If you are a minority in America this morning...

I’m sorry.

Like most people I know, I went to bed last night and woke up this morning sick and frightened. There have been many political candidates I disagreed with and even believed destructive over the years, but this is not that. I woke up to discover that I’d been crying in my sleep, something that has happened only a few times in my life and not for many years.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next, or how I’m supposed to interact with the people around me. My concern isn’t just the chaos and violence that is surely right around the corner, but also this horrible thing I have learned about the people I encounter in daily life.

But, I am a white professional. If I choose to, I can simply shut up and I will be safe and accepted among the people who voted to microchip you, deport you, bar you from an entire country based on the color of your skin or where you were born or the religion you practice.

I know my fear and uncertainty can’t possibly scratch the surface of yours.

I also know I can’t eliminate your fear and uncertainty. It’s well-founded. It may keep you alive. But, I do want to say two things that I hope you will hear and believe in.

The first is that you are not alone. For every person standing behind you in the grocery line who believes that Donald Trump said what we were all thinking, there is at least one who clearly sees that you’re a valuable human being who, in the most fundamental ways, is just like us. There are millions of people of all races and religions and ages and educational levels and shoe sizes who are prepared to fight for you.

The second is please, please don’t lash out. I understand the inclination, if you’re experiencing it. I think I might want to smash some things myself, if I didn’t feel so completely depleted. You will undoubtedly be provoked in a thousand ways in the days to come. But, those who provoke you know exactly what they’re doing. They want you arrested. They want viral videos that are edited to cut out the provocation and show only your angry response. They know there are millions of people in the neutral zone right now who can be turned against you.

Don’t let them frame the discussion. Don’t let them manipulate you into becoming the poster child for their campaign to amp up the hate, to mischaracterize everyone whose skin color matches yours or who wears the same type of clothing you do.

Watch your back, but do it with your head held high, and never forget that no matter how it looks right now, there are more of us than there are of them.

Frontier Internet: Incompetence or Fraud?

ISP options are limited in my rural neck of the woods, and I was delighted when I learned, back in February, that high speed service was now available through Frontier Communications. Unlike many people I've seen complaining in social media, I've had zero problems with the service itself--my connection is quick and consistent.

Unfortunately, that's the only thing that's going smoothly in my relationship with Frontier.

Trying to Get Frontier Internet Service

I nearly gave up before I ever signed up for service, because the first person I got on the telephone when I called the sales number declined to give me information about available packages. Instead, she asked me a few questions about my needs and then told me she would put in an order for the best package for me. After explaining three times that I wanted to know what my options were and make a decision, I'd still only heard about two packages, but she'd said, "So, I'll process this order for you.." at least four times.

One of the questions I couldn't get answered during that call was whether there would be an installation charge. The rep told me that information wouldn't be available to her until she processed the order. She was a little surprised and more than a little annoyed that I wasn't willing to order service before hearing the costs associated with the order, and eventually I told her that it didn't seem that Frontier was the right company for me and got off the phone.

My options are limited, though, and a friend had recently ordered service from Frontier and encountered no such problems, so I thought maybe I'd just had bad luck with the person who answered my call.

I went online, where information about the various packages was available, and chose the one I wanted. When I got to the end of my order, a message popped up telling me that I had to call Frontier to complete my order.

I called, and the guy on the phone promptly started in again with trying to push me into the package the initial rep had been pushing--even though I'd already put in an order for a different package. Finally, we resolved that and this rep confirmed that there was no installation charge and gave me an installation date ten days hence.

Installation Charge Fraud

A day or two after the call, I received an email confirmation from Frontier. I almost missed it, because at that point I had received approximately half a dozen "action required" emails from Frontier that all said the same thing--that I needed to call them to schedule an installation date and should ignore the email if I'd already done so.

This email, though, contained a breakdown of my order...including a $99.99 installation charge.

I called and the representative said it was an error and claimed to remove the charge.

My friend who'd ordered service just before me said he wasn't having any problems with customer service, but warned me to watch out for an installation charge--they'd told him there wouldn't be one, but billed him for one anyway.

Despite their representations, I knew there was a chance that $99.99 charge was going to show up on my first bill. It didn't, though: the installation charge on my first bill was $149.99.

Again, I called. Again, I was told that the installation charge had been posted in error and would be removed. This time, though, there was a twist: the company's computers were down, and the correction couldn't be made that day. The representative promised to call me back as soon as she'd accessed my account and made the correction, probably the next day.

Eight days later, when I hadn't heard anything, I followed up with another call. The rep on that call told me he'd reversed the charge, but when I got off the phone I realized that he hadn't given me a new balance.

I called back to get my new balance and the new rep was quite confused. He wasn't showing the charge reversed, and said that the credit was too large to have been processed without supervisor approval. Thus, he was able to submit a request for the credit, but couldn't actually give me a new balance.

We agreed on an estimate that I'd pay for the first bill, and he said that he was noting the account so that if I received a late charge based on any discrepancy, it would be removed.

Today, I received my second bill...along with a disconnect notice based on the unpaid installation charge.

Missed Installation Appointments and Poor Communication

The ten days passed and I stayed home all day and the installer never came. When I called, it took quite a bit of research on Frontier's end to uncover the fact that they'd discovered that I couldn't get the speed I'd ordered in my area. So, rather than calling to tell me that and offer alternative options, they'd just cancelled the installation appointment (and not notified me).

They offered me a much lower speed (down from 24 mbps to 6 mbps) and a lot of confusion ensued when I asked about the 12 mbps option on their website. Finally, they decided they could offer me 12 and scheduled another installation date...another ten days out.

Nearly a week later, I received a call from Frontier letting me know that the service I'd originally ordered wasn't available and asking whether I'd like the 6 mbps option--it was as if the whole conversation in which my new installation date had been scheduled had never happened.

Ultimately, the service did get installed and it works fine; I haven't had a single problem with Internet access or speed.

However, in the two months since I started trying to get the service hooked up, I've had to make more than ten telephone calls totaling more than three hours of my time to resolve two issues--and one of them has still not been resolved. And, according to the latest billing, they're going to disconnect my service on April 30 for not having paid the installation charge four different representatives have assured me I didn't owe...plus a $7.50 late charge on that balance.

With the exception of the early sales people, everyone I've talked to has been helpful and pleasant. But, that's as far as it goes. They smile, apologize, make promises and then hang up the phone and absolutely nothing changes.

Screw "It Gets Better"

Don’t get me wrong. I respect the “It Gets Better” movement. I love some of the videos. And although I know that they were born as a means of support for gay teenagers, I think they have much broader applications…because middle school and high school suck for a lot of kids.

But, why do we accept that?

Long before there was an “It Gets Better” campaign, parents were commiserating with their kids that middle school was horrible for everyone, but it ended and before long it would be a fading memory. Teachers and administrators rolled their eyes and talked about how “difficult” adolescents were, feeling more sorry for themselves than for the 13-year-old girls contemplating suicide in the back of their classrooms.

I heard those platitudes when I was in middle school in the late 70s, and I was still hearing them when I rescued my youngest child from 8^th grade in 2009.  In thirty years, the best we’ve come up with is a video series that reassures our kids that the hell we’re forcing them through won’t last forever.

If you lived in an apartment building where your twelve-year-old was routinely bullied in the hallways, to the point that he was depressed and his whole personality was changing, would you give him a hug and remind him that in six short years he could move out on his own and get away from this? If you worked in an environment that made you physically ill every morning, if you stepped off of the commuter train each day kind of hoping you’d be hit by a car so you didn’t actually have to enter that building, would you keep that job for three or five or six years?

I suspect not—at least, not if there were any way possible for you to change it. Yet, we accept the high-stress, abusive, soul-destroying environment that is public school for adolescents and teenagers without a blink.  We agree that it’s horrible, nod sympathetically, and tell our kids to hurry up and get in the car so that we can deliver them to its doors once again. And, we’re thankful when something like the “It Gets Better” series appears to give them hope for the future.

That’s our job.

And we don’t show them that there’s hope for the future by encouraging them to quietly serve their time in purgatory, to curl in on themselves and learn to protect themselves from the world and hide who they are until they can escape that environment. We don’t show them hope by telling them they’ll be happy when they’re twenty-five and expecting that to be enough, expecting them to even know what that means. We show them that the future can be better by showing them how to change it, by working our asses off to make the school environment better or by removing them from it and showing them that better world instead of just promising that it will come along one day.

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, 15.8% of teens had seriously considered suicide in the 12 months preceding the survey. In fact, 5,400 7^th to 12^th graders in the United States attempt suicide every single day. And we wait for it to pass? Hope they’re not successful, or that our kids are the ones who escape (and the hell with the ones who don’t make it)? Because, you know, that’s just how the teen years are.

Title notwithstanding, I mean no disrespect to the folks behind “It Gets Better.”  I think it’s fantastic that successful people from many walks of life have invested the time and emotional energy to share their personal stories and give our kids enough hope to get them through the worst years of their lives. Now, it’s time that parents, teachers, school administrators and everyone else who controls our children’s destinies get to work making that unnecessary.

The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Scandal from a Very Different Perspective

Recently, a white guy took his mixed-race children to Wal-Mart and all hell broke loose.  Someone--stories seem to vary on whether it was a customer or Wal-Mart security--saw the guy with kids who "didn't seem to fit" and called the police. The police went by his house (immediately) to check it out, determined that everything was okay and went on their way...and then roughly 276,383 bloggers and minor news sources got involved.

If you've ever read this blog before, you probably know that I'm not a racist.  My daughter literally didn't know that there were different races until she went to school and someone else filled her in, despite regularly interacting with people from at least a dozen different countries.  She viewed the differences in the color of their skin no differently than differences in hair color or height.  Probably, had she been in that parking lot, it wouldn't have registered with her that those little girls didn't look like the biological children of the man they were with.  And that's a lovely society to look forward to.  But it's also beside the point.

Discrimination sucks, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't really know what it's like. I've seen it, but as a middle-aged white chick, I haven't felt it.  But it, too, seems to me to be rather beside the point in this case.

What happened is that someone saw very young children with a man they thought perhaps shouldn't have them and acted.  Then, the police immediately followed up to make sure those children were safe.

Yes, it was an inconvenience and probably very stressful for the parents, and I'm not minimizing that.  But look at the bottom line: it's not that a stranger at Wal-Mart was racist because he or she recognized that it's very rare in our society for a white man to have children who appear to be African American.  It's that a stranger at Wal-Mart went out on a limb to make sure that a stranger's children were safe.

Just recently, we saw the escape of three women who had been held captive in Ohio for years.  After the escape, neighbors told us that they'd called the police on more than one occasion, but the investigation was half-hearted at best and those girls grew into women as captive victims.  Not these cops.  They followed up so quickly that they reached the guy's house before he got home himself.

I'm a mother and a grandmother, and I can tell you without reservation that if some stranger had ever called the police because of something out of the ordinary they thought they'd witnessed, and the police ran right over to my house and asked me to prove that those kids were mine or that their mommy knew I had them, I'd offer a sincere thank you.  No, it wouldn't be any fun, but I WANT to live in a society where strangers care about children they think may be in danger and police follow up quickly.

In 1999 (the last year studied), 797,000 children were reported missing.  33,000 of those are believed to be non-family abductions--you know, people like those girls in Ohio or Elizabeth Smart or, worse, young children who are molested, terrorized and then killed.  When those children survive, it's often because something out of the ordinary caught the eye of a stranger, who had the courage to act...and then the police took that person seriously enough to investigate quickly and thoroughly.  Amber Alert reports alone have saved 642 children since the program was implemented.

Our ridiculous knee-jerk reaction to the fact that racial disparity was an element that caught the eye of the reporter in this case has sent a powerful message to society that if you're uncertain, you should keep your damned mouth shut.  It's just not worth the risk to make that call and have the press ranting about what a horrible person you are for weeks on end because you wanted to make sure that kid was okay.  You were probably wrong anyway.

So...mission accomplished.  Society has learned its lesson about getting involved and children may die, but better that than having them saved because someone recognized a racial disparity and wasn't quite sure about it, right?

Visiondecor Customer Service Debacle Continues

A few days ago, I posted about my experience ordering furniture from Visiondecor. In a nutshell, 11 days after I'd paid for the item and 8 days after I'd received an email saying the item had been shipped, I hadn't received the item and no tracking information was showing.  I emailed the company inquiring about the status of the order and received no response for five days.  On the fifth day, three things happened:

• The shipping company advised me that it had received the item on the 8th day after I received the "your item has been shipped" email...coincidentally, the day I sent my follow-up email;
• I posted negative feedback on Amazon; and
• Visiondecor suddenly became interested in talking to me.

I chose not to accept the 50% refund Visiondecor offered me in exchange for removing the negative review on Amazon, and that apparently is outside their usual experience. (No wonder a company with arguably the worst customer service in North America has mostly positive reviews.)  

The same company that couldn't respond to a simple inquiry about order status in a five-day period has contacted me FIVE TIMES to offer a discount in exchange for immediate removal of the review.  I ignored the first two telephone messages and the first email, but after the second email I responded that I was troubled by the fact that the company had been so disinterested in actually solving my problem but was now so actively engaged in getting me to remove the negative feedback.  

Unbelievably, the response (email # 3, included below in its entirety) from Visiondecor consisted almost entirely of detailed instructions for removing my negative feedback from Amazon.

Nadine Alvarado, Oct 10 11:09 (PDT):Hello, I am very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you do decide to remvoe the feedback below are the instructions to remove the feedback: You will need to log into your Amazon account. Once you are logged in, please click on the "Your Account" tab on the top right hand corner. Once that has loaded to the next page please scroll to the bottom of the page where it shows the "Personalization" section In this section you will see another tab that says "View seller feedback submitted by you" and click on it. On this screen it will show you all feedback submitted for any order by you, and locate the feedback for this specific order and on the right side of that feedback will show a button that says "remove" and you will need to click on that. Once you click on remove, it will ask you the reason for removing and you can choose seller resolved problem and then click remove seller feedback. Once that is done, please let me know right away so that I can issue your refund. Thank you, Nadine

Visiondecor Furniture Offers Payoff to Alter Amazon Review

Bad customer service experiences are hardly rare these days; in fact, most of the time they're not even worth mentioning.  Last month, though, I had one bad enough that it seemed worth taking a few minutes to leave seller feedback at Amazon.com, and what happened next left me feeling worse about Visiondecor Furniture than I had when they'd simply been ignoring me and failing to fill my order.

Here's the backstory, condensed:

On September 11, I ordered a bed frame from Visiondecore through Amazon.com.  I ordered a few other items from other sellers at the same time, including a loft bed/futon combo.  On September 14, I received an email from Visiondecor saying that the item had been shipped and would arrive between September 19 and 21.  By September 17, all of my other items had been delivered.  No tracking information ever appeared on Amazon for the Visiondecor order, and when the item hadn't appeared by September 22, I sent a message to the company inquiring.

I received no response.  However, on Monday the 24th, I received a call from a logistics company wanting to schedule a delivery.  I returned their call on Tuesday morning but didn't get a call back until Wednesday.  When I got that call back on Wednesday, I was advised that they only delivered to my area on Wednesdays, and since they hadn't put the item on the truck that morning (because they hadn't returned my call the day before), I wouldn't be able to get the item until October 10.

When I protested that it had already been ten days since I'd received the "your item has been shipped" email from the seller, the shipper said, "We only received this item on the 22nd."  Prompted by my email, perhaps?

I told the shipper that wasn't acceptable and suggested that she get in touch with her customer and find out what they would like to do to get the item to me sooner, since I had been unable to contact them directly.  Then I went to Amazon and left 1 Star feedback with this comment:

"Worst online ordering experience ever. Seller misrepresented that item had been shipped, it still hasn't arrived 13 days after "has been shipped" email, no tracking information ever appeared. Delivery estimated 9/18-21; it is now 9/27 and no delivery or information. Email to seller has gone unanswered for 5 days."

Within hours I'd received a call back from the shipper saying that the item would be delivered the next day and one from Visiondecor apologizing and offering a discount.  I decided not to return the call to the company until I received the item.  Then, when I did call, it was early afternoon on a weekday and I received a message asking me to call back during regular business hours.  I decided it wasn't worth pursuing further; I had the item, didn't care much about receiving a discount and couldn't imagine what Visiondecor could do to change my impression of the company at that point.

I was wrong, though.  

About a week after the initial call, I received an email from Visiondecor.  The company lost points right away because the email was a reply to the one they'd never bothered to respond to back on the 22nd.  As I read further, I was totally dumbfounded: the purpose of the email was to let me know that IF I removed my negative review from Amazon within 24 hours, they could offer me a 50% discount to "change my customer experience".  My customer experience was NOT improved by being offered a bribe to remove my entirely accurate description of my experience with the company--especially since I had myself relied on customer feedback when deciding which seller to purchase the item from and now think it's likely that the feedback was positive only because the company has purchased that result.

The email I received from Visiondecor is below; the moral of the story is that apparently customer feedback isn't a reliable way to determine whether or not you want to deal with a seller.  When (after the fact) I checked sites like TrustLink, I found reports much more in line with my experience.

Nadine Alvarado, Oct 04 15:41 (PDT):

Hi there!

My name is Nadine. I’m the customer care manager here at Visiondecor. I’m writing to personally apologize for the inconveniences you suffered due to your negative experience shopping with us on Amazon. I would like to do something to help change your customer experience into, at least, a more satisfactory outlook. I see that you’ve been offered a discount for the inconvenience already. But, if you would be willing to reconsider the negative review you left within the next 24 hours I can get a refund of half your entire order approved.

Please respond as soon as possible and let me know if you would like this. I can get it for you right away if you do that.

If you have any questions, concerns or aren’t sure how to remove it please let me know and I will be more than happy to help you out.

Thank you so much!
Nadine
1-877-683-3267 ext.118


Update: Since this post, Visiondecor has continued to contact me to repeatedly request that I remove the negative review.

Looking for a Spammer with an Ounce of Creativity...

Unlike most bloggers, I don't really mind when other bloggers (and even businesses) try to piggyback on my posts to gain some traffic for their own sites or draw attention to their services. That's just good marketing strategy, and I'm all about a collaborative environment where potential customers know what their options are and make informed choices. I don't want my law school admissions consulting business to be the only one a prospective student finds online--I want it to be the one they choose after they read the information on my site or talk with me on the telephone. And I certainly don't want my posts on topics I consider to be socially significant to be the only opinion someone sees. So post away--comment, disagree, add supporting points and feel free to include your link.

But add something of value.

I have a lot of blogs, but the two that draw the most targeted spam are my relationship blog and my LSAT / law school admissions blog. That makes sense--one is a competitive area and the other is a money-making venture. That being the case, I'd expect the people who drop spam comments on those blogs to be good at it. I'd expect them to be thinking in terms of marketing their sites or their services when they commented.

If they were, and they made intelligent comments, I'd leave their links alone. Even direct competitors are welcome to add valuable insights and information in my space, and when they do, they should take credit for it.

It's when they show themselves up as lazy and incompetent that I get annoyed. If my subject matter is also your subject matter and you have something related of value that you're trying to draw readers back to, shouldn't you have the ability to craft a sentence or two reasonably related to my content? And if you want someone to trust you with their hard-earned dollars in return for a service, shouldn't you show that you have the capacity to perform that service well?

I'm always torn in this situation. This morning, for example, I found a spam comment on my law school admissions blog from an LSAT tutor. As I said, if he'd added anything at all of value to the conversation, I'd have left his link. In fact, I'm only tutoring a very few students at the moment under pretty narrow conditions, so if he'd impressed me I'd have checked out his site to see whether he might warrant adding to my list of referrals.

If he'd just dropped a link, I'd have deleted it and moved on.

But no--he left a "comment". His comment was that he was glad I'd posted this LSAT information because he had been looking for it for a long time.

And then he left his link. As an LSAT tutor.

Can't you just feel the confidence bubbling over?

I deleted the comment, but I had to think twice about it. Part of me wanted to promote that post all over the place and let his prospective market see that either he was too stupid and lazy to formulate an intelligent sentence to post or that he was reliant for his "expertise" on information found on a stranger's blog.