The name of song that has the first line above is how I feel about this blog. In my first month in NYC I have discovered the bloggers paradox. When you actually have things to blog about there is that much less time to blog. I have “so much to say” but I need to start with a tilt on Pottery Barn. If you don’t care at all about hearing my customer service tilts, skip the following paragraph.
Upon moving into my apartment I had to purchase some odds and ends. There was a pottery barn near me and I was also offered a ride to Ikea. I hate administrative hassles and mainly for that reason I chose to buy a few lamps, a mirror and a bookcase at Pottery Barn figuring they would ship the items with minimal assembly and hassle. Boy was I wrong. After being told I would receive the items in 7 to 10 days, I had to call the store after 2.5 weeks to try to figure out what was going on, they claimed I never paid for shipping and I was supposed to come pick up the items in the store. Luckily I had my receipt which indicated otherwise and they promised to ship them soon buuuuuut the bookshelf did not come in yet becuase they had to order it. When I asked why it was not ordered yet htey responded, “well it was but sometimes corporate headquarters gets in the way of the things we order so there is nothign we can do”. I don’t really want to tell the whole story here, but this sort of passing the buck was the norm in my dealings with them for abotu a whole week that ended with delivery of 5 of my 6 items (not the bookcase) and 1 of those 5 being incorrect. Every step of the way the customer service was beyond horrendous. I was told I would be called back 8 sepereate times, I was called back twice and the rest of the times I had to follow up on my own. They offer 3 hour windows for deliveries (how the heck do they need three hour windows to deliver 5 blocks!!!) and they did not make even that loose time frame on either the initial delivery or the follow up to pick up the lamp they had delivered in error and drop off the new one. For the latter delivery they were a staggering 3 hours late from the 3 hour window (so I had to sit waiting for 6 hours). All this left me beyond frustrated so I called to speak with a manager not really knowing what I was looking for. I told her that I wanted 50% off my entire purchase more out of principle than anything else and she offered 20%. I did not care for this haggling so she agreed she would try to get the “real story” and would call me back. She was the 2nd of the 2 callbacks I received (of the 8 promised) and she had the customer service reps I dealt with in the room with her (I think i was on speakerphone). She then proceeded to debate everythign I said even including the fact that I “Had no record of being told I would receive the items in 7 to 10 days)” I found this so absurd that I couldnt help but sarcastically reply, “Next time I shop I will exercise my right to counsel and have him draw up a contract specifying everythign the sales associate says to me”. The Woman I was speaking to didn’t care for this comment even though I feel like it was really necessary to make her seem how absurd it was. As she was going step by step through the errors passing off blame for each one to some “entity” that could not be controlled by anyone, I got sick of it and said, “If this whole call is just going to be giving me excuses for why no one ever called me back and pretty much every step has been inaccurate or just plain wrong then I think I’ll just send emails of my story somewhere else to ask for the refund”. She relented saying she was just trying to figure out what really happened and made a “final offer” of 40% off my purchase. I took it and hung up but I am still pretty annoyed with this. As usual I feel there was some age bias and my order would have never been botched in such a way if I were some middle aged couple that was furnishing my house. I don’t really love shopping to begin with and I do not plan on every buying things from pottery barn again.
Anyway, onto Business School. I am now through 2 weeks of classes and am taking a relatively heavy load (5). My classs range from fairly interesting to dreadfully boring, there are some thigns I think are worthy of note:
1) Across the board they treat you way more like middle schoolers than grad students. Every class has weekly assignments and every class also has mechanisms to “check” that students do them in ways that almost no classes at Penn did.
2) I’m frustrated with the way marketing treats their “studies” and “surveys” as fact. I find when I look at the fine print forI always find the methodology dubious but when I raise the concerns they pretty much get brushed off. For example we were being told how businesses can measure the income of their patrons by taking their zip codes and looking at the avg income for those zips and that we would be shocked at how high income walmart shoppers are. This may or may not be true, but it seems to me that averages are tricky numbers to work with since they can be greatly skewed by several super rich people. I’m not going to elaborate further but a bunch of things like that kind of bother me.
3) Business Law is by far my most interesting class and it makes me wonder if I should have gone to law school. I can still in theory apply to fordham and do a JD MBA but I’m still not sure I’d actually enjoy law school, I may just like the small sampling of it.
4) I find accounting to be reallllllly tiring. I have trouble listening to anything related to the subject and getting through that class is going to be my biggest challenge.
5) Part of Fordhams core curriculum includes a math class. I missed the first class since I hadnt added it yet, but the second class was weirdly simple stuff. We discussed how slope is the change in y over change in x, and how to plot points on a coordinate plane, both topics which I have vivid memories of covering in 6th grade. I am nearly certain that everyone in the class must have learned those things at some point yet I was the only one of the 50 students not furiously scribbling notes. I am not a notetaker in general but still for these topics I found it pretty insane that anyone was. Maybe many students become robots during class writing down everything the teacher says regardless of whether they know it or not.
6) The first fundamentals of management classes was one of the weirdest experiences of my life, I felt like I was in the twilight zone. She gave out the syllabus that said our grade was based on a midterm, a final and a project. After everyone introduced themselves, she lectured for abotu 5 minutes about management processes then says, “now I want people to say what prodcuts or services they produce in their jobs” A few people had answers and she listed them on the board, but most people seemed unable to answer. I decided to go out a limb and ask, “Is perhaps the reason that hardly anyone can name what product or service they provide is because most business people do not produce anything, they just try to make money”? She stared at me like I was nuts and then jokingly said, maybe as a poker player YOU don’t produce anything, but everyone else does. I laughed and let it go, but I thought my comment had some validity anyway. So she eventually go 4-5 products/services that random classmates produced on the board and then said, “Now we will decide what groups will be for the project” bare in mind at this point she had given us no info at all about the project. She then asks us to each vote for one of the 4-5 topics she listed on the board (which mind you is totally random assortment of jobs of my classmates).Everyone seemed totally on board which really frustrated me as I had no idea what I was voting for. When I asked she replied, “you are voting on what you will do your project on of course”. I still did not understand how a random assortment of jobs of my classmates were the topics for our project or how we could vote for the one we wanted to do without knowing anything about this project but since all of my classmates seemed satisfied I thought maybe it was my lack of work experience at play and I was just missing something so I let it go. After class I talked to several classmates and no one really understood what she was doing or why she was doing it that way. I cannot really comprehend sitting through class and nodding along like I understand when a) the teacher is not making sense or b) they are and I simply can’t understand but them, I guess others are ok with it. Anyway, the teacer did seem like a very nice lady so hopefully things will clarify and there is a method to the madness.
I have way more to say but this blog is long enough and most people probably won’t read it all as is so I’ll end it here. Hope everyone has a good weekend.
