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| Good programs, less good membership department |
Like you (he suspects), Curmie has contributed to various
causes over the years: alumni funds, theatres and other arts agencies, charities
dedicated to helping those in need or overcoming medical conditions. He’s almost never contributed to individual
political candidates, but he’s sent a fair amount of money to organizations whose
work borders on the political—FIRE, Amnesty International, etc.
It’s not unusual for such organizations to send out appeals,
especially at the end of a year, that read something like, “Thank you for your
ongoing support; we’re in an especially difficult time right now [they always are,
of course], and we’re asking you for an additional contribution.” This tactic seldom if ever works, at least
with Curmie, but at least it’s by email, and Curmie can just delete the message
and move on with his life.
Curmie has supported PBS stations for well over 40
years. He’s not always enthralled by the
programming, especially (ironically enough) at pledging time, but there’s enough
good stuff there to merit our support. In
fact, this Sunday, we watched their entire primetime lineup. I’m pretty sure the last time we watched even
a single episode of a show on one of the major commercial networks was a few
years ago when I knew that a friend had a guest appearance on a cop show. Plus, the opportunity to watch things we’d
missed or hadn’t seen in decades (e.g., the BBC Shakespeare series) adds
to the attraction.
Anyway, we’ve been members of the local PBS affiliate, KERA
in Dallas, since shortly after we moved here over 20 years ago. Curmie was initially going to avoid mentioning
the specific station in this post, but ultimately decided they deserved the…
erm… recognition that follows. Plus,
there are actually two PBS stations closer to Chez Curmie than KERA is, and we
wouldn’t want to impugn them in the minds of those who know where Curmie lives but not the details of our cable package.
(How the local cable provider decides which Public Television station to
carry is a mystery that would baffle even Miss Marple.)
To the point: in November, Curmie received an email message
that our membership was about to expire.
OK, fine. I thought we’d set it
up to automatically renew at the same level, but whatever. It took a couple of days to get around to
going online and filling out the form to charge our credit card, but it still
happened before Thanksgiving.
Two weeks later we received, by mail (meaning the station
incurred the expense of printing, postage, etc., despite the fact that they
obviously had my email address) a dire warning that our membership was about to
expire. Curmie is distrustful of technology,
and he’s been known to forget to hit “submit” or to make similar mistakes or
omissions. Since the membership fee was
to be paid in monthly installments, he had no proof that the renewal had gone
through, as the November payment had been made but the December one wasn’t due yet. So he called the station, and got a recording
of what the business hours were.
Needless to say, Curmie had called about 1:30 in the afternoon of a
weekday. There was no opportunity to
leave a voicemail.
Rather perturbed, Curmie resorted to email, requesting a
response. In return, he received an auto-generated
form letter (or whatever the email equivalent of such a missive might be) with
lots of links to click: none of them relevant, of course. No actual person could be bothered to spend two
minutes to check if our account was current and send a reply reading simply “You’re
good” or “We don’t seem to have it.”
We could still access the members-only part of Passport (the
site for online material), however, so we decided we wouldn’t worry about the
situation until and unless that access was denied. Fast forward a couple of weeks and we get a
(worthless) membership card in the mail.
Another week or so and we get the end-of-the-year whine about needing
more money. A couple of days later, it’s
a “thank you” email.
But then… but then we get another letter (yes, letter,
with the associated costs of sending it), telling us our membership “expired
last month.” Curmie admits to having
chosen a participial adjective of Anglo-Saxon origin to describe the particular kind of
moron these people are.
But then he began to wonder if what he was witnessing wasn’t
simply a perfect storm of indifference, laziness, and general incompetence, but
something even worse. Surely no one
could be that inept accidentally?
Could they? What if they hired some
consulting firm that told them they’d make money if they pulled this stunt because
2% of people would unthinkingly send them another check, and the break-even
point is 1%?
Curmie has never been much of a conspiracy theorist, however—Hanlon’s
Razor and all that. We’re just going to
go with KERA’s membership department being in the hands of folks who’d come in
third in a battle of wits with an anvil and a rotting kumquat. Curmie feels so much better now.
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