When The Corporation Renders The Consumer Helpless

Or, humanity is still the Achilles Heel of technology 

“It hurts that they make you feel they are far removed from the situation, that they really make a point that you feel they don’t really care…”

I remember having written the sentence I quoted above into a draft three months ago. But I just forgot about it.

When you see “corporation” and “consumer” in one sentence, that sentence is either about a praise or rant for or against a product or a service.

So, by the process of deduction, I now remember the “why” behind that statement.

My wife was returning a defective, overheating Samsung Galaxy S4 to T-Mobile for a replacement via UPS. To cut the story short, T-Mobile never received the unit.

The last known status of the package according to the UPS tracking system was “out for delivery.” But they declared the packaged “lost.” And they told us that they would not recover it, and that “things like that happen because of the load they have to deal with.”

We contacted UPS with the hope that we can still recover the $600 phone (price at that time with T-Mobile’s no-contract plan) through some miracle. But, no. It was nowhere to be found. No trace. Nothing. Gone.

We did not insure the package. All they can give us in return was $100. Ouch!

Humans have been tracking gazillions of data from celestial bodies. We can almost predict the next position of everything in the skies. We know what the Chinese are up to. CERN has found a way to recreate Big Bang. We can almost track everything and anything. NSA even knows what you did last summer.

And, yet, we cannot track a package.

We have gone so far that we have gone too far from the human sense.

But I refuse to end this story on a sad note.

T-Mobile gave us a break on this one. They recognized that we are loyal customers.

Humanity is its own antidote.