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When trying to get help fixing a broken machine the last thing a consumer wants to talk to is a machine. When something you paid lots of money for doesn't work it's a Barbra Streisand moment people, people needing people. But of course when you call the consumer help line the first thing you hear is a machine saying "Your call is important to us."
If they were honest what you would hear is "Your call is so important to us we are answering it with a machine. While you listen to the annoying music we've picked out we will occasionally break in with another lie, saying that we appreciate your patience. Actually we laugh at your patience and can't believe you would buy things from a company with our level of customer service. We will also tell you your call will be answered by the next representative. That is also a lie. Your call will not be answered by the next representative. You will get frustrated and hang up long before the next representative gets close to answering your call because... the next representative is in the parking lot having a smoke. On the off chance the next representative does answer your call English will be their second, possibly third language and we haven't really told them much about our product. Why? Because employing customer service agents who don't really knowing anything about our product and have a difficult time understanding English spoken by irate customers protects us from having to service you, the angry consumer. Imagine our savings. We hope you appreciate our honesty and thus continue to buy our products no matter how we treat you. Thank you. If you don't slam down the phone this message will repeat."
I doubt calling the consumer complaint division of the company in question and complaining about not getting through on the customer service line will do any good either because they are expecting your call and only exist to feed you more lies about how they value your patience and business.
But I can tell you this, you'll feel a whole lot better if you go to the offending companies web site, find their consumer comments section and week-after-week leave horrifying tales of electrical fires started by their shoddy product. You might even go into a chat room to exchange horror stories about the service you haven't received from this company with their other irate customers because in moments of frustration and anger it feels so good to communicate with another human, that this chat room becomes, well, another Streisand moment People, people complaining to other people...
Who said "You'll never go broke underestimating the taste of the American people?" Rupert Murdoch? P.T. Barnum? Or F.W. Woolworth? Make your decision please. (beat) Times up. Pencils down. The answer is the man who brought us the circus geek and bearded lady, P.T. Barnum. Although the others pretty much followed Barnum's example.
There was a recent article in Scientific American which looked into marketing and, as it turns out, we the people are pretty easy to manipulate and perhaps even stupid. They know you are more likely to send in a $20 donation IF they send you two-cents worth of return address labels because the human animal craves reciprocation.
They have done experiments and know you will follow a man crossing the street against the light 350% more often if he is wearing a business suit rather than two sleeping bags and 18 pounds of grime because humans respond to successful authority figures.
They know if they say "Four out of five doctors recommend..." you won't worry about what the fifth doctor had to say even though four out of five doctors used to recommend opening your veins and running out half your blood to cure a headache.
Even been in a furniture store, looking around and the salesman says "That's an ugly couch. Get up before your wife sees you on it and dumps you for someone with taste." Of course not. All customers have terrific taste according to all salesmen. Recently, my wife and I were looking at couches and fabric samples and the sales guy said, "I just did a big star's home in this chenille." So I should buy a couch from you because Dom De Luise is eating a meatball sandwich on this chenille right now?
There's an acupuncture clinic that does facelifts without surgery. A satisfied customer said, after an acupuncture treatment her faces "Feels so young, so alive." You know why? You just had needles in your face. You want your face to feel real alive, hit it with a soup ladle. You'll feel like you're back in the womb.
Why are we consumers so easy to convince?
Have you seen those ads for the pill that helps you "lose weight in your sleep?" They know you will believe you can lose weight by doing nothing because the powerful combination of vanity and sloth trumps logic 59.3% of the time.
Actually, I just made that number up. Which is a good example of how saying-it-authoritatively-on-the-radio-just-makes-it-so.
What's my point? Every time you walk into a store, watch T.V. or listen to a politician speak imagine you are a french fry at a starving pigeon convention. You don't have a chance. They know where your buttons are and how to push them. Hide your buttons and beware the starving pigeon.
Finally a way to make money off the internet-CNN in the buff
Call your brokers and tell them to get you back on the tech stock band wagon. For, I have seen the golden future of the internet and its name is Nakednews.com. What is Nakednews.com? CNN in the buff. And, finally a way to make money off the internet.
A friend of mine e-mailed me the other day and said to go immediately to a site he had just discovered called Nakednews.com. Who could say no to that? So, I pointed my browser and watched as an anchorwoman very professionally delivered the day's news. Then as her hands subtly gesticulated in a low-key Diane Sawyer manner she made a brief detour to undo a button on her jacket. More news, then another button. Then another. Casually she slipped out of her jacket. As she delivered a story on a train wreck in Belgium she was down to her bra and panties. And by the time she got to that hoof and mouth thing she was completely naked. Crashed F-15's, suicide bombers in the middle east all the news that's fit to print and it's done by Live Nude Girls.
Which is not to say Nakednews is a tawdry striptease. This was a very professional, journalistically-sound unveiling. I would go so far to say Nakednews has family values. One of the anchorwomen is 6 months pregnant and below the eyebrows as bald as a baby's butt. I am so enthused about this style of journalism were it not for my clothes I would be naked right now.
Nakednews.com is genius. It provides guys with the best excuse, ever. "Honey, I was just watching the news." "Boss, I was just watching the news!" "Mom, I was just watching a special on Macedonia. I'll eat dinner in my room again tonight."
This brilliant new news service (available for a monthly fee) is going to bring CNN to its knees. You watch Bernard Shaw is going to give the Full Monty treatment to the latest in the Middle East or Ted Turner will have to pull the plug.
I cannot tell you how proud I am to be an American right now. Sure the tech sector has taken a beating recently but you can't keep the U.S. economy/country down. Thanks to Nakednews.com not only is our tech sector going to take off again but in the future how many 14 year old boys with internet access are ever going to fail a current events quiz? God Bless America and God Bless Nakednews.com.
There are moments that give you pause and make you take stock of your life. Like the other night, I saw an ad for Viagra on the CBS Evening News, that was followed by an ad for Beano and after that one for Lipitor, that cholesterol medicine. I sat back and thought, I must be the youngest person watching the CBS Evening news. If you're having trouble in the front, in the back and in the arteries, you're old.
But that impotence, flatulence, artery blockage ad cluster got me thinking... first of all, that you should never run a news story about a natural gas shortage next to a Beano ad.
And then beyond that I thought, are my wife and I prepared for old age and retirement? What investments have we made over the past few years that will help secure our future?
If a secure future is the yard stick you measure by then it was probably a mistake to put all our money into monkeychow.com, a pet food service that delivers directly to the pet. When I first read their prospectus it looked golden, everybody has a pet but not everybody has the time to feed it.But even though delivery was free monkeychow.com had all the staying power of Norwegian wine futures... another bad investment. I drive a Volvo and I thought if the people that make this car start making wine it's bound to be good... Well, as it turns out you can't make quality wine that close to the arctic circle. Their growing season is too short, the grapes only got to the size of a pea before winter hit so they had to add so much sugar to make the wine drinkable...
And anyway, after reading the owner's manual I found out Volvos are made in Sweden. So my Norwegian wine futures had all the fiscal staying power of cigars.com. An investment I, thankfully, didn't make. But only because I had put all our savings into monkeychow and the Norwegian wine thing.
What's my point? If you're paying attention there are sign posts in life and you will get the information you need. And according to the signposts, before I need Viagra, Beano and Lipitor just to have sex without producing a heart attack or an embarrassing backfire I need to make a lot of money and save it somewhere safe because, no matter if you buy and hold or try to time the market, monkeychow.com and Norwegian wine futures are not a stock portfolio I can retire on.
I Think I Saw Joni Mitchell Driving an SUV
What would be a stranger sight to see Joni Mitchell driving an SUV or Henry David Thoreau roaring over Walden Pond on a jet ski? I am pretty sure I saw one of those things the other day on Sunset Boulevard and it kind of creeped me out.
I don't know exactly why but if someone had asked me to guess what kind of vehicle Joni Mitchell drove I would say a Volvo or Saab or a new highly efficient hybrid Honda or some classic vintage Studebaker that was not earth friendly but so cool I could give her artistic license. I never would have guessed some big honkin', trendy, just like everybody else in L.A., environmental disaster truck.
Being concerned with the environment is not something you do because someone famous told you to, but if the singer who was worried that they were going to pave paradise and put up a parking lot is getting 11 miles to the gallon I AM somehow less motivated environmentally speaking. And if Joni Mitchell is driving an SUV it also means our whole culture has lost its mind. We're just not thinking.
We know burning fossil fuels is not helping things. We know buying more and more oil makes us more and more dependent on people who think of us as the great Satan and we know that the new Cadillac Escalade looks like a fancy storage shed rolling up the street.
Can I possibly be wrong when I say these SUV's have gotten hideously huge I saw a soccer Mom climbing down out of a Lincoln Navigator and for a second I thought she was a midget getting off a school bus. These behemoths are sized all out of proportion to their transportation purpose. In the future we will see the current crop of SUV's as 10 inch wide lapels.
I just don't get what people are thinking about, the furthest off-road these L.A. SUV owners get is a gravel parking lot. People, you don't need 2 feet of ground clearance to go over a speed bump.
People like George Will argue that the SUV has been a great financial boon to the auto industry and gives great benefit to the consumer. But George Will didn't right the song Woodstock. He wears a bow tie and still thinks Reaganomics was a miracle. He can't understand why SUV's are wrong.
But if Joni Mitchell doesn't get that, we're doomed. Joni, if it wasn't you driving that SUV I am sorry. But if it was, I am confused. I believed you when you said we are stardust, and that we are golden and that we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. Are you now saying we need four-wheel drive to get there? Because Joni, I'm pretty sure the roads to the garden are level and paved.
Coming to a theater near you-- Bat Boy Saves the World!
The most creative newspaper in the universe, the Weekly World News, employing their own unique form of journalism, recently reported that Bat Boy, the boy who is half-human/half-bat, escaped from his hospital room in Chicago to help in America's fight against terrorism.
For some reason, Bat-Boy is not the big story here in Los Angeles, although many of us wish him well, but the big story out here is what kind of entertainment the American public will flock to in the years to come and what will they turn their backs on?
Not knowing the answer to that question has lots of people in Hollywood crawling the walls like, well... Bat Boys and Bat Girls. How happy would your stockholders be if the only movies your studio had for the Fall/Christmas season featured terrorists, Martians attacking the White House and serial killers, when what the public wants is a romantic comedy where love triumphs in the end or a space movie where world peace starts in a far away galaxy or a wacky farce where the mind of the 8 year old son trades places with the 35 year old Dad. Actually I can't imagine any time period when that one would have worked but...
This, indeed, is a tricky time for Hollywood yet the last time the world stood face to face with pure evil, World War 2, the U.S. entertainment industry turned out some of the best movies and music in its history. So we have reason to be very optimistic.
Certainly, not everything we see and hear will be good. Tragic events like Sept. 11th bring out the best, the worst and the inexplicable in people, and because the entertainment industry, for the most part is run by people, Hollywood will produce product from that wide range of human potential. We will see inspiring movies, we will read unique stories about a half bat/half boy using fear, rabies and radar to subdue the forces of evil and we will see commercials showing Martha Stewart naked in a bathtub--the best, the worst and the inexplicable.
But minus Michael Jackson recording another All-Star sing-a-long, I believe, for the most part, Hollywood is going to do great things. And even if the American Media doesn't rise to the occasion you still gotta' love it that some writer, somewhere came up with the idea that Bat-Boy is hanging on the wall of a cave in Afghanistan waiting for you know-who to fall asleep. In Los Angels, I'm Tim Bedore for Marketplace.
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