Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times... is Enemy Action.
-- Ian Fleming, in Goldfinger.

When I was young, I discovered my mother's cache of novels by Horatio Alger, Jr. Alger wrote a lot of novels, and while today's critics dismiss them as formulaic blurge, they were good formulaic blurge, and the public bought them in great quantity.

In a typical story, an orphan would find work as a bootblack, apply himself, and through honesty, diligence, pluck, ingenuity and just plain hard work, achieve a certain degree of success. He'd attract the attention of a person of wealth and power, who would propose a mutually-beneficial arrangement. He'd apply more honesty, diligence, pluck, ingenuity, and just plain hard work, eventually achieving wealth and power in his own right. In the end, he'd be older, and would notice an orphan who has achieved a certain degree of success through honesty, diligence, pluck, ingenuity, and just plain hard work, and would propose a mutually-beneficial arrangement.

Oh, I told myself, when I grow up, I'm going to be honest, diligent, plucky, ingenious, and work hard. Success is already mine, I can smell it. Except that's not the way it always works.

Calvin Coolidge said that "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race".

You need to "press on" a lot when you're dealing with Verizon. And "hold on" as well. And you need to be able to tune out the wretched "music on hold" that they use. Lordy! It's not enough that they choose terrible performances of third-rate music, but it's overmodulated as well. It's enough to make a dog cry; a music lover wishes the cord on his phone would allow him to walk over to the cupboard where the irish whiskey is found.

Not that it's just Verizon. Many big companies have voicemail systems that make it impossible to deal with a human being. Verizon has this nifty system, though, which they toss your phone call back and forth between different people, none of which admit to being able to help you. At the time I'm writing this, it's 2:50 PM and I've been on the phone since 1:03. I've been disconnected 4 times. Every time they transfer you, you need to punch in your 10-digit telephone number, and then, after someone actually picks up your call, the first thing they ask for is that, plus the name of the person calling, the name of the person whose name is on the account, the relationship, and the address of the service.

I don't mind them verifying that I'm someone that can order changes to service, but why do I need to repeat the information in order for them to tell me they're going to transfer me to someone who can take care of the problem? More importantly, why do I need to repeat all this information in order for them to transfer me to someone else who can't take care of the problem?

Most importantly, why do I need to repeat all this information in order for them to disconnect my call?

A Horatio Alger hero is as honest as the day is long. That's not how you succeed in business today. What you do is to mark the shelf with one price, so the consumer thinks he's getting a good price, and put another price in the cash register, so you can steal a dime here, twenty cents there, three dollars the other place.

A couple of years ago, I bought some gourmet coffee online. It was as good as the cheap breakfast blend I had been buying, but no better - certainly not worth the $12.99/pound they wanted, and they expected me to buy 2 pounds a month at that price. I went to the web to cancel my order and when I went to that URL, it was a blank page. My identity might have been encoded in the URL, though, so I assumed everything was OK until I got another shipment, and they charged my credit card not $26, but $36. The deal was free shipping, and I could cancel anytime. And you know that deal from Visa, that they guarantee you won't be charged for unauthorized charges? The bank said that if the vendor had my CC number, that they assume the charge is authorized. I had to sue in small claims court, against both the coffee vendor and the bank, to get my money.

Berkeley Nutraceuticals advertised "Enzyte" on television. Their "natural male enhancement" pills turn "Smiling Bob" into a telephone pole, making his wife dizzy, the neighborhood wives swoon, and the other men in the neighborhood feel like wimps. Gosh, that sounds good. And the folks behind Enzyte are so sure you'll be pleased with it, that they'll send you some free, and all you have to do is give them your credit card info for shipping.

Oh, and by the by, you soon getting regular shipments, and your card is getting regularly hammered. In August, they sentenced Steve Warshak, the head of Berkeley, to 25 years in prison. His mother got a 2 year sentence as well, but she's 75 and has cancer. The judge is allowing her to remain free on bond while appealing her conviction; she will surely die before she goes to prison.

It's not just WorldCom and Enron. I wrote last year of giving Weis Markets a check, which they deposited twice, once as an electronic deposit, and once as a paper check. I had to fight and fight and fight to get the money back from them.

If you steal a loaf of bread from the supermarket, that's shoplifting, and since the amount is so small, they will only send you to jail for several days for that. When they stole $103 from me, and refused to make restitution for days, the police said it was just a mistake, and there was no intent.

When they loaded the ATM at Penn National with the wrong denomination of bills, though, and people got too much money from the machine, they threatened the people who used the machine with criminal prosecution. Do you always check the amount of money the ATM has given you? If you withdrew $200 from your account, and it dispensed 9 twenties instead of 10, who would believe your complaint? I just shove the cash into my pocket, without counting it.

The GOP always seems to have "tort reform" near the top of their list of campaign issues. They talk about abusive lawsuits - but I see that Norm Coleman is calling in the lawyers because the recount for the Minnesota election didn't come out in his favor.

They talk of Stella Lieback and the coffee at McDonald's, and suggest she was just greedy, but Stella had $20,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for her burns, and McDonald's refused to pay more than $300 towards them. They say it was Stella's own fault, that she shouldn't have been trying to open the coffee while driving the car, but in fact, she was a passenger, not the driver, and the driver had stopped so Stella could get the lid off the coffee cup. This wasn't the first time McDonald's had sent people to the hospital for coffee burns, either; there were hundreds of other cases.

Or take insurance companies. The folks at Coventry Health Care, which handled my Medicare Drug insurance last year, tried to get me to pay them directly and pay through deductions to my Social Security for several months, and then after six months, they'd repay the money I'd loaned them without interest for six months. They didn't get away with that, but they did manage to cheat me out of six months coverage for my diabetes medicine.

And Harleyville Insurance screwed me when a hit-skip school bus driver - I can only conclude the driver was drunk - creamed the left side of my minivan. It ended up costing me hundreds of dollars to rent a replacement vehicle while mine was in the shop. It ended up costing me hundreds of dollars.

I like to think that most companies are owned and run by people who have a sense of decency. That's obviously not true, but Horatio Alger taught me that success in business is the result of honesty, pluck, ingenuity, and hard work. I tend to do business, when I can, with local companies, and especially with companies where it's an individual owning the company, rather than a corporation.

But when I deal with outfits like Verizon, I get awfully frustrated. It is now 3:44 PM, and I'm off the phone. I finally got someone who was both willing and able to get the billing fixed. Or at least, she said she accomplished that. There's supposed to be an email confirming that, and I haven't yet received it.

I'm not holding my breath.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
AdvantraRx - Calvin Coolidge - Coventry Health Care - Enzyte - gourmet coffee - Harleyville Insurance - hit-skip - Horatio Alger, Jr - music on hold - Norm Coleman - Penn National - pluck - Stella Lieback - Verizon