the long goodbye

Yesterday, I said goodbye to a companion that’s been by my side for the last seven or eight years-- one with which I have spent more time over that period than anyone I know. Well, I sort of said goodbye. I said adieu come the end of the month. Lest you think I’m going to get all mushy, I best explain. It was my internet service provider, and my best summation of the situation is, good riddance. I now have access to DSL and it is the dawn of a beautiful day.

Years ago I moved to a rural community where we had no local internet service provider. My ISP at the time was Prodigy, but they didn’t have a local access dial up number, so I used an 800 number and paid them a dime a minute while I was on line. Needless to say, I got on and off in a hurry. Schwab gave me an 800 number I could use without charge to trade stocks, so for a year or so my internet access was limited. Sometimes my son would give me back his allowance, so he could surf the web for an hour. I know it’s hard for you to imagine living like that, but I’m told back in the old days they lived without central air, so I guess my sacrifice wasn’t unprecedented.

Lo and behold, one day one of my son’s friends told us about a local ISP that had just come into being. It seems one of my neighbors started an ISP and added a local number so he could get on line from home. When rural folk do something, they do it right, and it was a pretty darned good service. It was an epiphany in my coming into the internet age. In the year or so I had been dormant, the internet had changed. It was now a wonderful place where free information was only a mouse click away and where you could purchase almost anything you wanted by tapping on a keyboard and the postman or UPS guy would deliver it right to your door. You could buy a book, a CD, a belt for the lawn mower or a shelf bracket for the door of your refrigerator (how was I supposed to know that it wouldn’t hold six two-liters?). I found, however, there was a seamier side to the new and improved web. There were porn shops, and I confess I may have glanced in through the window once or twice. There were guys who would sneak up behind you and steal your money (via your credit card number) when you weren’t looking. There was also the lowest form of humanity (using the term loosely). Yes, there were the people that sent you the junk mail, who turned the beautiful virgin innocence of the internet into a cesspool. But I am way off subject, here. Let me get back to my story.

A couple of years ago my neighbor was bought out by a larger company and the service began to deteriorate. Oh, heck, let’s put it in the proper perspective: the service turned to defecation. You may recall an earlier blog, customer disservice, where I lamented problems I had with them. As a faithful reader, I’m sure you remember it vividly and you probably made some annotations in the margins on the copy in your computer. Some of you probably memorized it verbatim. In the off chance you are a new reader who hasn’t gotten back to that one, yet, here is the address:

http://jimboandhisfriends.blogspot.com/2004/12/customer-disservice.html

My ISP bills my credit card at the first of the month, so during the last week of last month, I sent them an e-mail, using their web mail site, asking them to cancel my subscription. I didn’t hear from them. The final day of the month, I e-mailed them again. Again, I got no response. The day before yesterday, I e-mailed them again. This time, they responded with an e-mail saying they would not accept e-mail cancellations and that I had to call their phone number between 9 and 4 during the day. They also said that partial month cancellations were not accepted so I couldn’t cancel the service until the end of this month. I hurriedly composed a reply in which I began by saying:

That’s a bunch of shit.

I went on to remind them I had sent previous e-mails and that I would be glad to be rid of them. You are probably saying to yourself right now, “Jimbo, you are kind of a prick.”

Yes. Yes I am.

You are probably also thinking that I was dealing with a customer service person who was simply doing as they were instructed and following the company line, and the decision to sleaze an extra month’s charges from their customer was probably a corporate mantra directed by an upper management sleaze ball. Incidentally, I was sort of ticked off about having to call them and sit on hold, being told how much they appreciate my business, for ten minutes before I was able to talk to a human and cancel the service, but I remained cordial when I told them what they could do with their service.


The way I look at it is this. I have a fiscal and moral obligation as a dues-paying member of a capitalist society to withdraw my support of companies that don’t deliver quality in the product they sell. This is economic social Darwinism at its basic. My current service provider does a better job and we are willing to pay them a few dollars more a month to do it. My former provider (at least I can say that next month) didn’t deliver the goods and I will stop my contribution of funding for them. If they treated all their customers as they treated me, eventually everyone will switch to someone better, and their species will disappear from the face of the earth, and they will only be a paragraph in an economic history book. And, if you don’t mind my borrowing a couple of titles from Raymond Chandler, they can sleep The Big Sleep and say The Long Goodbye, and no one will miss them.

Because in Jimbo’s would, when some big company does us wrong, we don’t just get mad, we get even.