Some people are using the glitches in the Affordable Care Act exchanges as proof that government is inefficient.  Duh, how often have you updated software on your devices with version x.0 and then within a week or two received a notice of the release of version x.0.1?

Government is run by people.  Corporations are run by people.  People make mistakes!  All the time.  Everyday.  In every way.  Government screws up.  Corporations screw up.
For examples of corporate screw-ups and non-response to customer complaints, take a look at the customer “support” message boards.  All the support comes from other customers who spent hours trying to figure out how a product really worked.  If they are lucky, other users mark their responses as helpful and they get “points”, whatever those are worth.

I’ve seen some issues go on for two or more years. Let me give you a short summary of some customer service issues I’ve had this year. I think it was late spring when we had several days of windy, rainy weather.  Our DSL service was erratic.  It would be slow then normal then nothing at all.  The DSL light on our modem would go out.  I called CenturyLink and spoke with a tech in Idaho.  She said that our service had been throttled back from the nominal 7Mbps to 3Mbps.  She did some resetting and things were better.

The bad weather continued and our DSL service became erratic again.  I made a call and sent some emails, but this time I was told that it was my modem and that I should buy a new modem.  I checked online for the current CenturyLink modem, and guess what!  One customer had left a message that he bought that new modem and was having the exact same problems as we were!  Two months before my search! I didn’t buy a modem and a few weeks later our modem was doing just fine.  Our service now runs about 6Mbps.  Could it be that CenturyLink had some line problems that customer support was not told about?


I bought a solar light for the outhouse at our cabin.  It worked fine and then it would not turn on until it had been off for about an hour.  I sent email to the customer support and received back a request for my address, phone number, date of purchase, and a scanned copy of the receipt.  I said “Phooey” and figured out that I had drained the batteries by leaving the light on.  Replacing the batteries improved the performance.  It looks like the first line of customer support is only screeners who have no access to problems and solutions.  Now this dumb customer left the light on again and it wouldn’t turn on again.

We replaced our cabin landline with a wireless home phone base.  The answering machine now gave a time an hour later than the time of call.  Consumer Cellular replied it was my answering machine.  With a bit of web searching, I found out that the wireless home phone base is passing the wrong information and that a firmware upgrade fixes the problem.  The upgrade is available only from the original manufacturer and only can be installed with Windows software.  When I relayed this information back to Consumer Cellular, they replied they could not help me and implied it wasn’t even their responsibility!  This from a company that is rated highly in customer service.

The keyboard and keypad on my laptop would not respond.  I tried the various reset tricks from Apple support boards but none worked for long.  I took my laptop back to Best Buy where I bought it, but everything worked fine for the Geek Squad.  It worked fine for a while at home and then… “Dead” again.  I figured out that it was Microsoft Outlook that I always have on that was the problem.  The techs had closed all my apps before their tests.  I reorganized Outlook’s database and the keyboard has been working fine since.  If only I could make the fingers hitting the keys work as well!

But we should also look on the bright side.  Corporations have done a great job of making our cars more reliable and comfortable.  If we take some reasonable precautions they start every time and get us where we want to go safely.  We have all kinds of extras that weren’t on my first car, a 1940 Chevy.  Turn signals, windshield washers, side view mirrors, power steering, power brakes, anti-skid, ABS, air-conditioning, and accurate speedometers.
Ah! Accurate speedometers!  I had a 1969 Fiat that said I was going 70mph when I was actually going 63.  I had a Ford Escort that said I was going 55mph when I was actually going 47 mph!  The Ford dealer blamed it on the tires and wouldn’t do anything about it.  I found it was a wide-spread problem; when I compensated for the error I passed many Ford Escorts driving well under the speed limit.

If the dealer was right about the problem, the tires would have to be about 15 percent smaller than “standard” to have that speed disparity.  For a tire that was about two feet in diameter, that would work out to over an inch of tread wear.  The grooves on a auto tire are not even that deep!  What was it that Adam Smith said?  “Those who live by profit deceive and oppress the public.”

In the favor of those who live by profit, our latest cars do much better on speedometer accuracy – 30 mph on the speedometer at 30 mph and 71 mph at 70 mph! Oh, and we have one domestic car and one foreign car.a