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Ok, so as promised, I am going to give the gory details of the absolute worst instance of Customer Service my wife and I have encountered here in New York City as of yet. And what’s amazing is that within the following story, there actually is an honest answer to the essential question that underlies every story I’ve written on the oxymoronic nature of Customer Service in New York City. The essential question is: In Customer Service, is it actually your job to help people? I thought the answer was pretty simple but it appears that New Yorkers are either more highly evolved than the rest of the nation or stuck in the mud somewhere a long ways back. Here goes.

So my wife and I have discovered thousands of little annoying snafu’s and inefficiencies here. But the one that starts our story is a bit bigger deal. My wife attends Hunter College, a cheap but well regarded public institution part of the City University New York system or CUNY. As her semester quickly approached we became alarmed at the fact that though she had submitted her request for financial aid, we hadn’t heard anything for weeks. What was worse, we found out that she actually couldn’t register for classes until she paid for them first! And then we found out that she technically couldn’t collect her financial aid until she registered for classes! How’s that for a Catch-22. We then were rudely instructed to just pay for the classes any way possible, with a credit card or perhaps with our savings or something. Well, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of applying for financial aid in the first place? Either way the classes were eventually paid for and she was able to register. Here is where our story really begins.

My wife finally got frustrated with waiting to hear back from Hunter so she headed down to the Financial Aid Office to figure out what the hold up was. It was there, at the Financial Aid Office, that she heard the phrase, “not my job” spoken by a customer service representative for the first time. What’s worse, the man said it wasn’t his job and then just a blankly stared back at her, never offering up of who’s “job” it might be to help her locate her lost application. After a long drawn out battle, the man who’s job it wasn’t to help her gets up and walks about 5 feet from where he was sitting and discovered that her application had been “put in the wrong pile”. She came home pretty worried that night because even though the man said he had now put her application in the right pile, she couldn’t be sure. The confrontation between them was so contentious she wasn’t sure she could trust him. What was keeping him from “losing” her application in the wrong pile yet again!

So the following day she called the Financial Aid Office and received the one-two knockout punch that closes the case on Customer Service in New York City. She gets a Financial Aid office worker on the phone. My wife politely begins,

“Hello, I’m calling to check on my financial aid application, yesterday I learned that it was effectively lost because it had been put in the wrong pile. Can you check and make sure it is in the right pile?”

“That’s not my job” said the office worker.

“I’m sorry, I’ve called the Financial Aid Office, right?”

“Yup”

“Ok, you mean you can’t just walk over to the pile of applications that I saw sitting on the counter and make sure mine is in there?”

“Nope”

“Ok, well, what is your job?”

“This” said the worker.

“This? You mean not helping me?”

“YES” replied the worker.

So there it was. Finally, the honest answer that my wife and I so desperately sought from the day we got here. In New York City it is, in fact, NOT your job to help people as a Customer Service Representative. Thank you for your candid response Financial Aid Office Worker. I hope you continue to stand up and refuse to do your job. I can’t wait to discover all the ways that people are not Taxi Drivers, or not Doctors, or not Underwriters here. With over 8 million people, I’m sure I will meet more. These not workers that I never knew existed.

Hans Erik
Content Marketing Director
Hans@Next2Friends.com
www.Next2Friends.com