...to celebrate when you've passed a test.
I normally only go to Dunkin Donuts, but Krispy Kreme is the favorite stop of the ham who as I off-topically boasted in this blog a while back, informed me that it was even possible for a bumpkin such as myself to join the elite ranks of Extra, the top of ham radio. So on Wednesday night on my way home from passing the Extra, I stopped at Krispy Kreme.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Times' "free subscription" gimmick costs carrier $30. worth of time to collect $9.
Unlike any of my other businesses, being a paper boy involves the monkeying around of keeping track of a big number of customers for a relatively chump-change amount of money per customer: Route 62226 has 180 customers (or perhaps down to more like 176 lately due to the economy), so naturally - and here's the detestable part - out of that many people there will always be at least a couple per year that I have to fart around knocking on the door of to get my money.
So before I started this blog, I pipe dreamed that a major feature of it was going to be to plaster the names of slow-paying customers all over the place as a strategy to shame them into paying.
But as it turns out, I seem to always get my money by other methodologies short of that. I keep on forgetting to report to y'all the many stories about the various ways that I've done so, but here's the latest one:
Today, I finally succeeded in getting another ignoring-of-my-bills customer to talk to me. (Part of the trick is to vary what time of day, etc., you knock on their door.) This one had only been a subscriber for a brief time, about a year ago, and then after they'd cancelled I'd kept on leaving a bill there for $9. (the same $9., for a certain 6 Sundays almost a year ago), every month or so for almost a year (with all of my contact info on it too BTW, but that's a whole 'nuther diatribe).
I guess they must have thought that if they keep on ignoring it I'd eventually give up or something especially since it's "only" $9. Well it doesn't work that way with Tom Frost.
When I knocked on their door a few weeks ago, it was entertaining in that I happened to very briefly see a guy in there who didn't see that I'd seen him, squirm around and move to a couch that was more out of sight of the door. (My alcoholic neighbor, upon hearing that story, said that I should have shouted "I see you"; but, I didn't.)
Today, however, there were more people about, and a lady answered the door.
Just as I suspected would likely happen, she almost paid, but then began nitpicking that instead, she's going to call the Times and argue that the year-ago subscription was supposed to be cancelled on an earlier date than it was.
Well fine; I can easily collect the $9. from the Times by monkeying around a little bit more (what the hell: I've already spent probably $30. worth of time just with all of the repetitious preparing of that same bill together with wasting my brain energy worrying about how to time my cruises through Clarks Summit to best accommodate knocking on their door, so what's a little bit more time?) and filling out a form that the Times has for just this sort of purpose.
In most cases, the challenge is to try to educate the non-paying customer about the fact that when I get the Times to pay me that way, it will still cost the customer the same amount of money anyhow because when the customer switches to paying through the Times, the Times simply shortens the customer's future paid-for period in order to reimburse itself what it paid me for the past period that I filled out the form for.
But in this case, I was 100% easy to get along with about making the Times pay, and here's why: All of the evidence indicates that this only-for-a-brief-time-last-year subscriber was a victim of one of the Times' "free" deals for new subscribers. They apparently give a new subscriber so many weeks for free, and then when that runs out, they have to pay if they want to continue. Well if I was selling something by that kind of methodology, I'd make sure that cancelling is easy to do if the customer wishes to hold the offerer's feet to the fire about the subscription being "free".
I detest those kind of gimmicks. And therefore (despite qualms such as the fact that the customer could have been more skilled at getting it cancelled at the end of the "free" period; I suspect that all that she would have had to do would have been to notice the "Your account has gone carrier collect" notice that I included with her paper at that time), I'm going to take the customer's word for it that the Times failed for 6 weeks to tell me to stop delivering to her.
And that's just one example of how, in the case of a fortunately-small percentage of customers, a paper boy has to fart around spending $30. worth of time to collect $9. And I'm going to keep on doing it.
So before I started this blog, I pipe dreamed that a major feature of it was going to be to plaster the names of slow-paying customers all over the place as a strategy to shame them into paying.
But as it turns out, I seem to always get my money by other methodologies short of that. I keep on forgetting to report to y'all the many stories about the various ways that I've done so, but here's the latest one:
Today, I finally succeeded in getting another ignoring-of-my-bills customer to talk to me. (Part of the trick is to vary what time of day, etc., you knock on their door.) This one had only been a subscriber for a brief time, about a year ago, and then after they'd cancelled I'd kept on leaving a bill there for $9. (the same $9., for a certain 6 Sundays almost a year ago), every month or so for almost a year (with all of my contact info on it too BTW, but that's a whole 'nuther diatribe).
I guess they must have thought that if they keep on ignoring it I'd eventually give up or something especially since it's "only" $9. Well it doesn't work that way with Tom Frost.
When I knocked on their door a few weeks ago, it was entertaining in that I happened to very briefly see a guy in there who didn't see that I'd seen him, squirm around and move to a couch that was more out of sight of the door. (My alcoholic neighbor, upon hearing that story, said that I should have shouted "I see you"; but, I didn't.)
Today, however, there were more people about, and a lady answered the door.
Just as I suspected would likely happen, she almost paid, but then began nitpicking that instead, she's going to call the Times and argue that the year-ago subscription was supposed to be cancelled on an earlier date than it was.
Well fine; I can easily collect the $9. from the Times by monkeying around a little bit more (what the hell: I've already spent probably $30. worth of time just with all of the repetitious preparing of that same bill together with wasting my brain energy worrying about how to time my cruises through Clarks Summit to best accommodate knocking on their door, so what's a little bit more time?) and filling out a form that the Times has for just this sort of purpose.
In most cases, the challenge is to try to educate the non-paying customer about the fact that when I get the Times to pay me that way, it will still cost the customer the same amount of money anyhow because when the customer switches to paying through the Times, the Times simply shortens the customer's future paid-for period in order to reimburse itself what it paid me for the past period that I filled out the form for.
But in this case, I was 100% easy to get along with about making the Times pay, and here's why: All of the evidence indicates that this only-for-a-brief-time-last-year subscriber was a victim of one of the Times' "free" deals for new subscribers. They apparently give a new subscriber so many weeks for free, and then when that runs out, they have to pay if they want to continue. Well if I was selling something by that kind of methodology, I'd make sure that cancelling is easy to do if the customer wishes to hold the offerer's feet to the fire about the subscription being "free".
I detest those kind of gimmicks. And therefore (despite qualms such as the fact that the customer could have been more skilled at getting it cancelled at the end of the "free" period; I suspect that all that she would have had to do would have been to notice the "Your account has gone carrier collect" notice that I included with her paper at that time), I'm going to take the customer's word for it that the Times failed for 6 weeks to tell me to stop delivering to her.
And that's just one example of how, in the case of a fortunately-small percentage of customers, a paper boy has to fart around spending $30. worth of time to collect $9. And I'm going to keep on doing it.
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