Friday, September 26, 2008

Welcome to the Frustrated Female!

I am one of those women who is regularly frustrated by the silly things that I encounter on a daily basis when I am shopping or deciding where to shop and what I should buy. After having had a particularly frustrating experience, I often find myself standing in the middle of a store by myself thinking 'I wish I could tell someone about this' . In fact I am often tempted to walk up to a complete stranger in the store and say ' you'll never guess what just happened', but luckily I refrain because I don't want to get carted away by someone in uniform.

So it seemed to make sense to start this blog where I could vent about these daily annoyances and see if anyone else out there has had the same experience.

I thought that I would start off by talking about a recent experience that I just had trying to buy Bendaroos for my 9 year old daughter via an '800' number. Unfortunately she had seen the commercial on the TV numerous times ( you know - all this for only $19.99) and finally wore me down. Bendaroos for anyone who is interested are long, thin pieces of plastic that can supposedly be bent into all forms of different models etc. Yeah, right.


So.....I was dreading making the call because you know that you might as well pitch a tent they keep you on the phone so long. This time there was a twist. While they were busy wasting my time by attempting to sell me another $100 worth of useless stuff, they were saving their own time by doing it all with an automoted sales person.

After I had made my purchase of the Bendaroos I was dying to get off the phone - but no luck. The automated voice on the other end of the phone kept saying 'we know your time is precious, so we'll keep this short' and then went on for another five minutes trying to sell me another product. Every minute that passed I was hating Bendaroos, the company that makes them and their sales approach more than ever. Are they nuts? Eventually I did wise up to the fact that I could just hang up but it took me a while (good manners drummed into me at an early age).

My only conclusion from this experience is that the companies that sell this stuff have absolutely no idea (nor do they probably care) what the customer on the other end of the phone is thinking or feeling, or else they would find a better sales approach.