Customer Service
Sometimes I need to let off steam…..
I like it here in the Czech Republic I do. But the lack of customer services sometimes drives me insane..
I had to replace the water heater in my camper van this spring as despite following instructions on how to winterize it - it froze. I took my van to the place I normally go and where I have spent quite a lot of money. A lot of money. Yet, my three emails asking if they might tell me when I can drop by to get them to winterize this heater - as they offered - have gone unanswered.
For me this is rude.
It’s unnacceptable.
But I’m used to it here.
I shall just go in the van and ring their damned bell and not leave until they help. Or, I need to find someone who unlike me is practical and knows how to do these things properly.
Then, there is the electrician. I have infrared panel heating - its awesome. But two of my thermostats have fried meaning that these things come on full heat and stay on. The electrician came out two weeks ago and diagnosed the issue and stopped them from being hot. New thermostats. He said he would order them and be back in a few days…. I’m still waiting. My texts unanswered.
This is Czech customer service.
A joke.
How is it where you live?
If you need a breather from their staunch and totally oblivious view on their not knowing at all what customer service is, I mean is it a word at all in the Easternly programmed peoples where everybody is just a cog in the wheel and therefor I will not smile at you or reply as expected to a service I may be offering and will charge for? Tip: just hop over to Bavaria or maybe even Saxony or Thuringia, for a weekend and recover from the drudge of the Eastern programming, they can't be helped for the most part due to the fact that even the word customer, remember in their system there were no customers as they 'thought' that they were all a bit owners of it all, service does not appear on their internal map, it is not there. You are expecting something they do not hold in their make-up as that is not the way their programming worked, the Western programming is all about smiles and immediate replies and t'is often also shallow however if I have to choose give me a smile anytime of day. In my neck of the woods I'd also have to go to Bavaria to get what I would call normal human behavour when trading, selling, dealing , with human beings called customers or just human beings meeting on the streets, they actually say : Grüß Gott, on the street to each other , acknowledging each other as being a child of God whilst holding God up on high, and in stores all the time, it's pure bliss, sould food, humans treating humans kindly, oh well, thanks for the rant, I could do the same on a daily basis, I don't as I just avoid them like the plague, t'is insufferable to the sensitive soul, almost like being hit in the face, and you have to suck it up as you need your wheels or somehting else, I'm lucky as far as wheels go as those guys, yes, Eastern, are a gem in the ocean of no service landscape, very professional, on time, honest and kind, however to be fair t'is also a survival skill developed in a ptsd world of authoritarianism, I guess smiling in Eastern countries made them weary of what you might want from them, or an overly polite mail might have meant trouble, a bit Calvinistic maybe as well, like expect the worse then your day might turn out fine or so, etc,etc, so stoic all the way, however to be fair again many peoples have jobs where the living daylight is sucked out from under them! Do keep smiling and being polite and kind you might just do wonders without knowing, never ever give up, I wish you a lovely day, Grüß Gott.
We commented on the crisis in competency but there is a concomitant crisis in basic reliability and integrity. I have friends who are always late and dismiss this with a perfunctory 'sorry'...then repeat the same behaviour. Doing what you say you're going to do is beyond many. The modern episodic and hedonic life seems to have destroyed integrity to a great degree.
It sounds very bad where you are which is strange given their bureaucratic insistence that YOU...get it right. Maybe this rude unreliability goes back to resisting the Habsburg bureaucracy...or...they're just lazy twats.