Here it comes from my new work computer used for non-work purposes.

Washington Mutual? Bad Customer Service?

Yep.

Come on guys, I thought you were a bank. Sure, I’m not Donald Trump, or Robert Kiyosaki, or anyone else with half a brain and a lot of currency.

But I wanted to deposit a nice chunk of money into a rainy day account within your cool Open Online and Get 3.3 Percent APY.

I walked into your bank with a previously written check in my pocket, ready to deposit into your coffers. Your branch is only a mile and a bit from my house. I like real bank branches filled with real bank people.

But your tellers told me to go sit on a bench and wait. They were not servicing anyone else and were just talking to themselves, and obviously accepting my check was going to be too much work for them. I’ll admit, the girl I sat next to was cute, but definitely not cuter than my wife, and way less talkative. After 10 minutes of no help, I got up and left your branch. Total work time I gave to you at that point: about 40 minute, which included travel time to and from your branch on bicycle.

But I gave you another chance. I tried to sign up online, to go along with your advertising. I actually went through the entire sign up process twice. Each time you asked me these stupid “keep my identity secure” questions, which I answered correctly. But what does your security system respond with?

“We’re sorry, you’re answers are incorrect. You must wait 7 days for your account to be processed.’

Seven fucking days????? SEVEN DAYS!?!?!?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

So I called. I spoke to 3 people, 3 of the most worthless fucking “customer service” people I have ever spoken to in my entire life. None of them were empowered to help me GIVE YOU MONEY!!!!!

But let’s not dwell on the details, because this story has a happy ending.

Not for WaMu.

The happy ending is for me, my wife and HSBC, an online bank that definitely knows what’s up. Thanks guys, you get my money, and WaMu doesn’t.

WaMu = FAIL!

HSBC = WIN!

They called me, I didn’t have to call them. Total points.

They told me how much I owed them. Total points.

The only minor glitch that I worked through on the phone with them:

Please peeps, stop trying to convince me to pay more money than I actually owe you, and telling me that once I pay the money that you will credit me. No no no no.

Luckily, the person who called me understood how to handle the situation. She was cool enough to tell me, in advance, what my credits would be. I told her that I would pay the net of it immediately after I got off the phone with her. And, that I did.

So with any luck, the billing system that Credo uses will not go through any conniptions. It will understand that in August, when it computes my next bill, that everything is netted out exactly as it should be.

Good work Credo. You made me a happy customer once again.

Perhaps my newly acquired positive impression came from my inherent laziness caused by working on potentially giant, unwieldy projects. Or maybe my exploratory browsing from the home portals of the English Wiktionary and then from the home page of the German Wiktionary allowed me to find contentment. I’m very impressed that the Wiktionary community is working on multilingual translations, and I don’t really see the value in continuing to work on wordinary at this moment.

I still consider this project a great learning experience for me even in its short life. As long as I’m coherent and not being a dork (or drunk) in my project planning, all of my projects will now consist of one additional step of formulation: get on Google and spend a good deal of time looking around. Chances are someone has done, is doing, or will do the project I am thinking about and I won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

1) If you read the blog post, please also read the comments. Mark from Credo kept his promise and got my phone turned back on immediately. That scores MAJOR POINTS for me. As a customer, I know businesses are run by imperfect humans, and that I am also one of those imperfect humans. I don't expect humans to treat me like I'm right all the time, because I'm not right all the time, or even most of the time. I do expect human beings that are part of companies to treat me as a human-being-customer to their company, one that has feelings and emotions and a real life apart from the dollars I give in exchange for goods and services.

2) If you are a customer, and we all are at some point, please remember that the people in a business are also human, most of us just trying to get that mortgage and rent paid for. There are plenty of awful customer service experiences that I've declined to post about for various reasons. But if something bad has happened, blog it, or youtube it, or write letters, or take that crappy toy back to the store, or whatever! It's up to us, the customers, to make sure our society works like it is supposed to.

Enough soap boxing. Thank you again to Credo for the speedy response, and for making sure that we both doing our best to make this does not happen again.]

Dear Credo Mobile:

Life has been peaceful for the last few days since you turned off my cell phone. Someday when a truly better alternative to cell phones appears I’ll give it up, but I still find it necessary. I’ll admit I only really miss talking to my wife, my mom and my dad, and I being in touch with them is necessary to me.

Thank you for allowing me to switch my plan last month and not once informing me that the moment I switched my plan to a lower minute usage that my phone bill would sky rocket to around $450. Yes, I’m clear that $150 of that is for my wife’s canceled phone, but I figured a person who actually understood customer service would warn me that my new, requested $49.99 service plan was really going to net out to a $300 fee due to minutes accrued previously in the month. I can see how you might think that by asking for a less expensive service plan I actually wanted to pay you more money.

I know I’ve checked my address with you on 3 separate occassions, but I have yet to receive a bill from you since I’ve moved to my new home. I should understand, after all I live on a street with a Spanish name–Escuela–and it’s given your agents angst, given how many times I’ve had to re-spell it to them. I have faith that your bills will make it to me someday, or that someday you’ll grant me access to log-in to your website with what I could swear was the email address I provided to your agents.

But I really can’t wait for someday and I’d like to just wire you the money. However it seems that by shutting off my phone, you’ve made it completely impossible for me to contact you and get the dollar amounts I actually owe you. I know, I’ve tried to call you every way possible today. I’ve even gone to your website, clicked on that orange “Click to Talk” weblink and attempted to get your operators to call me. Nope, looks like not even your operators can reach my phone.

And, to be fair, I did just find your customer service email address, and I will be emailing them right after I post this blog. You’re lucky, not many people read my blog, and those that do are a bit desensitized to my whining in moments like this.

Here’s to hoping we can resolve my problems with my phone service soon. I have no problem paying you what I really owe you, as my previous year and a half of on time payments should prove.

Take care,

Jeremy Osborne

PS. You should make sure you train the agents to never again tell a customer the following, “Yes, Credo may have overchaged you, and they might reverse their charges, but you will still have to pay for the extra [utilities] taxes due [to our mistakes].” Tsk, tsk, that’s a big customer service no-no.

The problem seemed simple at first: the project is called wordinary: a cross-language, public domain, word-tionary–no definitions, just words (free morphemes, if I have the terminology correct) accompanied by a simple interface that allows for quick retrieval of multiple languages with a single query. Kind of like a Rosetta Stone, although I doubt I will ever create something remotely as useful as the real thing.

Self deprecation aside, looking at one of the ISO language definition standards, I chose a subset of languages for the prototype:

Arabic, German, English, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nederlands, Portuguese, Pashto, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, and Chinese

and two words to populate the initial database:

the number ‘two‘
the color ‘red’

From here, let the fun (no sarcasm intended) begin: learning to deal with Unicode (UTF-8); using the Python I’ve learned for something constructive; learning to ask for help.

I spoke to a linguist this morning at a great coffee shop (Firefly) in Santa Cruz. After speaking to her, I realized what an idiotic, suicidal project this is. Fine, I’ve done dumber things, and have succeeded at even dumber things that are not worth mentioning here. This would be a crazy project worth succeeding at.

So I ask for help, those of you who read this blog. I knew I would need to turn this into a wiki like project in the future, but I didn’t think the future was here already.

I need help translating the following:

The number ‘two’ in:

Japanese
Korean
Pashto
Somali

The color ‘red’ in:

Korean
Pashto
Somali

I’m also looking for bilingual speakers of these languages, preferably those who speak English and one of the languages I’m listed above… but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

And, if you are willing to help with my translation of ‘two’ and ‘red’, just copy the characters into a comment field within this post. If you understand Unicode or UTF-8, I’ll also gladly take the string of UTF-8 codes for these words in the comments of this post.

He inspired the next post I’m going to make. It should show up in less than an hour…but if you actually read my blog, you know you can’t trust my promises.

http://www.bottleshockthemovie.com

Fine, if Alan Rickman doesn’t do it for you, throw in Eliza Dushku and you should be set.

At least I am.

Here’s all I have to say about same-sex marriage:

Anyone out there who is gay who needs an officiant let me know. I’ll get myself ordained (Universal Life Church) and marry you. If you want a domestic partnership, I’ll go become a notary and grant your wish. For free.

I’m not going to fly my ass all over the globe, but if you come to me, I’ll marry you.

Why? I just had another friend tell me they were getting divorced for no particular reason. Perhaps if we allow same-sex marriages, we might actually start lowering the divorce rate.

Whatever the reason, I can’t sleep.

I keep thinking about the following scenario:

If we taught a requisite curriculum, and truly educated, on Money in schools
then People, as in the population of Human Beings as a whole,
would do far fewer stupid things
because today
money = food, shelter and care
and
money = happiness

For just a moment, leave philosophical arguments aside, because believe me, I will side with you about how universally incorrect the above statements are.

but…

Today, even for the incredibly crappy value of my nation’s dollar, currency is life. I don’t hunt and forage. I didn’t inherit a cent. Like most other people I know, I work.

I work in what I like to call not-my-parent’s world.

There is no job security.
No one has ever offered me a pension, and ignore the horrific time bomb called Social Security.
Layoff is now a polite term for being fired permanently.
Inflated real estate prices–yes yes, I agree with you real estate is, and always will be one of the greatest investment, but take a moment and Zillow.com Mountain View, my current town of residence. I can’t say that if I could service a million dollar plus mortgage I’d jump at the chance at grabbing a 2,000 square foot home.

Just some thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I finally feel like I can go to sleep.

Curious of others’ thoughts on the topic of Money Education.