Saturday, March 20, 2004

Losing The Battle For The American Dream

Well, I spent what seemed like a lot of time talking online to CoffeeCup to see if they could direct me to the Right way of using the FTP part of their HTML editor. I talked to them a couple of times; they were friendly, but not helpful. I realize it’s probably something “wrong” on my part that’s creating this glitch, but they didn’t seem to know much about how it works. They said they couldn’t find my files at all. No doubt--but the files ARE there. I connected to them (using the Other FTP program) while I was online with CoffeeCup. I gave up and asked them to email me if they thought of anything useful.

Later I emailed them and told them they wouldn’t have to bother because their Free Trial Download, downloaded only 2 or 3 days before, now Thought the trial period was Expired and had Frozen Up 42 days early! I uninstalled that piece of self-congratulatory crap in a heartbeat. One odd part of it all is that the goofy program was supposedly the replacement for the Graf HTML Editor (CoffeeCup bought it and immediately changed it apparently, for it’s barely recognizable.) The old one was a program far simpler and more useable. You could view your results in one step, not two, among other things.

Pardon my rave, but:

I know we can’t always get what we want, but what I hate is that we often can’t get anything Even Remotely Resembling what we want! Some moneyed corporate jackass buys it, makes it bigger, fatter, slower, and less sensible, and then raises the price too. I guess I’m just not enough of a confirmed American Consumer these days, because I still get pissed off at the notion of American goods being junk and American service being so pathetic. If I’d shop more and buy more, I’d become inured, I’d be indifferent, to all this incompetent stuff.

I’ve been in business, I’ve provided services and I’ve made products. Quality does sometimes fail in the production of almost anything or the delivery of most any service, but that’s when quality customer service is supposed to Cover Your Ass. If you quickly apologize and express horror that things aren’t right and if you clearly get to work to correct things, most people can be won back to your side. But there’s increasingly less and less of even that. It’s hard to find anyone who gives a damn and everybody’s as proud of that as they are of their children and grandchildren. I once worked with a fellow named Joe who was always saying, “They don’t pay me enough to do that job.” He was a likeable guy, but I was always disgusted with his attitude. Now everywhere I look, the place is full of Joes, and I HATE to buy anything for fear of being forced down that long road to disgust.

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