blog.deanland.com

A Bum Steer

A day or so ago there was mention in this space of the seeming disappearance of use in the general parlanceÖ of the word BUM. Vernacular being a contemporary dynamic, sort of a thing-of-the-moment, it struck me as odd when my referrer page showed a few hits under ìbums in midtown Manhattan.î

And there it is. My blog, at the very top of the list, when someone enters ìbums in midtown Manhattanî into a search engine.

Disturbing Search Requests being a witty site, it seemed time to visit yet again, and give this one some eternal notoriety. So now it seems that those aforementioned bums in midtown Manhattan and I have converged on the postings at Disturbing Search requests.

Name Dropping

Thereís this fellow. He is my friend, neighbor, colleague, and in a few endeavors, my sometime business-venture partner. He complained that I never used his name in the blog. Gee, he said, that means no search engine hits.

Add to this his frustration in that it seems my blog gets a good google ranking. He knows all about rankings and site traffic, click-through, etc. He expressed that my dropping his name in the blog would increase traffic to one or more of his sites. http://www.freecellphoneguy.com

What do you think? Should I put his name in here?

Magnum Qworst

Okay, while we are on the subject of the Telecom bizÖ. In which I gladly toil on a daily basisÖ. Two or three years ago, in what proved to be a move we would regret, my company moved all of our Long Distance program clients over to Qwest. They were matching the low price, no monthly recurring fee, the good deal we had developed and were offering through another company. According to the scoundrels who sold me on making the move, the service would be flawless, the clientele would be thrilled, and the commissions to guys like us would be greater.

Wrong on all counts!

Qwest sent out bills at higher rates, with all sorts of arbitrary add-on fees and charges, and we never saw commission check 1. Adding to the frustration was the inability of any of the Customer Service people at Qwest to handle a complaint call or to prove or even indicate the ability to communicate with customers when they called to question, complain, request a rerated bill and the dropping of the bullshit charges.

This debacle lasted only a few months. We moved everyone away, paid the change-over fee, and helped them fight their billing-error battles with Qwest. After a while it seemed over and done. Seemed being the operative word in that sentence.

Of course it is all over the news these days that Qwest is in financial trouble. The compnay misstated earnings, they fired the CEO who was making millions a year while the share price and the revenues were in decline, etc. Also, it turns out that Qwest was paying some consulting firm $10 Million per month for some bandwidth trading assistance -- but that this firm did absolutely nothing. Sounds like Enron all over again, doesn't it? Can you hear the shareholders gnashing their teeth?

Suddenly, out of the blue, two or more years later, our clients who once used Qwest start to hear from them again. Qwest decided to turn a funny little trick: all of the customers we formerly had with Qwest ñtwo plus years away from them, and unhappy, still, with the treatment they got from Qwest-- have, over the past week or two, received a bill in the mail from Qwest. Yes, a bill from a vendor they no longer do business with, by choice.

Qwest calls it an ìadministrative fee.î I call it a crock of shit.

Letís play with this concept. Say Qwest has 10 Million former customers it has churned away since 1999. Now letís say they send a bogus bill to all of them for $4.95, and it looks like some official phone company bill. How much of a percentage of those 10 Million former customers might just pay the bill? Hey, it is just $4.95, and it is for some administrative fee. A drop in the bucket for most. So what if, say, 5 percent of that supposed 10 Million group of former customers send in the $4.95 ñwhat does that bring to Qwest? Well simple math tells us that Qwest would be scamming a cool $2.475 Million smackeroos on that basis.

This will probably be fuel for the tstewq.com website, a chronicle of the scam of the boys from Denver.

Sooner or later these practices will appear in a RICO or other such action against the qwestrillionaires who lined their pockets while the share price went down, the employee benefits and retirement packages went into a massive downslide, and while Qwest sent out to collection (or sold off as parts of ìB-Creditî packages to collection houses) customers who had paid their bills, challenged the incorrect bills, or just would not put up with receiving late charges on erroneous bills, and simply cut off payments until Qworst sent them a corrected bill.

Qwest is under investigation by a House Committee, as well as by the SEC. Whatís that phrase? Something about reaping what one hath sown?