Dear Corporate America: Hire more people!
Dear Corporate America,
Hello. My name is Del. I am one of your customers – you know, those people you purport to serve.
I have an insight I want to share with you, but before I do, let me proceed from an assumption: You want to make money. Is that right? You want to make as much money as you can.
Making money is the point of a free market economy. Bob builds a mousetrap and customers buy it. Sarah makes a better mousetrap and customers no longer buy Bob’s mousetrap. They buy Sarah’s mousetrap. If Bob wants to sell mousetraps, he must build a better mousetrap than Sarah.
The process is Darwinian. Its intent is to foster innovation. The motivation is money.
But Bob can do other things to increase his chances of selling mousetraps. He can lower his price. He can make the buying experience more salutary. He can increase his advertising.
Let’s say one of Bob’s tactics is to make the buying experience more salutary. This is where the concept of “customer service” enters the picture. One way Bob can distinguish his mousetrap from Sarah’s is to provide superior customer service.
The customer service concept is made up of many different parts. One is accessibility. Bob’s customers will have questions about his mousetrap. They may need help setting it up. Or maybe they want to tell Bob how nice it is. The point is, they will need to contact Bob from time to time. Obviously the easier Bob makes it for them to do that, the more feedback Bob will receive and the more appreciation his customers will bestow upon him, enhancing his ability to sell mousetraps in the future.
If we agree on everything I have said here, let me ask you, Corporate America, the following questions:
1. When your customers call you by telephone, do your force them to navigate the infuriating maze of an automated telephone-answering system?
2. Do you force your customers to wait on the telephone – sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes half an hour, until the next “customer service representative” becomes available?
3. Do you constantly remind your customers who are waiting on the phone that your company is experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume, and that wait times may be longer than usual?
4. When your “customer service representative” finally answers the telephone, do they actually work for your company and understand the fundamentals of your mousetrap, or are they employees of a call service and don’t really care if your customer’s questions are answered or their problems resolved?
If you can honestly answer yes to these questions then may I suggest the following.
1. From a customer’s perspective, automated telephone answering systems are rage-inducing. They save your company time by stealing it from us. They often do not present us with the proper options. They are sometimes circular, leading us into ridiculous self-perpetuating loops.
We resent this, Corporate America. Our time is as important to us as yours is to you. You may be “maximizing your profits” to “answer to your shareholders,” but you are driving us away to avoid paying the salaries and benefits of employees who would receive calls. The goodwill earned by having an actual human being answer the telephone and promptly address our issues would more than compensate for the tiny loss of income for their salaries and benefits.
HIRE MORE PEOPLE, Corporate America.
2. Making us wait on the telephone for a “customer service representative” to take our call should not be our problem. It is your problem, Corporate America. You clearly do not employ enough “customer service representatives” to manage the number of calls you are receiving. The solution?
HIRE MORE PEOPLE, Corporate America.
3. Reminding us that you are experiencing higher than usual call volume and wait times may be longer is a slap in the face. We are perfectly aware that a pandemic is in progress and more people are using the telephone to conduct their business. Pretending that you cannot correct the problem is an insult to our intelligence. You can easily correct the problem, Corporate America, and we know this.
HIRE MORE PEOPLE.
4. After negotiating your rage-inducing automated telephone answering system, waiting for half an hour to speak to a “customer service representative,” and being told repreatedly that you cannot do anything about the call volume, do you seriously expect us to be friendly and cheerful while speaking with the representative if they know nothing about your mousetrap and cannot help resolve our issue?
You do understand, Corporate America, that with any product and in any transaction there exists multiple bottom lines, not just one, and one of those bottom lines is your reputation. Another is your customer satisfaction.
We don’t care about your P and L. We don’t answer to your board of directors. Your investors mean nothing to us.
We have paid you for a mousetrap, Corporate America, and we expect you to not only build the damn thing and sell it to us but to be available when we have questions or need help.
Money is not the only bottom line.
So do this one thing, Corporate America, and we’ll get off your back.
HIRE MORE PEOPLE!
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Photo courtesy of Darryl Leja, NHGRI, under the auspices of a Creative Commons license.
Talk about an anal fixation: I’m always worrying about my PSA.
For those of you who aren’t 65-year-old men with prostate glands the size of Butterball turkeys, PSA stands for “prostate specific antigen,” or as I like to call it, “pain specific (to) ass.”
Doctors long ago discovered they could make elderly men quake in their dark socks and sandals if they devised a test that would measure the likelihood of prostate cancer and gave it a number, sort of like Ryan Seacrest’s New Year’s Eve countdown, except there would be no popping of champagne corks – the only “popping” would be the doctor’s rubber-gloved finger being ejected from a sphincter wound up like an anaconda after a rousing bout of “massaging the man gland.”
That reminds me of a joke. When I had my first physical the doctor went to check my prostate, which meant rubber gloves, Vaseline and, with luck, an index finger long enough to touch that hidden love nut within the backsides of all men. He placed one hand on my shoulder and with the index finger of his other hand began rooting around my innards. Then he said, “You don’t have to worry unless you feel BOTH my hands on your shoulders.” To a gay person that’s a mildly offensive joke but don’t worry – I worked for a newspaper for 41 years and the only thing that offends me is people who still think Donald Trump was the best thing to happen to this country since Tang and Space Food Sticks.
That PSA number I mentioned – it’s on a scale of 1 to Hell, Hell being anything over a 4. The prostate emits an antigen – I say this as if I know what I’m talking about when I have no idea what an antigen is, except it apparently causes grown men to wet their pants four or five times a night – and doctors, through a carefully calibrated scientific process of humiliating males by sticking things up their butts, can measure this antigen. A whole lot of antigen can mean one of three things: 1. cancer. 2. An enlarged prostate. 3. Maybe you need to put one of those fat, cushioned seats on your bicycle.
I have a blood test every six months and my doctor looks at the results – good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, thyroid, transmission fluid, brake fluid, venom, and yes, PSA. Over the years my PSA has slowly gone up, just like my weight, my cholesterol, my debt, but not my income or IQ. Sometimes my PSA goes up half a point, which means 1. I have an infection, to be addressed by antibiotics, or 2. I really need to change that bicycle seat.
In 2020 my PSA reached that line in the colon not to be crossed – the number 4. My doctor was not particularly alarmed because the previous number was only a little bit lower. It wasn’t a large increase.
I, however, was greatly alarmed. I had visions of things being inserted into my rectum – rubber-gloved fingers, tubes, cutting utensils, cameras for “America’s Got Talent” – and I did not relish the idea of being probed in my most intimate of body locations, which is why I would make a lousy candidate for alien abduction. So naturally, I did what any red-blooded American male would do in a similar situation.
I worried.
Worry, as you know, solves most problems, which is to say it solves nothing, but some part of you believes that all those emotional kilowatts emanating from your brain get noticed by God, who then chuckles and says, “Let’s see if we can screw with Del a little more before telling him everything’s OK.” God is a funny guy. Or girl. Or nonspecifically gendered entity.
A week before my blood test I avoided all bicycle seats. I avoided thinking about anything that might awaken any thought of anything except puppies and daffodils. I took lots and lots of saw palmetto because I had heard it does wonders for that pesky man gland, and I silently apologized to all the palmetto bushes I had ever hacked out of our yard’s landscape.
Oh, and I worried.
On the day of the blood test I told the tech NOT to find any antigens. I was not interested in any antigens. I would not pay for any found antigens. Antigens were not the kiss on my list. I think she clearly understood that I did not want antigens raising my PSA number.
Two weeks later I found myself sitting in the doctor’s examination room, staring at diagrams of the male reproductive system and wondering if mine looked like, or did it look like a map of France after D-Day.
Today would be the day I hear my fate. Would I waltz from this clinic happy as a puppy clenching a daffodil in its teeth? Or would I slouch to my car, visions of violated orifices slithering in my head? I sent out one last plea for mercy to the prostate gods, and then my doctor gave me the news. It was almost anticlimactic.
Once again, the number was a 4.
My doctor explained that as men grow older, their prostates tend to grow larger. More prostate means more prostate antigen, causing the PSA number to slowly rise. And that’s what mine appeared to be doing. He suspects it’s something called BPH – benign prostatic hyperplasia – or as I would call it, borderline paranoid (something that starts with an H). I’ll finish that thought when I come up with something worthy.
It would appear that higher numbers are now a part of my life – higher PSA, weight, blood pressure … while the numbers I would like to be higher – income and IQ – remain depressingly low.
That’s OK. I figure it’s all part of being on the other side of life’s algorithm. At least I am on this side of the dirt.
Now, about that pot belly … is it really just belly fat, or could I be the guy you see on Yahoo News, the one who’s been carrying around a 37-pound abdominal mass for most his adult life?
A fixation, yes, but at least it’s not an anal fixation.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .