Bring Them Down; The Cingular Debacle

Preamble: Gentle Readers, this paper is written in the new language of email, inspired by The Cluetrain Manifesto; The End of Business as Usual (2001). According to its authors, Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger, email is a human language of the market that is personal rather than professional, that deals with subjective experience rather than academic fact, language that is short, to the point;
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in a language that is natural, open honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakingly genuine. It can’t be faked (p. xxi).

Bring Them Down; The Cingular Debacle
Phone service companies provide the worst, most horrid examples of “service” known to modern humankind. I don’t know which one I have (just like I don’t know which strain of flu virus I have); once it was Verizon; then I moved and had to change to Sprint which I think is now Embarq. There’s a TV ad in which each of the phone companies are represented by a different geeky guy who are all jealous of this one un-geeky guy who represents…? I can’t even remember who. All I know is that my last delightful interaction with one of these hell-companies took several weeks of being on hold several hours at a time and that I talked to literally 20-30 different “customer service representatives” with all my calls being “recorded for quality assurance.” Not once did I have a conversation. I gave and listened to sound bites and was told everything from “we don’t deal in 800 numbers anymore” to “your Verizon 800 number can’t exist, so how can we transfer it?” By the end of the ordeal, I had contacted The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (by email) to complain. I started explaining my fragile temper upfront to every human who I had the misfortune of confusing between my bouts on hold. I also had two 800 numbers with Embarq, or, er… must be Sprint which is why I consistently get obnoxious yellow bills mailed to me at the wrong address.
I am not at all surprised by Beckie’s experience with Cingular, which she describes in “Consumerists 10 Biggest Business Debacles.” I am not surprised that when I was foolish enough to print out all of the comments Beckie’s experience elicited from sympathetic web-writers, there were twenty-three pages in all (printed on the backs of re-used, redundant paper forms, of course). I am not surprised because I have so much internalized, stopped-up rage within my heart due to my own experience that I know I myself would go to great lengths and spend meager resources to Bring Them Down (BTD) ~ any of them, those phone companies that are all the same, no matter by which geeky name they go.
During my bout with the same enemy as Beckie’s own battle I had such an overwhelming need to tell someone! I wanted Someone to know how absolutely terrible and awfully this business was treating me, if they can even call themselves a business! Enter the beautiful description of “voice” in the chapter “Internet Apocalypso” by Christopher Locke (2001), in which he describes the transition of Joe Six-Pack, who goes from a passive recipient of TV propaganda to an internet surfer who hears laughter and starts thinking, “looking for the source of this strange, new, rather seductive sound (p. 7)”. Locke’s character Joe and many others like him discover their rebellious collective voice that corporations can no longer control. I needed to laugh after those hours on hold. I needed to laugh good and hard and then look around for someone to beat up. I was in the mood to get a voice!
The collective voices answering Beckie gave her abundant advice, objective, even, for the most part. Many shared her frustration, but pointed out that the contract she may have signed gave Cingular the legal right to cut off her service as they did. Some suggested she illegally unlock her phones and carry on, but all agreed that in this unjust situation, the best conclusion can only be a warning that we all need to be better consumers, reading contracts carefully before we sign them. Wise as a grandma, snarky as a little brother, and compassionate as an old friend, these voices of strangers contrasted like color to black and white with the voicelessness of the Cingular corporation.
My friend Paula received an email from her sister which she forwarded on to me this week, a You Tube video clip of the Stephen Colbert show The Colbert Report, in which he is discussing Cingular phone company mergers. The report starts with a sarcastic “Big News in the Telecom Industry…” as Colbert goes on to give a humorous slam of the deregulation of phone companies which results in one mass mess of a product (in other words, no change at all). Entertainment? Humor? Stick-it-to-the-Man Revolution? If the Cluetrain Manifesto is correct in its assertions, Cingular needs to see this web circus as its new public relations department. And the relations aren’t going very well.
References:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/top-10/top-10-biggest-business-debacles-2006-222632.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFtcp4mNzA

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Paperback) by Christopher Locke (Author), Rick Levine (Author), Doc Searls (Author), David Weinberger (Author) "You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad..." (more) Key Phrases: networked markets, market conversation, pen chains, Fort Business, Getting F-'ed By My Saturn Dealer, Appian Technology (more...)
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