LIME…Life in a Monopolistic Environment

Customer Service, taken literally, describes the interaction between a company and its customers whether that service is good, bad or in-different.
Many companies assume that to have a Customer Service Department and/or Customer Service Policy is all that is required for good service, but like any tool, be it a kitchen knife, a screw driver, gun or customer service representative, it is the user that determines the function and not the tool itself.
Last week I went into LIME to discuss a problem I had with their service and my bill(it still amuses me that a company built solely around the use of the telephone refuse to carry out business on the phone. Come on people! I carry out my far more private banking business by phone but, the phone service provider, oh no, they demand that you must see them in person to discuss even the most trivial revisions to your account.)  I had previously written them about it but to date, one month later, I have yet to receive a reply.
I moved into a new Apartment in July, which has an existing telephone and internet service. I utilized the internet right away but the telephone I did not use, mostly because I use my cell phone as my primary phone contact, until, almost a month later, to realize that I had no dial tone.
I assumed that the fault was internal since, after all, the internet was working, so after changing each separate component one at a time, the connecting wire, then the DSL filter and finally the phone itself to no avail, I finally called in a telephone repairman, who indicated that the fault was with LIME and not my internal connections.
By the time all this happened a month had passed, so I wrote LIME indicating the problem and asked that the phone portion of my bill be credited to this account since the phone was not (and still is not) working. The internet portion I will gladly pay.
So, three weeks later when I received my bill with the phone charge still there and no indication of any credits, I went into see LIME’s customer service. Only to be told that 1) they issue credits only after the fault is fixed and 2) credits are only issued from the time the fault is reported until service is restored.
My next question to the Service Representative was what happens if they take six months to repair a fault, this system, as explained to me, seems to have no accountability on the company’s side but all the liability on the customers side. The Customer Service’s answer…”Sir you’re not listening to me, a credit will be issued only after the fault has been repaired.“
My first thought was of Skynet, maybe the take over is imminent and this person in front of me was really a robot with a glitch in her system. That would explain the repeating of a previous answer to a different question. So to confirm my hypostasis I asked the new question again. She replied, “Sir you’re not listening to me, a credit will be issued only after the fault has been repaired.“
Definitely a robot!
While she was talking to me she was also clacking away on her keyboard, she then advised that they had received no fault report, so they were not liable for a credit for the June and August periods that my phone was not working, hence the robot supplied information that credits are only due from the time of making a fault report.
I decided, since I was dealing with a robot I would use my considerable experience in dealing with Positronic brains (after all I’ve read all of Isaac Asimov's Robotic novels, more than once) to pose a new query using cyclic logic.
“So,” I said to LIME’s customer service representative, “if I report my functioning phone as being out of service, continue using it until you get around to fixing it, then I could request a credit for the period between reporting the fault and it being recorded as fixed?”
“No sir!” She replied emphatically. “We can check and see that you were using the phone.”
“Why then, can’t you check to see that I haven’t been using the phone for the period I claimed your service was unavailable and get my credit?” I replied smugly.
“Sir you’re not listening to me, a credit will be issued only after the fault has been repaired.“
Back to the default answer, I had gone as far as I could at this stage so I asked for her supervisor.And after five minutes of waiting another young lady approached me.
“This young lady,” I started, pointing at the robot in front of me,”has indicated that a) LIME issues credits only after a fault has been fixed and b) credits are only issued from the time the fault is reported until service is restored. Is this true?
“Yes!” She replied.
Looking into her eyes as she responded I recognized the same uninterested, unemotional stare, closed mouth with the same slight smile at the corners of her lips, crap another robot, it was then I realized that I was wasting my time, so I smiled back and said thank you got up and left.
LIME…Life In a Monopolistic Environment!

An Asperger’s Life–Part 2

Each of us have a few unusual foibles, in rare cases they define who we are but in most of us they simply help, along with physical characteristics, identify us as individuals. In many instances these imperfections are seen in a positive light, as a character quirk or a small sign of eccentricity, “Oh, that’s John for you!”
But, label a group of people with a unifying description, and these same traits become disabilities. As an Asperger I have a number of traits that can be identified as being common with others labelled with the same mind set, because, face it, that’s what Aspergers basically is. A group of people who share a particular vision of the world in which we live.
One of the traits that impacts on my daily life is hypersensitivity. In the normal use of this descriptive word, it defines a person as more prone to allergic reaction from an external stimulus. For me this means noise and touch, but not just any noise or touch, just a few specific types.
Complicated noise, that is noise made up of various components, like the hubbub of conversation of a large group of people (the level of the noise is not the deciding factor) since this hubbub could emanate from a cocktail setting or a nightclub with throbbing music, it’s the jumbled babble that acts like hay fever’s pollen and every verbal stimuli, no matter how banal, sets off warning alarms throughout my system, overloading my brain.
Random gentle touch does the same thing. Moving through a packed crowd where you have to frequently and randomly touch people as you (or they) do to get through the crowd sets my nerves all on end, with each touch escalating my sensitivity to a point where I feel I have to scream to to release the tension.
I think, for me, a big component of this hypersensitivity is random patterns. Patterns dominate my life, they explain, they sooth, they comfort and they entertain me. From the banal ritualistic life patterns of getting up in the morning, getting ready for work, working, getting home, going to bed in preparation for another day, the patterns of eating – breakfast; lunch; snack; tea; dinner, the patterns in music, the patterns in dance, the patterns in numbers…even the patterns in human relationships.
Not being able to discern a pattern, hence jumbled noise, random touches etc. are hard for me to deal with. Even simple things like a cluttered desk makes it hard for me to work, first I have to convert it into a recognizable pattern. For entertainment I play a game whenever I'm driving, I look at the license plate of the car in front of me and try to determine the pattern of relationship of one number/letter to the other. Letters are converted to number by their position in the alphabet.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t transform into a raving lunatic from hypersensitivity, after all I've been dealing with this since I was born. Like most people who suffer from allergies I know the triggers and try to stay away from them, but when it’s necessary to place myself in such a situation I can steel my mind against it for a limited time, and I have to withdraw from time to time, to reduce the stress before heading back into the fray.
And like the allergic, my hypersensitivity does not end with the elimination of the stimuli, it takes time for my body to return to normal. This means isolation time, a removal of stimuli, to allow my body to return to its normal state.
These, and other traits, make me an Asperger but it does not define me, it does not control me. The one mistake many people, including some of those closest to me, make is defining me based on a series of general traits that can be ascribed to Asperger’s syndrome, instead of seeing my positive virtues which break me out from the crowd and define me as an individual.
They mistakenly try to mend my weaknesses, rather than build upon my strengths, excellence can be achieved only by focusing on strengths and managing weaknesses, not through the elimination of weaknesses.