Monday, October 23, 2006

Blethen's crappy operation

Just a quick followup on my last post, having nothing to do with the continuing saga of Frank Blethen’s obsessive crusade to keep future asset transfers from being taxed.

As you recall, a week ago I called the Seattle Times circulation department (206-464-2121) to switch my newspaper subscription over to the Post-Intelligencer.  I didn’t expect the change to happen overnight, so it was no surprise to see the Times on my doorstep on Tuesday.  Wednesday might also be a bit quick to expect the information to trickle down from the office to the distributor to the route deliveryperson, so I didn’t really mind that that morning’s paper was still Frank’s rag.  As Seattlites know all too well, under a long-running Joint Operating Agreement, Blethen owns and runs the printing presses, circulation department, and delivery network for both of the city’s dailies.

So… Thursday, Friday, and Saturday arrived, and so too did the Times.  On Sunday, as is the case in many of the few two-newspaper towns, there is only one paper (alas, the Times) to be had, though there are a few scraps of the P-I‘s editorial/op-ed pages and comics slipped in among the usual Bletheniana.  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I semi-convinced myself that perhaps they defined subscriptions by the week, and that I’d had to fulfill last week’s Times run before I’d be moved over to the P-I.

Hoping to find this surmise confirmed, this morning I bopped downstairs to the door, and found ... the same goddamn Seattle Times, a full week after I’d tried to kill the subscription. 

So I called their circulation desk again to lodge my complaint.  The very helpful customer service rep took my information, checked their subscription database, and informed me that there was NO RECORD that I’d ever asked to cancel the Times, nor that I’d demanded to start receiving the P-I, nor even that I’d complained bitterly about Blethen and his obsessions.  She asked whether I recalled who I’d spoken with—yeah, like I’d written down the clerk’s name—and promised that this time the change is in their system.  It may not happen tomorrow, but I’ll definitely receive the Post-Intelligencer on Wednesday morning.

Y’know, it’s not the most difficult database operation in the world to enter, record, and create the sort of transaction I requested last week.  Every customer-service database has that sort of operation built into it.  Every clerk is trained to do it, and is led through the procedure by pre-written macros.  It’s so far from rocket-science or brain-surgery that it would be silly to even mention those metaphors.  Yet this, one of the simplest of customer service procedures, wasn’t done by that Blethen-hired clerk a week ago.

Will the Post-Intelligencer be waiting on my doorstep come Wednesday?  I’m not a betting man, but I suspect I could get some pretty long odds if I went for the “yes” side.