WHAT I LEARNED FROM THAT
AOL CANCELLATION RECORDING:
Employee Loyalty Is for Chumps

So it's been big news for a week or two, that famed telephone recording of a fed-up America Online customer trying unsuccessfully to cancel his account, but just in case you haven't noticed, here's some background.

From Philadelphia's NBC10.com:

On Tape: Rep Won't Let Customer Quit AOL

An incredible video from CNBC shows an AOL customer trying to cancel his account, but a phone rep won't let him do it. What customer Vincent Ferrari got when he tried to cancel his account was a lot of frustration.

It took him 15 minutes waiting on the phone just to reach a real, live person.

And, what happened next was recorded by Ferrari on audio and lasted about four minutes

And

He recounts how the AOL representative - as a last resort even asked if his dad was home.

"I think I could've put up with everything, but at the point when he asked to speak to my father, I came very close to losing it at that point," said the 30-year-old Ferrari.

Ferrari then posted the call online, and the response was tremendous.

AOL sent him an apology and said the customer service rep was no longer with the company.

Click here for some segments of the call's transcript; click here for streaming video, including audio of same segments, with onscreen text.

Obviously, the caller was treated like total crap, which was the angle played up about the story in the news. Like I said, obvious. What's not so obvious is why anybody with a heart ought to have some sympathy for the sacked customer service guy. Implicit in AOL's apology and employee dismissal is the suggestion that AOL doesn't really do business that way, that this was all due to an overzealous phone rep, or a stupid phone rep, something like that. But that's just not true. That is how AOL does business. There's no need for me to go into my own personal experiences with the internet giant, but suffice it to say, AOL sucks, and lots of people know it. I feel pretty certain that stonewalling and railroading customers who make trouble, and by "make trouble" I mean "insist that AOL follows the terms of the service contract," is company policy. Consequently, the AOL phone guy was made a scapegoat for doing just as he was told.

So, there's a real lesson in all of this. In this corporate dominated era in which we live, in this time of "globalism," employees are completely expendable. As if the continued hemorrhaging from all this downsizing and outsourcing didn't make that plain already. Do your job wrong, get fired. Do your job right, get fired. We simply don't matter to them: why should they matter to us? Company loyalty is for chumps. All a worker owes his employer is the work for which he is paid. Nothing else. Not "hard" work, just work. Not excitement, not overtime, not trust, not a pleasant attitude, not friendship. Just the work. Believe me, that's their attitude toward you, and you're a fool if you think otherwise. You're not on "the team." You never were.

I didn't ask for this philosophy, and I don't really like having to live my life this way either. But I was never given a choice. Employee disposability was rammed down our throats years ago; it only seems natural for workers to devalue their employers in the same way.

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