Special people

Today was special person day on the phones. Most of the special people were of the "might be riding short bus with the square wheels that go round and round" variety. I may get a bruise on my forehead from too much head-to-desk action but I can deal with these special people (and I think fairly pleasantly (especially when I remember that most people haven't the foggiest when it comes to computers)). But there is a second kind of "special" caller that usually ends in frustration and sometimes a supervisor call for me. I don't have quite a catchy name for them but it has something to do with entitlement and the false premise that the customer is always right.

The company I work for is not an email company. We offer email as a complimentary product that you can choose to use when you sign up with us or as the case with most customers the company previous to us. No matter which company a customer originally had, it was laid out in the Terms of Service that email was for entertainment purposes only and explicitly not for business use (there is a good reason for this and it goes back to the fact that we are not an email provider). As we all know, no one ever reads the TOS (myself included) but it's in there.

Anyway there are a handful of customers that come through that seem to think that the email is more important than their connectivity. Of course these people are the ones who (according to them) their entire livelihood depends on their email address they maintain with us. If email was truly that important to their survival, one would think they would invest a small amount of money into a plan with an email provider instead of our rinky-dink email service that was really designed for grandma and grandpa to get email from the darling granddaughter (who may or may not be named Nikki). It's like asking for Coach leather seats in an Escort. And are these people special, as in their time is more precious that everyone else and they are "model customers that you don't want to loose my business". Here's the thing, in the how many ever years they've had high speed Internet with us, they've never had a problem with it. And they're not calling because they can't get online.

I offer this up: a quick scan of my contacts in my Gmail account list a whole two who use an Internet Service Provider email address (and one is AOL the other is Earthlink). In this day in age there is no reason to be dependent on an ISP provided email address.

Perhaps it's just me. Maybe it's because I've had my Yahoo! email address for over ten years at this point and I don't understand the reason people are beholden to an email address that can change for any number of reasons (moving, canceling or the company selling). I don't get it.

I also don't get why people can get so work up over something they weren't even aware of just a few years ago.

Although I wonder what would happen to me if I had to go more than a day or two without the Internet.