Chilled Out Bearded Man

Dear RCN,

I am writing to you in the hopes that you will improve yourself.

Your billing system is preposterous. Every month when I check the bill, I worry what new surprises I will find. When my bill increased recently, I tried to figure out where the difference was, but the actual names of the line items had changed. How am I supposed to read my bill every month if the names of the line items are changing?

The question of line item names should really be nonexistent because you offer 3 services that consumers care about:
1) Cable
2) Internet
3) Phone

When I used to get bills from your competitor Time Warner, I had 3 line items:
1) Cable
2) Internet
3) Phone

Do you see how nicely the line items match the services above? That’s how your bill needs to be. We don’t want to see that we are paying for a cable box. We know we have to pay for a box, because there can be no cable without a box. Include the Cable Modem in my price. I can’t have internet without it. The Bundle Discount is meaningless. Show me the bundle as an item and somewhere on your site show me what’s in it. That’s all you need.

In fact, you don’t even need to show me those 3 line items. You should just create packages and have the elements of the package on your website and in your brochures. Then have one line item on the bill.

You are wasting time and money by dealing with all of these line items on your bills. It takes me at least twice as long with one of your customer service people as with Time Warner customer service, because we have to walk through all the line items when I call RCN. When your sales people are trying to sell me a new “package” (bundle, etc) it takes them way too long to figure out and explain the offerings.

Lastly, I would like to bring up my price increase. The increase this year was almost $40 in two months. It was an increase on multiple products, but you have to be kidding me if you think I am going to just accept a $40 increase on a $157 bill. That is a 25% increase.

The short of it is that I will most likely be leaving your service, because your customer support did not seem to understand my situation. In fact they asked if I wanted to remove some of my services. (I may be mistaken, but I believe that will cost me $5 based on many articles I have read. I forgot to ask.) No, I don’t want to remove my services. I want the services, I just want your company to have some sanity about their annual price increases. A 25% increase is unacceptable.

This is by far the worst increase I have seen, but billing failures seem to be a regular event at your company, probably due to the inanely complex billing system. I deal with some sort of RCN billing error one to two times per year. That is one to two times more than it should be.
Make some packages and let me choose one. Show me 1-3 line items on my bill. Then I will stay with your company. I am done playing this ridiculous pricing game. I deserve better as a consumer of a company of your size and stature.

Best Regards,

The Chilled Out Bearded Man

P.S. In case you are wondering, I left Time Warner because I moved to a location that did not offer Time Warner. But, there are other choices and I believe Time Warner may be available to me now.

Every time an Oxy Clean commercial comes on TV, I turn to a different channel. Its too loud. The guy sounds retarded. And I left off the quotes intentionally. I literally mean he sounds like a retarded person with a low IQ who has no volume control. Or maybe he is insane. Thats possible, too. Now, I’m not being mean here. I just find it offensive that this company, Oxy Clean, thinks its funny to use retarded people to sell their products.

The company must be doing at least alright, because the company doesn’t go out of business. Unfortunately, I, and other sane people of normal IQs, don’t get to see the commercials that show after the Oxy Clean commercials, because we change channels when the Oxy Clean commercials come on. So, to all the networks that show these commercials, and to all the advertisers that advertise after the Oxy Clean commercial, STOP SHOWING THE LOUD RETARDED INSANE GUY on my television.

I feel bad that I am giving Oxy Clean a free promotion, but this had to be said.

And oh yeah… Lets not forget that he is ruining the image of all bearded men.

… Heeeeeerrrresss BILLY!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRVgPOH-9dU

Pretty ridiculous names, right?

I think its about as ridiculous as the merger itself. Can someone please explain how this helps either MS or Yahoo? You have two companies that have majorly different focuses. They both happen to be competing with the same company. Yahoo is a direct competitor. Microsoft is afraid that if they don’t get onto the playing field, they’re in trouble in the future world of computer software. Yahoo was originally based on Google’s search technology. Not sure if anyone has tried running the same searches on both Yahoo and Google, but from my experience Google’s results are generally dramatically better. And lets not even talk about Microsoft’s searches. Windows Live and MSN aren’t even in the same ballpark.

But search isn’t where the really money is anyway. Search attracts users to Google’s main site, but Google makes most of its money from advertising. Yahoo also does advertising. Advertising money, as you may have heard, is based on cookies. The more users an advertising company can get in their database of cookie-ified users, the more reach they have. And Google has the most reach. Microsoft has some reach and yahoo has a decent amount of reach, but combining the two just doesn’t a Google make.

And lets talk about quality for a moment. Google is known for their hiring techniques. Microsoft was too, but then it just became gigantor corp and its impossible to monitor all hiring at that size, though you do manage to attract some people due to your offerings if your competitor doesn’t get them first. Yahoo has some good people too due to their attractiveness. Google has always taken their hiring very seriously. Each person they hired since the beginning had to be a gem. So not only did they hire the best for themselves, they also took hiring potential away from companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. Google’s people are just quality. Its that simple. They work hard, efficient, and smart. The company is focused from the top of the pyramid down to the lowest of the low (though they have a very flat and hence less bureaucractic and more efficient system).

Hopefully this is just a marketing tactic by Microsoft to get people to their own search sites or to start feeding the anti-google fire. Either way big bad Microsoft needs to leave our innocent Yahoo alone. Yahoo ain’t no Google, but it definitely ain’t no Microsoft neither.

Perhaps Microsoft has some other intention that they are not telling us. Like they really want Yahoo’s wonderful financial website, finance.yahoo.com. Or they just want to use their software experience to access the deleted Yahoo servers of yore to find the old Google search algorithms.

If this unfortunate merger does in fact take place, I would at least hope that Microsoft allows Yahoo to keep their name. This isn’t sanity world, this is corporate america people, so it may actually happen. And as my friend over at Landscapestartup.com would say Yahoo is headless and Microsoft is Jabba the Hut

Headless people (Corporations are people, too.) often tend to be spineless as well. Be strong Yahoo. Please be strong.

And in other news… Bill Gates is giving away all his money. Dear Bill, Please send a large check to the Beard Trimming Foundation for Bearded Men who Need New Trimmers.

I’m on a mission to find a new dry cleaner. I’m sick and tired of taking dirty clothes to the laundromat, leaving them there for 4 days, paying to get them back, and then finding that they’re not just still dirty, but the simple dirt stains have been ironed in.

And you would think that pointing out the dirt spots would help. No. You can put big red stickers on your clothes with notes saying dirt spot. They’ll probably just iron the note right onto the shirt. Okay… Maybe thats a little extreme, but you get my point.

If they need to raise the prices, then do it, but for the sake of all that is good, don’t claim to be cleaners when all you do is steam something and iron it. Iron the dirt right into your clothes.

On my last trip to the cleaners I was picking up pants that I had taken in 4 days earlier. These were pants that had survived for years, through everything. They still looked almost brand new besides a new dirt spot on the left cheek. When I say dirt spot, I am referring to dry dirt. As in dry earth. Mud that had dried on the back of the pants. I easily scraped off a bit of it with my fingernail before I took it in, and I figured the rest would get washed out at the “cleaners”. Dried mud. You can wash the stuff off with water. The pants hadn’t been washed for awhile, and they had started to smell a little. Not skunk smell, just a slight mildew smell.

In the 4 day period from when I dropped off my pants until I picked them up, they had sent my nice pair of black slacks to a third party. The third party threw them into a dry cleaning machine, pressed the pants, and sent them back to my “cleaners”. IN THE SAME CONDITION I GAVE THEM TO THEM. The pants looked the same with the big dirt spot on the back. They still smelled the same, too.

I looked up dry cleaning on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cleaning . Dry cleaning uses perchloroethylene (perc for short) to rinse the clothes without getting them wet (with water). Before the clothes go into the dry cleaning machine, they are supposed to be checked for dirt spots. A different catalyst is meant to be applied to the soiled area depending on the type of nastiness it is. Now, being professionals, you would think that these people would be pretty good at gaging what sort of spot it is. And, wouldn’t they check after the wash to make sure that the spot was removed? Don’t they know that ironing dirty clothes stains the clothes. They’re professionals.

Back to my pants… How could they possibly return with a big stain on them and smelling the same? I’m a patient guy, so when I showed my cleaners that the spot was still there and they offered to “redo” the cleaning, I gladly accepted. (I didn’t point out that they still smelled the same, but I made a mental note.) When the pants returned this time, the smell was gone, but the spot was still there. Is this normal? At this point, I assume that their system is broken in some way, be it the machine, the communication between my cleaners and the third party dry cleaners, or something I can imagine.

If I was running a computer business and I installed faulty software the first time, on my next visit I would test the new software until I couldn’t see anymore. Its common sense. Its also my reputation. In such a competitive business like cleaners in Manhattan, I would at least make sure that an obvious stain was cleaned on the second go round. I had prepaid, so there was no discussion of financial reimbursement and I’m not gonna send it back to the same incompetent fools a third time. That would make me a fool. So I picked up the pants, politely said, “Thanks for trying,” (the same sort of thing I would say to a 7 year old who handed in an incorrect math problem) and left the store never to return again.

And this is not the first time this has happened to me. I’m sure many people can tell you the same story about getting back dirty clothes from the cleaners and the cleaners giving that face like, “Hey! I didn’t stain the clothes. Thats how they were when you gave them to me.” No shit sherlock. Your job is to clean that mess I made. That’s why I give you money. Take responsibility for your mistakes and fix them, or start a different business. Its just cruel ruining someone’s clothes.

We can only take so much dry cleaners. And before long, we may all switch to wet cleaning, so you had better get your act together.