A Human Face

Our little household found itself short of the Internet service promised by its well-paid providers, one Singtel, last week. The problem manifested itself on Wednesday and plagued us for some forty-eight hours. Eventually I resorted to phoning said providers and found myself chastising some unfortunate young lady at the other end of the line who was attempting the impossible: to sound reasonable in defending the service providers from an indefensible position and genuinely trying to provide us some help. I don't want to go into the gory details of how a major flagship company associated with all that's good about this Far Place gets into indefensible territory, but let's just say it can't really be wise to offer people a contract for a service and then tell them that the infrastructure that supports the service isn't up to par, such that those needing the service have to accept they made a bad choice and need to make fundamental changes regarding the service at higher cost.

For some reason I can't quite grasp it seems it's unthinkable to suggest that one might receive a refund to compensate for the periods for which one wasn't provided the service paid for. An excellent way to do business, I'm sure.

But strangely enough I didn't intend to write this little post to rant about the inadequacies of Singtel. Rather I just wanted to say how genuinely impressed I was with the young lady who handled my call on Thursday and even more so regarding the guy who came round and tried to restore our service on Friday. It took him a good three hours to deal with the problem and he was unrelenting in his attempts to figure out what parts of the cabling involved were giving a problem as well as being pleasantly chatty throughout. I'm guessing that neither of these minor figures are regarded as indispensable to the company they work for - the lady in some call centre not even located on the island, and the gentleman painfully clear in his explanation of just how dispensable he and other technicians are seen as being to their employers - but from our perspective they somehow managed to put a reasonable face on, and give a human voice to, a company that really doesn't seem to possess either.