Bureaucracies, Multi-national companies, phone companies. Mankind is doomed not just by peak oil, global warning, overpopulation, lack of food and water, drought, rising sea levels…we’ll be done in by incompetence long before then!
Case 1: My Tracfone (and my wife’s) stops going to voicemail if you let it ring six times. But only if you’re calling from a landline. Only if you’re calling from a landline. Only if you’re calling from a land line in Southeastern Virginia, to be exact. Ok, so I call the nice Filipinos at Tracfone to work through this and after the usual 4-5 calls doing various things, yada yada, it turns out that Tracfone’s local provider is… drumroll… AT&T. (That’s where the voicemail is recorded.) And they had a problem for the last two days in this here area. Didn’t tell anyone of course, just let people (and several businesses) go nuts trying to figure out what’s going on. Besides voicemail that stopped working several Big Box stores had two days of phone outages. Not a good thing. Finally back up and had to totally setup voice mail again. INCOMPETENCE!
Case 2: The Virginia Dept. of Motor Vehicles has decided that one of the Hyundai Elantra’s that I’ve been using for my business since 2004 has magically become a Hyundai Accent. All the previous years paperwork is correct but this year it’s an Accent. I have to take time and see them in person and show them the title because “we can’t fix it over the phone.” Believe me, you don’t want to stand in those lines… INCOMPETENCE!
Share your tales of incompetence and make me fell better, won’t ya?
My neighbor called Comcast the other day to report an outage and request a tech come by to fix it, and the customer service rep looked at the system and told her “The computer says there’s an outage.”
That was after they sent a tech out who had no information as to the nature of the outage and didn’t have the proper training or equipment to fix it.
Ameriprise Financial uses the wrong bank account (which they admitted) to charge my payment to them. And then had the nerve to send a “Delinquency Notice” and charge a late fee. Grrrrr. It irritates me no end that this type of stupidity probably will result in my credit score going down, even though they’ve admitted they have no idea where they got the particular bank account they used to try to charge the account. They have since charged my proper account but still I got this notice. Really stupid.
I did once bill my UK bank for the time I spent addressing one of their mistakes. And they didn’t pay the requested amount but forwarded it to their complaints dept who made what I imagine was their standard ‘we have screwed up - please go away’ payment, which was more than I had billed them for.
My Citibank student loan is due on the 18th of each month, and I pay electronically, but depending on how pay periods fall, it’s sometimes close to the due date. Which should be fine–I’m paying it on time, and my account page indicates “payment submitted on X date,” and all is well and good in loan-land, right? Wrong. It takes them a variable amount of time to “process” the payment, sometimes two days, sometimes as many as four or five. And if they haven’t processed the payment before the due date, they mark the account delinquent, and harass me with phone calls (sometimes as many as four a day), even though I already submitted my damned payment. I’ve taken to ignoring them, but when I’ve answered them in the past, it always goes something like this:
Them: “Did you know your payment is past due?”
Me: It isn’t. I paid it last week."
Them: “Oh. We’ll make a note of that on your account.”
Me: “I’m looking at my account right now, and it’s already noted.”
They then claim that they can’t see that information when they look at my account, which I think is bogus. Either they have the most inept IT people on the planet (“Hey, let’s design an account system where our people can’t see whether or not borrowers have submitted their payments!”), or (my guess) they are deliberately trying to harass people into paying early, so that they can make some extra interest on your money each month. Which is probably illegal. I have no control over how long they sit on my payment before processing it, and the terms of my loan certainly do not obligate me to make early payments, so as far as I’m concerned, they can fuck right off.
The ineptitude always boggles my mind, though. They are a company that specializes in moving money around, and it takes them two to five days to process a fucking EFT? Craziness.
It seems The Bitter Cynic was made for this thread.
The form of incompetence I most despise is poor packaging. It’s bad enough when something is impossible to open, but when the packaging is so inadequate that the product inside actually arrives damaged, I just give up on people.
We opened a credit account at Sam’s Club because they were offering a discount on purchases if you did. I don’t really want another account to carry a balance on but I did it for the free stuff. It took a long time to receive the bill for those items… when I did, my first bill had a late fee on it.
I got it taken care of, but how ridiculous is it to get a late fee on your first bill?
my local town planning dept is so incompetent I’d like to see them all hanging from a lamp-post.
They have taken a YEAR to tell me ‘yes you can have solar panels’, then in the last week of this, they demand £25 for looking at a picture of some wooden screening and saying “yes that is wooden screening”.
They must all work for local govt because they are fucking incapable of lasting 2 seconds in the free market.
Kill them all. Kill them now etc…
