Your Estimated Hold Time is 74 Years, and that really sucks*.
The other day I visited Assembly member Beth Gaines’ Granite Bay office and talked to a super nice young woman to discuss a point from Beth’s latest newsletter. I left her office feeling the same way I felt the last ten times I reached out to her and her husband Ted Gaines. This dynamic duo represents a gerrymandered mishmash of geography that I happen to fall into in South Placer County. Sitting in the parking lot, I felt I could have had better results delivering my point to the telephone pole next to my truck. I considered this feeling and it reminded me of something I experienced earlier in my career.
I have been an early adopter of technology. I bought my first computer directly from Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was four days before Steve Jobs announced Macintosh to the world with his brilliant marketing ploy; this Superbowl ad.
I bought the first PostScript Imagesetter (the PostScript page description language was the first product of the fledgling Adobe Systems) west of the Mississippi, the first Walkman, the first CD, and of course, the first cellular phone.
I remember the first big customer I was able to land because I could immediately call her back “from the road” and give her the great customer service our company was known for. That cell phone, housed in something reminiscent of a standard issue army ammunition box, was a product I purchased from a division of our local baby bell phone carrier, PacTel Cellular.
PacTel Cellular had a local marketing office in Sacramento and being a natural born killer salesman, they quickly became a client. They were run locally and were doing a booming business. They needed the services we provided and we began to make money together. Two smaller companies being successful by using emerging technology combined with great customer service to deliver value to their client base. Nice.
Sadly, like everything else in life, it didn’t last forever.
I don’t remember the exact details of the chain of events, but within two years of the beginning of our relationship, it ended with PacTel Cellular being eventually rolled into the reconglomorizing of ATT. When the Sacramento office was centralized in LA or SF or whatever, the orders dried up.
The orders weren’t the only thing to vanish. My single page bill for a simple monthly service became a small novel that arrived in a two pound package documenting every call and charge. New fees and glaring inaccuracies were hiding on page 247 and 265. And the worst part was that because the small company that cared about the client was now a tiny part of a big company that clearly did not.
At all.
What struck me was the ungodly amount of time on hold to talk to a monthly bill interpreter. I began to realize that this new entity simply had too many customers for the number of people they served. It sucked. Actually it didn’t just suck. It sucked hind teat. And not just any hind teat, it sucked hind teat from a dry Rhino. And not just any dry Rhino, but it sucked hind teat from the driest Rhino inside the biggest Rhino herd in all of Africa.
In other words, ATT really, really sucked.
Today, what sucks even worse than ATT’s “customer service” is the kind of representation I (don’t) get from my elected Senators and Assembly members in California’s Legislature.
Sadly, California ranks at or near the bottom of a lot of lists that make it, contrary to popular belief held by many Californians, California may not the best place to live in the world. In fact, it could well be the worst state in the Union. You can find examples of that opinion here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. I could still be typing here and embedding urls by the time you get around to reading this.
Perched way atop the California Sucks list is the ratio of elected state legislator to resident.
On that subject we really suck. Hard. We suck harder than the blackest hole created by the biggest collapse of the most enormous star in the vastest galaxy in the entire universe.
Yes, representation in California sucks that hard.
And this is the reason I support the State of Jefferson.
It’s about representation.
The time has come for 51. For more information check our website. But don’t do it on a mobile device, because on mobile devices, we suck. But not for long.
Want to support The State of Jefferson? Click here — > bit.ly/1fWLOVc
#gotrepresentation?
*Dividing California into The State of Jefferson was slated for a vote on December 9th, 1941 and was expected to pass. Events conspired.
