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at some office in Ohio, who promptly told me they had switched me to the wrong division. He gave me a brand new number to call, toll free of course, which I immediately dialed when we hung up. Well, at least I'm getting somewhere I thought, waiting for someone to answer on the other end.

An automated voice began to give me options, and my stomach started to get a knot in it, but I persevered and got through all of the different sounding choices of who to connect to, and after waiting another 45 minutes, a familiar sounding Indian voice answered.

Oh, you're kidding me right?! "Hello to you Mr. Batmanchester, what for the problem is you are receiving today sir?" I hung up.

Finally the next day, I looked online for the company's corporate offices here in the U.S. I went to the Standard and Poors index. I found out who the company CEO was, who their media contact was, who washed their floors. I wrote an article naming the company, their horrible service, their run arounds, the fact that no one knew what the hell they were doing, my experience with them, etc. I entitled the piece, "America's Worst Company" and emailed it to the CEO and their media contact, asking if they would be so kind as to give a comment on the piece that I was going to post online not only on my own blog, but also to 108 web sites, as well as every message board I could find.

Within one half hour of sending the emails, the company's head of customer relations called me. I relayed the entire sordid affair once more. Sounding horrified, he assured me that things would be fixed forthwith. 20 minutes later, the head of my local office called, and stayed with me while he got tech people on the line in a conference meeting. I relayed the story again. I was offered a tour of their facilities. Three free months of service, and needless to say, the problem has been corrected. Call me a cheap whore, but for three months free service, I'm not going to name the company nor what they do.

My point is this. First they told us that they needed to outsource all of our manufacturing jobs in order to make way for the future, which would be service oriented, information industries, and we'd all be prosperous again. But they lied and scammed us with that line. They are outsourcing the information and service jobs to India and Pakistan, leaving us poor English speaking people to whirl around endlessly when we have questions about a product or service, to say nothing of the jobs being lost in that sector now.

This can not possibly be in our best interest, and just this one experience I had with customer service and the result of outsourcing should make that pretty clear. So, the next time you need to get something done, don't bother calling the customer service number. Send an email to the CEO of the company you're contacting. If it worked for me it can work for you. And somehow, we need to make it clear to our elected officials that the pillaging of our jobs must stop. Batmanchester

Learn more about this author, Paul Wylie.
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