Get Thee to The ...Nuttery

Discourtesy's Up

1) You get home in the evening after a tough day. Before deciding not to go to the gym, whose homework to tackle, and what to make for dinner, you want a little room to decompress.

The phone rings; it's the land-line. You hesitate. It might be your brother, your mother, or your brother about your mother or visa versa. Could it be that client you pitched a couple of months ago, finally, or that job you applied for last year, but never heard back? You grab the receiver.

"Please hold for a courtesy call," says the lovely voice. Courtesy? As if. Instead, it's a perfect example of an Orwellian corporate world, intruding on you in a most discourteous way, but giving it a warm and fuzzy name.

What kind of fellow-humans thought that this would be a good idea? Get thee...!

2) You're on hold again - duh! - after punching in your account or phone number.

"We appreciate your call..." Really? Then, why don't you ever answer the phone without putting us on hold? If you truly appreciated our business, we would not be automatically on hold, or, at least, we would be able to proceed quickly without having to listen to nine different options, none of which cover the real reason for the call.

My Account Number

Eventually, you get through, and the first thing you are asked is: "May I please have your account number?"

What do they do with these numbers , while you've been on hold for five, ten, eighteen minutes?

Get thee to...!

3) Triple Play is a baseball term for something that is very hard to perform and only happens 4-5 times a season, since 1876, less than 1,000 times in baseball history!

And yet, you might think that it's a commonplace event the way certain companies throw this supposed money-saving term around:

Cable-Internet-Phone. Phone-Cable-Internet. All for about ninety bucks a month. Such a deal.

Well, not always. It turns out that Cable companies may not be any good at phone calls, in the same way that they are not always good at Cable! And, phone companies don't always offer cable in your area, or aren't really so good at that. You get what you pay for.

Triple play? Near-miracles don't come cheaply. A double and a single is just as good as a home run.

Get thee to The...!

4) You're on the check-out line and hand in your Shopper's Card. Before the cashier begins giving you some special benefit, she asks, "Would you like to donate a dollar to help children?" Huh, didn't this just happen at the gas pump?

Charity is epidemic: it's at Stop & Shop and Costco. Chase "card services" wants you to donate to Robin Hood Foundation online. Suddenly, the most generous citizens in the world by any measure of giving are being inundated with more requests for giving. Everywhere we go: everywhere we look.

Want Heaven With Those Fries?

And, where there is charity, there is...guilt, whenever you choose not to give. Was that an "attitude" you saw in the cashier's eyes, when you said no? How did we get here?

Obviously, we are not against giving. To the contrary, we do what we can and encourage others to do so (see Disclosures, below), but this feels different. The companies facilitating the giving see it as part of their brand. Banks especially, after nearly taking the country down a couple of years ago, seem to be on a new mission or several of them with our money.

Here's an idea: why don't these companies start asking people and The Party in China to start an epidemic of giving? Why aren't American companies building their brands and doing good by expecting their Chinese "partners" and consumers to donate to these worthy causes?

Could it be that they would not want to offend their Chinese customers?

Get thee to The...Nuttery!

Disclosures: A)We think that there is a place for giving in a consumer environment, just not everywhere. We once created a national limited-time program for vending machine giving called Small Change, Big Dreams, in which one of the snack/drink choices was a specific program to reduce child obesity. Everyone loved it until the vending company's corporate parent sent in the lawyers...and it died. B) We created a tennis tournament, which currently raises money for a local children's tennis program. C) One of our business services clients is an educational non-profit organization for whom we develop ways to reach donors among other things. We see pervasive requests for charity giving as a privacy issue more than a giving issue.