Sneer All You Like, Monkey Boy…

I have a lot of things to catch up on, one being a huge shout-out (they’re all the rage, homies, y’all can even do it while debating for the second-highest office in the country! /sarcasm) to our friend Amanda, who ever-so-graciously stopped and offered us a ride while we were waiting for the shuttle on Sunday. Actually, before I knew it was her, I could tell from the car slowing down and pulling over that someone was going to stop, and I told JWo, “We don’t accept rides from strangers!” Well, hellz-no, but this wasn’t a stranger! She’d just dropped her fiance’ off for judging, and was nice enough to swing back around & drop us off as well. I swear, this town, it just get smaller & smaller each year!

So, back to the story, as we were leaving the judging on Saturday, we were once again asked by the local newspaper if we were subscribers.  (We were asked that morning as well, and on hearing we were subscribers, they thanked us for our support.) This time there was someone new, and JWo said, “Yep, matter-of-fact, it’s on our doorstep as we speak.” The representative? Said, “Yeah, riiiiight”, ever-so-sarcastically. Wha? Huh? That was no put-off lie, jackass. James, who RARELY seeks confrontation marched back and asked him to repeat what he’d said. And the guy continued his jack-assery, and sneered his name when asked, wanting to know why we’d want it. “So when I call and cancel our subscription of 9 years, I can give them your name!” I was doing the oh-hell-there’s-gonna-be-a-fight dance watching all this, and the jackass basically said, “FINE! Go ahead and do that.”And continued to make faces and gestures as JWo walked back towards me.

Customer service at its finest! And as we walked away, all I could think was, “Motherfucker. It’s not over!” Because I’m not a big shot, I’m not fancy pants with city council members at my beck and call, nobody rushes when they hear it’s me on the phone, I don’t qualify for private banking.  But remember that thing about this town getting smaller? I’ve worked at several places, and have connections at most every media outlet in town, including the paper. And I happen to have a salesperson at said paper who takes his job, and his company, VERY seriously, who can zip right through the channels and get to the supervisor of a jackass who decides to mouth off at the husband of a small agency media director. And mind you, I didn’t go about this to try and get the guy fired.  My point was that as someone who places ads, and as a subscriber myself, I WANT people to stay subscribers. Yes, newspaper is berated as a “dying medium” – in some markets, circulation has declined drastically. It’s down about 10% in Kansas City over the past three years. But in many smaller cities, circulation, especially Sunday circulation – is flat or up. The baby boomers that comprise the majority of the population haven’t embraced the internet as their sole source of information. OK, I’m wandering. The essence of my message was simple. Customer service is paramount at all times.  If you want to believe someone’s lying to get out of talking to you about subscribing to the paper, keep your lip buttoned. And for all I knew, they outsourced hiring these people, and if that was the case, they definitely needed to be alerted to the behavior. The last thing they need is someone driving off the people who are already on board!

Within thirty minutes of sending my email to my rep, I received a call from The Person who supervises the person responsible for our incident. With apologies and reassurance that this was not acceptable behavior, and that it would be addressed.  Hopefully we won’t get a dead rat delivered with the paper tomorrow, but again, at least I know who to call….