With my mortgage, the stakes are infinitely higher than with a DVD player or whatever. And the problems are more subtle.
It's embarrassing to admit, but I've over the last few years I've teetered on the edge of foreclosure. I've come closer that I care to admit, or to remember, to having my house sold at auction. (Thank Fred Christ that's not my situation now. But having been there, I never want to go back, ever). Earlier in my life I've been homeless. In my experience, it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very disconcerting to try to straighten out a matter of a payment that has been made but not properly credited to my account when the possible loss of my home is at stake, with a person who does not understand what I'm saying, whom I must struggle to understand, and who is not familiar with American place names, various forms of address, and so forth. When my home is on the line, I don't want to fuck around with somebody who doesn't understand me and who I don't understand just to save GMAC Mortgage Corporation a few dollars in tech support cost. Of course in theory somebody in Bangalore can understand the subtleties of a problem I'm trying to resolve and can help me resolve it. In my experience, that has never happened; in fact, the opposite has happened on at least four occasions. And, to the best of my ability to figure out what happened, the problem was not that the person in India was stupid or incompetent or ill-meaning or anything like that. He or she just didn't understand what I was trying to explain, and was powerless to do anything to help me. The problem was some combination of linguistic, cultural, and institutional. But in any event, in every case I was able to solve the problem by saying, "I insist on talking to somebody based in the USA." Regards, On Jan 29, 2012, at 10:26 PM, Charles Haynes wrote: > On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 11:15 AM, John Sundman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> when it comes to my mortgage, I draw the line. > > Why? > > Seriously. Is it because telephone tech support from Bangalore is > relatively low quality in all cases, and you're willing to put up with > it for most things, but want high-quality technical support for your > mortgage? > > Why is that? Is it because you understand the other things better and > so are more confident you can identify the useful information from > amongst the chaff, but are less confident in the case of mortgages, or > something else? > > -- Charles >
