Having to work through those infernal phone trees is one reason I prefer doing almost all my business online. But occasionally, "If you want to find out [blank], press [blank]" is unavoidable.
Maybe. gethuman offers possible shortcuts which might be worth checking before abandoning hope.
Emily Yellin's Your Call is (not that) Important to Us documents some interesting aspects of customer service, such as cost comparisons of calls taken by "live agents", outsourced (i.e., offshore) providers, and automated responses ($7, $2.50, and $0.32, respectively).
Yellin mentions the site comcastmustdie.com, a site which has now "declared victory against Comcast, a vast, greedy, blundering, tone-deaf corporate colossus which, in one short year, has seen the light" and is thus launching Customer Circus, "where other infamously arrogant corporations will be subjected to power of aggregated rage."
Wow. Read more about Yellin's book. above, right: Edvard Munch's Skrik, of course: trite, but dreadfully on point
By the way, there is an actual site called Customer Disservice.
First off, no one is trying to rob our mud at gunpoint.
Our Richmond American Homes built house is in a subdivision less than ten years old. When we bought this house seven year ago, it was a year old.
The photos above show the problem. The floor of the garage has sunk as much as two inches in places (its level was scribed in red by the home inspector we hired). The driveway has sunk as much as three inches; without the SUVs we each drive, we would not have been able to park in the garage for months. Snow and rain cause deep puddles in the garage.
Some refer, more benignly it seems to me, to concrete such as this to having "settled". Settled? That's what the pioneers did. This is flat out sunk.
Maybe the driveway and garage were poured in winter, when frozen ground expands and it takes extra attention to compact properly the soil. Maybe the builder did a bad job of checking the cement quality. Whatever, today I will be paying about $1000 to have holes drilled at strategic (we hope) places so that a mixture of crushed stone and cement can be injected to lift the slabs. The process is guaranteed all of a year.
A number of builders in Colorado warrant big issues like this on their houses for ten years. When I contacted Richmond American, who returned my call less than a week later, I was told shortly that their warranties are for one year, period.
A problem like this is unlikely to arise within a year, so here's my advice. If you're looking at a house in an old Richmond American subdivision, look at it hard, but chances are good that the owners have already had to address the problem for you. If not, the home inspection is likely to turn it up.
A new Richmond American Homes subdivision is a place I'd never buy a house, and here are some reasons why:
- more about driveways;
We have Eagle Mudjacking on the job today. Obviously it'll take a while before I have an idea of how well their work solves the problem.
