Dear Not Particularly Helpful Satellite Radio Technical Support Person,

(You know who you are, or so I assume. Your name might or might not be Shawn, as you told me it was in our online chat this afternoon. I don't think I would use my real name if I had your job, especially if I were as uninterested in actually helping my customers as you seem to have been.)

When I signed on to the support web site, I didn't know what to expect. I have never participated in a support chat before, and I was a bit uneasy about it. But it was better than making a phone call, or so I thought. If you knew me better, you would know that that's how I feel in most situations. Anything is preferable to making a phone call, until the circumstance becomes the most dire.

When you asked me to describe my problem, hope swelled in my heart. I was ready to describe the problem and have you give me the solution, and then we would part as friends, in whatever sense that is possible in our situation. I told you that I had turned on my radio (the one inside the house, not the one in the car, which is in the garage; that radio works perfectly well, or did the last time I drove anywhere, which was two days ago), and it had come on as usual.

Then, a while later, I tried to change to a different station. I use one station (The Loft) for listening to music, and another (Spa) for music that I don't have to listen to. That is the kind of music I prefer as background for reading. But I could not change the station. In fact, I could no longer control the radio at all, either with the controls on the radio itself or with the remote control. I couldn't even turn it off. It just kept playing The Loft, although the display screen showed the song that had apparently been playing when it stopped working, and not the song that was playing at the current time.

For some reason, you couldn't get it through your head that I had no control over the radio. You told me that the signal needed to be refreshed, and asked me to change it to channel 1. I reminded you that I couldn't change the channel. If I could change the channel, I wouldn't have had to contact you.

You asked me if the screen now displayed my radio ID number, and I reminded you that the screen showed what it has showed all afternoon, "Shake Some Action," by the Flamin' Groovies. If you know what time that song was playing on The Loft today, you will be able to determine what time my radio stopped working.

Then you asked me to be sure that there was nothing blocking the signal from the satellite, and I reminded you that I was still getting a perfectly good signal, and that nothing had changed about the position of the radio or the antenna. If something was blocking the signal, I wouldn't be hearing The Loft. I like The Loft. It's my favorite station. But I'm paying a yearly fee to get a hundred or more stations, and it didn't seem right that I could only listen to the one, favorite or not.

So you told me you were sending a "refresh" signal to my radio, and that in five or ten minutes it would start working properly again. (You told me to be sure not to turn the radio off in the next five or ten minutes, but this time I didn't remind you that I couldn't turn it on or off, whether I wanted to or not.) I said that I would wait ten minutes and then make the dreaded phone call if it didn't work by then. You said there would be no reason to call, because it would work. I was already skeptical, and now I was also a little put off by your certainty, since you obviously hadn't been paying attention to my description of the problem from the first moment we began chatting.

Needless to say, it didn't work. Fortunately for both of us, I also get your service on my iPhone, so when I want to listen to a satellite station other than The Loft (Spa, for example), I can connect the phone to my stereo system. If not for that option, I would have made the dreaded phone call. Eventually, I probably will do so. It will probably be at about the time my yearly renewal is due. In fact, I expect someone from your company to call me at that time, since the credit card I used for the last renewal, nearly a year ago, has expired in the meantime.

Please, for the sake of other customers in future exchanges of this nature, try to listen to what they're saying, instead of merely reading from a script, as I assume you did with me. Either a script or a flowchart, anyway, or some combination thereof. I have found in dealing with the public that the best way to keep customers from being disgruntled is to solve their problems, especially when they're being quite clear about what those problems are.

Regards,

Disgruntled Customer (but only moderately so, and not enough to make a big deal out of this)