks a month is worth the effort. If I haven’t already done so, I quit my job now. My earned income drops significantly, and so taxes on the Social Security drop commensurately. I end up with a Social Security drawdown that makes a real contribution to my living expenses, something $857 would not do and $1,019 would barely do.

So, here’s the Poor Woman’s Answer to the Fat Cat’s Social Security Investment Strategy:

  1. Hang on to my job for all I’m worth.
  2. Start collecting Social Security at age 66 1/2, but do not quit working then.
  3. Bank every after-tax penny of Social Security income in an instrument that returns at least some interest income.
  4. At age 70, quit my job and repay the government the amount of Social Security paid to me.
  5. Reapply for Social Security, giving myself a $700 a month raise plus a “bonus” of 3.5 years’ worth of tax refunds.

What if I don’t make it to age 70? What if I throw over the traces before then, or if the university lets me go?

In that case, because I’ve banked every net penny of the $1,394 the government started paying me at age 66 1/2, my retirement savings have grown considerably. If nothing else, I’ve accrued a nice emergency fund, or at least enough to kick off retirement with a vacation in the south of France.

If I die before the age of 70, I’ve contrived to recover a certain amount of my contributions to the Social Security fund, which I can pass down to my heir — something I could not have done had I tried to delay collecting until I quit my job.

So, is this worth the trouble? Only if you live into your mid-80s. If I die in my 70s, then I’ve stayed in the salt mine altogether too long and missed out on a real retirement period. That certainly is a possibility.

However, if I dodge the family disease (and chances are I’d have it by now if I were going to get it), then I may be carrying the “good” genes. My father lived to the age of 84 after a lifetime of heavy smoking and unadulterated scorn for the concept of teetotaling. I don’t smoke and never have. The two women that I most take after lived into their mid-90s…and they were Christian Scientists. With decent medical care, I could live at least to age 95 and possibly to 100. Since that kind of longevity poses the risk that I could outlive my savings, yes. Yes, it is worth the trouble. An extra $700 a month could mean the difference between cat food and canned salmon.

Assuming any salmon are still swimming in the ocean by the time I reach that age.

Keep Ants out of Your Hummingbird Feeder

by


If you live in a part of the country where you can enjoy hummingbirds, you may have noticed that ants love sugar water even more than hummers do. The little gals quickly learn the source of any drips from your feeder; parade up the wall, across the rafters, and down the hanger; and then drown in suicidal droves, contaminating the food and repelling the birds.

Here’s an easy, cheap way to keep ants out of hummingbird food. The one thing you’ll need that may or may not be immediately at hand is a plastic lid of the sort that comes on cans of spray paint: it has an inner ring of plastic that creates a kind of “moat” inside the lid. If you don’t have a can of spray paint around the house, ask your friends, relatives, and neighbors — someone who will let you mooch the lid is bound to have one.

You need:
spray paint can’s lid
piece of cardboard
sturdy tape, such as duct tape or packing tape
scissors
ice pick or large nail
hammer or tack hammer
vegetable oil
hummingbird feeder with stiff wire or rod hanger extender

In the past, I’ve taken a pair of wire cutters to metal coat hangers to make hanger extenders for my hummer feeders. A couple of years ago, though, I discovered that nurseries and Home Depot have rods with hooks on each end that work nicely to hang bird feeders from a rafter. Either will work — the hanger just needs to be stiff enough to support the gadget you’re about to make.

Take the ice pick or nail and gently tap a hole in the center of the lid, using a small hammer. With the scissors, cut out a piece of cardboard about the size of the lid — you can trace the lid, for a neater look, or simply cut out a three-inch-square piece. Punch a hole in the center of this, too.

Now push the metal hanger rod through the cardboard and through the hole in the lid, so that the lid sits atop the cardboard with the open side facing upward. Position it near the top of the rod, and tape it firmly in place, so that it will stay as level as you can make it. Finally, pour a small amount of vegetable oil in the outer “moat” of the lid. Fill the moat about 1/4 to 1/2 full. Attach the rod to the hook in your rafter and then hang the feeder from the lower hook.

Ants hate oil. They will not go through it. Even after it has dried up and congealed, they still won’t get into it! This gadget absolutely positively keeps ants out of hummingbird water, without harming them, you, or the birds.

Hummingbird photo copyright Mdf, from Wikipedia Commons

Moments of Fame

by

At the74th Carnival of Money Stories, Not the Jet Set has placed Funny’s“lemonade from lemons”saga among the Editor’s Picks! Thanks very much for that, NTJS. At this carnival, Budgets Are Sexy tells the tale of the timehe had to pay for his own Starbucks(can you imagine? his employer hands out gift cards to Starbucks!). Trees Full of Money describesthe unfortunate decision to lease a Toyota 4-Runner; the first installment appears here. And No More Spending rejectsthe temptation posed by glossy magazines.

Broke Grad Student has posted the 167th Carnival of Personal Finance, with a Beijing Olympics theme. Funny’s squib about the national debt and its likely baleful effect on the US and world economy over the next decade or two appears here. Once again, many great stories here. At Alpha Consumer, Kimberly reminds me why I used to love being a journalist (because you can ask as many nosy questions as you like!) with an interesting report on how much bloggers earn, a story that incidentally reveals the traffic some blogs generate. The Financial Blogger has a hilarious piece on how some songs you’ll recognize relate to personal finance…along the way he confirms this old bat’s suspicions about what students are actually thinking about in class. 😀 In the suspicions confirmed department, Brip Blap reveals the truth about passive income, or so he says. The Wisdom Journal, on a more serious note, advises common sense when it comes to frugality. And Not the Jet Set describes an error on the bank’s part and the nuisance it led to.

The Make It from Scratch Carnival is up at Learning the Ropes, where Funny’s beauty tip for olive-oil hair conditioning appears above the fold. TM were pleased to see our recipe for fried green tomatoes also made the cut. Speaking of tomatoes — and frugality — My Daily Dollars has a tasty-sounding plan for a $3.00 family meal made with home-grown tomatoes.

Fire Finance hosts the 140th Festival of Frugality. As an employee of the Great Desert University, a decidedly public school given to larding FTE with (largely fraudulent) online courses and concocting graduate programs that do not require annoying details like the GRE or the GMAT, Funny is thrilled to see Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity hold forth on reasons not to go to a private college…but wait! snap out of that! It’s a Devil’s Advocate post. Speaking of the outcome of fraudulent practices, Care One Credit offers some strategies to avoid foreclosure. Back on campus, Frugal in the Fruitlands points out some of the many benefits colleges and universities offer alumni. Funny’s post on falling off the frugality wagon appears in this week’s Festival.

PF Buzz hosts the 27th Money Hacks Carnival, where Funny’s rave about the glories of doing business with credit unions appears. Here, Fiscal Liberty offers ten things to know before refinancing; No Debt Plan suggests some ways to save money on watering the lawn; and Realm of Prosperity tries to save on college textbooks.

How do I love the credit union?

by

Let me count the ways!

Just discovered that the credit union allows you to give your accounts “nicknames” in its online environment. Probably it’s ever been thus…I only tumbled to it this afternoon. So, I just spent ten minutes or so renaming all my accounts to jibe with the monikers I’ve given them in Quicken. This will much simplify making online transfers, which up to now have required me to think about what I’m doing, of all the unreasonable things.

How is the credit union better than the banks I’ve known?

  • All checking accounts are free: no charges
  • No minimum to qualify for free checking
  • Low minimums for money market accounts
  • No sneaky ways to extract extra fees from customers
  • Human beings answer the phone
  • Employees recognize regular customers
  • Office is located at my place of work
  • Another office is located 10 minutes from home
  • Plenty of tellers are on duty at all times: short or no lines
  • Loan rates are very low
  • Loan officers are on the premises
  • Online pages are easy to navigate and have many nifty amenities
  • Online help is actually helpful
  • Password is not your Social Security number (!!!)

How is the credit union maybe not as good as a vast faceless national bank?

  • Fewer brick & mortar offices
  • Fewer ATMs (but I don’t know: I don’t use ATMs)
  • Difficult to manage an ETF from Japan or Europe

By how much do the plusses outweigh the minuses?

  • By about 1,000 to 1