July 24, 2002
I guess in hindsight
I guess in hindsight it's not so big a deal since it got taken care of. Basically what happened is I signed up by faxing Rackspace a form where I wrote in my friend's name. I had more questions on how to make sure it was working right, so I called, and they said it had to come from him. So I called him and he took care of it - called the people and said he referred me. Then I called and made sure it went through, and they said it did.So they called me today and said it wouldn't work because the referrals are supposed to start FROM the other party, and it is supposed to be in place before the server is online. I didn't know either of these things, of course, and argued as such. They stuck to their guns for a long time, saying that doing it differently opened them up to fraud. I just kept saying that the way I did it didn't have anything unreasonable about it. They also said it was incompatible with the other promotion I signed up for, but I was never exactly given the choice. They said it was supposed to start with the other guy, but I said, "well, he can't exactly sign me up - there's a point where I have to call and say to do it." And I also said that if it wasn't supposed to work from me calling the guy to do it, then I should have been told about the referral program as a selling point.
Eventually, somehow, they actually started agreeing with me. I must have been ono top of my game. We were flat-out arguing with each other for a while at the beginning - I even said that it felt like bait&switch. He paused at that... when he finally caved, he took the tack of using it to give himself license to scold me by implying they were going to start looking at me as a problem customer, which was pretty creepy. I think I got him to backpedal from that by letting him know I really did understand the business concerns and was glad that they were doing the right thing, since I had plenty of people around Portland I could recommend to use Rackspace. Then he got really friendly.
What I think really happened is that he probably had someone over his shoulder that was telling him which way to go.
I hate those sorts of things because you really are at the corporation's
mercy. And it isn't so much determined by how right you are as by how
well you argue your point. I know people that complain about getting
easily flustered, and I think that I don't - but in this case I was
pretty close to the blustery panic point. I hate that. They didn't
turn around until the last minute.
Posted by Curt at July 24, 2002 07:27 PM