MARCH 11 — I came very close to having either a stroke or aneurysm last week.
This was mostly due to some very bad experiences with customer service (or more like, lack thereof), which made me escalate things very quickly.
My sister says I have a tendency to “go nuclear” on very short notice.
This is where I throw my father under a bus.
You see, when I was little, I remember us all going to have KFC in the middle of town.
This was when KFC still had metal cutlery, mind you.
My father was lining up for chicken and a tourist happened to come to the counter.
Instead of serving my father (who was there first), the server immediately turns to the Caucasian man and asks for his order.
My father was not having it.
He immediately delivered a blistering lecture to the KFC staffer and the incident had such an impression on me.
Little me thought her Papa was very much justified.
Of course you should speak up, I thought, it is the obvious thing to do.
And that is how I have become very talented at getting into trouble by speaking up and also getting people into trouble, also by speaking up.
The other day I was in an establishment to run an errand that I thought would take just 10 minutes.
What I did not expect was to be completely ignored by the staff.
I’ll save you the long, tiresome account of what happened as it is really just another day of dealing with poorly trained retail workers, a bit of a malady in Malaysia.
CCTV proved that my anger to the point I was writing a terse email to Corporate Affairs was justified.
To their credit at least my email was acknowledged and at least I did not have to start screaming in the middle of the store — I was sorely tempted to, just because.
Alas, a courier service is apparently sitting on my package in a warehouse and thanks to AI agents there is no one to receive my terse email.
The next step would probably be escalating it right up to MCMC (courier services not doing their jobs is under their purview) but I will stay my hand for one reason — as soon as the package arrives, I’m returning it for a refund.
To further raise my blood pressure to incredible levels, a Shopee seller is arguing that, after I complained about them being unresponsive, that responding to me faster (I just wanted an update, my good man) would not mean the package would arrive faster.
I could feel a blood vessel threaten to explode somewhere around my temple.
Then the seller insisted that there were customers who only got replied to after one or two days had passed and did not complain.
My response: their lack of standards and accepting less than the bare minimum of acceptable customer service is not my problem.
To tell you the truth, I wish I was more amiable, the kind who used honey instead of napalm to win battles.
I have burned more bridges than most people walk on in their lives and sometimes, I regret it.
Yet I know that sometimes the only things people will respond to is fire and metal, in the form of words that cut and burn.
Let others more suited be the peacemakers; I have resigned myself to be the General of (justified) Karens who will wage war on poor customer service and government agencies that need a lot of yelling at before they release welfare funds for a late stage cancer patient.
We all have our place in the world and I guess mine involves a lot of yelling.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
