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I guess I am going to have to stop listening to Pandora and
go back to CD’s and self-made playlists. It used to be very relaxing to tune in
to my Pandora chorus channel and get lulled into a state of Zen by listening to
Gregorian chants and blissful boys’ choirs. So calm, so serene, so soothing,
almost like a sweet narcotic lulling me to sleep. Ah, yes, delicious, heavenly,
carefree sleep until…
HEY PANDORA
LISTENERS! HAVE YOU SPENT HOURS TOSSING AND TURNING IN BED BECAUSE YOU JUST
CAN’T GET COMFORTABLE WITH YOUR PILLOW?
I bolt upright on the couch, my heart racing as I gasp for
air. What the hell? Where did my British choirboys go? After a few rounds of
self-induced chest compressions, I reach for my iPad to mute the volume. What
did this screaming pillow guru do to those mellow, innocent, falsetto voices,
and why is the volume for this commercial three times the decibel level of St.
Philip’s parish in South London?
Yes, I know I could save myself from being startled, and
possibly from future cardiac episodes, by ponying up a few bucks a month for a paid Pandora subscription, but I think
subscriptions are a pox on the world’s financial well-being. I don’t want to
get to the point where I need a prescription to manage my subscriptions, like a
lot of people I know.
I pay a subscription fee every month for my gym membership,
my home alarm monitoring, and the cell phone I use less frequently than I
attend the gym, and I refuse to dedicate any more of my salary to anything that
offers “auto-pay for my convenience.” Yeah, for my convenience. Like they’re inconvenienced
by not having to chase me down every month to pay my bill.
And then there’s the yearly anti-virus subscription which I
refuse to use again, ever since I got a surprise bill from Norton for a hundred
and something dollars. That wasted an hour and a half of my day, which I spent trying to track down their phone number and
then waiting on hold to be told, “when you signed up for the service, it
defaults to auto-renew.”
“Well change the default to cancelled,” I told them. And
then, of course, I got a virus on my laptop. Then I got an iPad.
The latest offensive subscription menace is brought to you
by the wonderful world of Microsoft, which now offers “Office 365”, so you can
make sure that the next time they create a new feature for Word, we won’t miss
out. So instead of just buying the software, you subscribe, as in yearly fee for the rest of your life. Listen, word
processing software has been around for decades. There is nothing more to invent.
There are no more features, so quit trying to re-invent the wheel by screwing
with the GUI by force-feeding us crap like “ribbons.” I still very happily use
Word 6, the ribbonless, menu-driven version, which is faster and easier, and
you don’t have to spend half of your time scrolling through an endless supply
of buttons for crappy features no one ever uses, like styles or equations.
Microsoft, if you are that desperate for my money, howbout reconfiguring that
awful way your products import graphics and then immobilizes them, or even
better, for the love of God, fix the way you handle page numbering. Every time
I even think about having to do a document that doesn’t have the page number on
the first page but starts the numbering on page 2, I start cutting myself.
Seems like everyone is jumping on the subscription bandwagon,
because most people think: “Well, $10 a month isn’t going to send me to the
poor house, so why not?” Click. And
the commerce world is well aware of our gullibility. They think that no one
multiplies the monthly fee by 12. Just look at Amazon Prime. Who buys into that? Subscribing to Amazon Prime at
$10.99 a month is telling yourself: “I want to get free shipping on everything
I order from Amazon, so I’m going to pay for it.” Is this Alice in
Wonderland? Where do they get their
logic? That’s like saying, “I don’t feel like going to work today, so I guess
I’ll just get in the car and drive to my job instead.”
Subscriptions are like heroin. At first they seem great. Everything
is wonderful, but as time goes on, you get less and less enjoyment out of them,
and they cause you anxiety, so you get more, and then they become impossible to
cancel. If you are lucky and find the number to call to cancel, they wear you
down with menus and an insane hold time. If that doesn’t have you tapping the
“End Call” button and you do eventually reach a human, instead of just
canceling your subscription, they try to upsell you on something different.
“We’re sorry to lose you as a faithful reader of Playboy, but if you want to subscribe to Hustler at our special introductory rate of ten cents per issue for
the first three months, we will give you Playboy
for free up until the end of your current subscription. Does that work for you?”
Canceling a subscription is almost as bad as canceling a
credit card. Recently I fell victim to signing up for one of those airline
credit cards to get “up to four free flights” by paying the $75 annual
fee. What a butt load of crap that was.
First of all, it took them 5 months to credit the miles to my account, and
secondly, the four free flights evaporated into one free one-way flight to
Atlanta. I could have gotten four free flights maybe if I wanted to fly from
Minneapolis to St. Paul or LaGuardia to Newark or Tampa to St. Petersburg. So when
I called them up to cancel this scam, they took it personally.
“Oh, I’m so sorry you have decided you no longer want to
receive the benefits and rewards our card gives you. May I ask why you want to
cancel?” Said the lovely Carol Merrill. On the rare times I get a woman who
speaks discernible English, I picture Carol Merrill from the original Let’s Make a Deal. I don’t know why. I
guess it’s because she spent her early years staying silent and pointing at
things, and I hope now she has found a job where she can actually speak to
people and interact.
“I don’t want to pay the annual fee,” says I.
“Well, Mr. Wiley, because you have been a loyal member of
our program for almost six months, I’m authorized to waive the annual fee for
you from now on, but you will still receive the same benefits you have been.
Now, how does that sound?”
And then we go round and round and I end up telling her that
a 32% APR should not, under any circumstances, be considered a benefit. When she refuses to take no for
an answer, I tell her things that are not even credit-card related, like how
they are the worst airline I have ever flown, and their seats are hard, and
they charge for oxygen and they don’t pay the flight attendants a living wage,
and just cancel the damned card already. And Carol runs weeping into the call
center break room, which is just a toilet stall with a half sleeve of saltines
on the shelf, rolled up and fastened shut with a binder clip.
So I keep my subscriptions to a minimum so I don’t end up
like Other Bill. We have a joint credit card, but we also have our own cards
that we use to buy our own clothes, nose hair trimmers and novelties with. For
years there was a charge on his credit card for $14.99 a month for a website
subscription that spread possibly nefarious content to its subscribers. He had
only subscribed to get one set of irresistible photographs of an old erotic
model heartthrob. But through years of declining libido and both short and
long-term memory, he had forgotten what the site was or how to unsubscribe. So
then he had to shamefully call his credit card company and admit, after being
told that the vendor was Smut R Us, that his adolescent son must have used his
card without his authorization.
“You know how teenagers can be, so can you give me their
number so I can get them to stop billing me?”
I don’t want to end up in that situation, because I’d never
be able to deliver that lie with a straight, so to speak, face.
But I would consider ending up in a career at a call center
if I could be assured that I’d get all the calls from remorseful subscribers to
websites of questionable taste. “So, sir, is your wife aware that you’ve been
forking over a monthly fee to Wet Women of the West Indies dot com? And what
would it be worth to you to ensure that she never
found out?”
I could have a lot of fun with that. And maybe then I could
meet the lovely Carol Merrill. So sign me up.
Or should I just click Subscribe?