- Oh, poor poor baby!!! Weak defenseless thing!!! The cruel unfairness of it all!!! Poor Mr. Humongous Telephone Company doesn’t like the inconvenience posed by mail-in payments, hence they penalize those customers who prefer same with an outlandishly short billing interval capped off by an arbitrary late payment fee. Poor pitiful things, these destitute, struggling telephone companies that next will be standing down on the corner of Jefferson and Elm with a tin cup in their outstretched hand, begging for pennies while hoisting a “God Bless…..anything helps!” placard. What an utterly mean, despicable person you are, Fred Blahnik, for creating a trifle of inconvenience for struggling Mr. Humongous Telephone Company and selfishly putting YOUR needs and desires ahead of THEIR perceived needs and THEIR wants and desires. What an ornery, selfish person you are by conflating roles here in thinking that YOU are the customer and THEY are the business that is purportedly serving you and that THEY should therefore bend over backwards in an attempt to satisfy you and in the process retain your business. What an old-fashioned ingrate you are, Fred Blahnik, for thinking that businesses are there to serve the customer and not vice versa. Why, Mr. Humongous Telephone Company is so fuckin’ clever I just don’t know what to do with it! To wit: They don’t actually come out and say they strongly disapprove of payments by mail, but they do offer such a preposterously truncated turnaround time that late payment fees are nearly automatic if you choose to utilize that method, and who in their right mind wants to pay an onerous late payment fee virtually every month if you don’t have to and another avenue of payment is available? No, not me either, but I do hereby reserve the right to pay a bill in whatever legal fashion I please, if only to honor principle and establish that I am the customer in this dynamic and as such deeply resentful of being led around by the nose akin to a prize Hereford bull. The solution to this predicament I have obviously forced poor and deprived Mr. Humongous Telephone Company into? Very apparent to me. I switch telephone carriers to a more customer-friendly vendor when my contract expires soon, and Mr. Humongous Phone Company is then rid of a stubborn, cantankerous customer and doesn’t have to deal with the impossible inconvenience of processing a mailed-in payment anymore. That way we both win!! They can then go about serving those customers who gladly genuflect and pay homage to them and–like all good slaves–are happy to accommodate Mr. Humongous Phone Company by doing everything in the exact manner in which they are told, and I can happily go off in my own direction and answer only to myself. After all, being an exemplary customer shouldn’t be so hard; all you really have to do is listen carefully at all times and then do precisely as Mr. Humongous Telephone Company orders you to do. Everyone wins when customers are not cranky and uncooperative. Customers can avoid paying objectionable late payment fees that stick in one’s throat like a chicken breastbone, while Mr. Humongous Telephone Company can increase their profit margins and subsequently use some of those obscene profits by paying a billionaire gads and gads of money for the honor of naming a football stadium after them, or maybe even sponsor a basketball game halftime contest where some lucky schmuck can win a million dollars (YOUR money, remember; the stuff doesn’t serendipitously fall out of the sky!) just by sinking a very makeable half-court shot. Can’t you see the plain and obvious truth here, Fred Blahnik?!?! Don’t be a rotten apple and chronic complainer who only occasionally bitches at beleaguered customer service representatives over the telephone (I know, I know, Reader, it sounds awful but in lieu of doing that it’s kinda hard to get the corporate CEO on direct-dial and I have yet to have a switchboard operator volunteer to forward me to same)! Instead, bend over, pull your trousers down to your ankles, and just submit and joyfully accede to pay your monthly telephone bill over the Internet like Mr. Humongous Telephone Company wants and is implicitly forcing you to do. Because it’s always considerably easier and smoother sailing to comfortably settle in and go with the flow as opposed to battling furiously upstream against rapids like a hormone-driven spawning salmon, even if acquiescing sans a whimper does feel like prostituting yourself and doesn’t resonate quite right in your heart and in your conscience.
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Fred's Soapbox 