A True Parable of Our Times

 

In the interests of advancing public insight and assisting any future chroniclers of our times, I have elected to publicly exhibit certain recent communications with a corporation which capture many essential elements of the contemporary consumer Zeitgeist.

The corporation involved is Bell Canada, a company whose business is all about communication. It is the main subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises, Canada's largest communications company (according to its website), and provides "local telephone, long distance, wireless communications, Internet access, data, satellite television and other services to residential and business customers through some 27 million customer connections."

Bell Canada offers High Speed Internet Access service through a corporate unit known as Sympatico. I am a customer.

The communications I've received from this communications company may astound and appall you. Please bear in mind that what follows is not just one man's experience, but something that highlights the contemporary condition. I am clarifying your world.

Satisfaction is not guaranteed.

BACKGROUND

Users of Sympatico's Internet service may have multiple email addresses. Customers can create and/or delete their email addresses themselves at Sympatico's "self-care" website.

I'd been using the address tomrsn@sympatico.ca for some time, but once it began receiving excessive spam I decided to delete it and create a new address which I'd use from then on.

After deletion, of course, the address tomrsn@sympatico.ca was no longer valid, and I received error messages on attempting to retrieve mail sent to that mailbox.

Question: What should happen if Joe, not knowing of my address change, sends email to tomrsn@sympatico.ca after I have deleted the address?

Answer: Sympatico's system should bounce back with an automatic response to Joe telling him: Your message was rejected — tomrsn@sympatico.ca is not a valid address. Otherwise, Joe will assume his message will reach me.

I'm spelling this out awfully painstakingly so as to be accessible even to the granny generation, but really, my dears, all this is utterly elementary in the Internet world.

Anyway, that's the problem here. No bounce-back is happening for messages sent to my defunct tomrsn@sympatico.ca address. There is something wrong with the Sympatico system.

Below is my correspondence with Sympatico's technical support people, wherein I attempt to bring them news of this problem.

As you chew on the meat of the matter, be careful to savor the incidentals as well. For example:

• The unwieldy Issue ID (KMM11316087V28510L0KM), suggestive of an ocean of customer issues the beleaguered company is attempting to track;

• The unceasing solicitations to partake of a Member Satisfaction Survey (as if one would be needed to find the reasons for dissatisfaction);

• The seemingly random glitch lines appearing in most of the messages from the company, which are actually unintended detritus left behind by the clumsy system which corporate representatives are using to insert boilerplate text. Thus "*****RRC:etimoreinfo,LID:mlacroix*****", for example, represents
  • the internal label for boilerplate text requesting "more info", and
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