Do I Have a Problem?

It seems I have this growing list of companies I don't do business with because of how I've been treated there in the past. As the list grows I have to ask myself if maybe I'm the problem.

A couple years ago we were doing our company payroll through Future Systems (www.future-systems.net). They failed to examine our history of tax payments and sent our payments on a monthly rather than a biweekly schedule. As a result we were hit with a $1850 penalty.

I contacted them and they said they'd take care of it. The way they "took care of it" was by writing the IRS a letter apologizing for the inconvenience we had caused them. Then they used their authority to withdraw funds from our checking account (normally reserved for withdrawing the money for payroll each month) and simply withdrew the $1850 and sent it to the IRS!

By all definitions, this is theft. When I asked Future Systems to accept responsibility for the late payments, they said it was our fault for not providing the information needed to determine the payment schedule. When we went back and looked at the "new account" forms we had filled out for Future Systems, I had put a big question-mark over the "payment frequency" because I didn't know what it was. (If I knew how to do payroll I wouldn't be hiring a payroll company!) Future Systems never asked us for the information they needed to determine the correct payment frequency. They said most companies consider payroll to be confidential and wouldn't give them that information. I pointed out that they're a payroll company and are privvy to a lot of our confidential information, and we would have no problem providing them information they needed to comply with IRS regulations.

I asked them to pay the $1850 themselves then approach the IRS to get the penalty reversed. They refused. I told them if I was able to get the penalty reversed without their help I'd be cancelling our account. They said it was futile but give it a try.

I wrote a letter to the IRS and was able to get the penalty reversed. I wrote a letter to Future Systems cancelling our account and never received an apology of any kind. So... we no longer do business with them and encourage others to avoid them, too.

A couple years ago I bought a portable nexrad weather system for my airplane from ControlVision (www.anywherewx.com). It was a Pocket PC and a satellite phone connected to a GPS. You'd connect to the Internet via the sat phone and connect to a service that overlayed storm data on your flight path. Way cool.

One particularly stormy day I was unable to get any weather. It would connect but never download. When I landed, I called the company and asked what was up. They said there was "too much" weather that day and it exceeded their preset buffer size. I said I'd just have to be careful to only use their weather system on clear days.

Another time I was flying into an area of thunderstorms and needed to see what alternatives I had. I panned the map to the right to see if the weather was better in that direction. I discovered that when you were in "panning mode" the program didn't overlay the weather on the map. So you could look at the map to the right of course, but you couldn't see what the weather was over there. I contacted the president of the company and he told me that he didn't really like panning mode so he never uses it and didn't realize he wasn't drawing the weather in that mode. He wasn't too concerned about it.

When I asked why certain of my settings didn't seem to work, he explained that he doesn't like those settings so he ignores them.

Needless to say, I eventually dumped these guys and now encourage others to seek other alternatives.

The most recent addition to my list is Aviation Consumer magazine. This is a "Consumer Reports" type publication that accepts no advertising and publishes unbiased reviews of airplanes and aviation gear.

The January 2005 issue contained an editorial on the possibility that general aviation pilots may have to pay user fees in the future when they fly using air traffic control services. The editor was against this idea, as are most pilots.

I wrote a "letter to the editor" to say that while his opinion was valid and important, it was off-topic for the magazine. I encouraged them to stick to their advertised purpose: Unbiased product reviews of airplanes and aviation gear.

He wrote back that the issue was too important not to be covered in the magazine. Well, it is an important issue, but so are a lot of things. The war in Iraq, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean -- these are important issues but I don't pay for this magazine to cover those.

When he continued to fail to see my point, I reminded him that his readers pay his salary, and his readers expect to get the content as advertised. His response? "Fire me."

So I did. I no longer get Aviation Consumer magazine.

So is it me? Where are the business people who (1) care about their customers, (2) care about the quality of their product, and (3) know how to follow a logical argument when someone complains?

And furthermore, where are the other consumers who demand not necessarily excellence, but just acceptable behavior from the companies they do business with?

When the college your home-schooled child applies to requires a GED for admission, why am I the only one who refuses, explaining that my child has completed a 100% legal course of study and by all standards of my state has the same high school education as the kids in the public school?

When BestBuy asks for your phone number at the checkout and insists that it's the manufacturer of the equipment (in this case, TiVo) that requires it, why am I the only one who walks across the street to Ultimate Electronics and buys the same TiVo unit without providing a phone number just to prove that BestBuy is lying to me?

When your stock broker gets bought out by another brokerage and asks you to fill out a "new account form" even though you've been doing business there for years, why am I the only one who sends it back, year after year, with "no change" written across it?

Is it me?