Odin is a great name for a kid

I remember the added story of customer service woe I had forgotten when writing my earlier post.  What could it possibly have to do with kids names?

My friend Jing had a baby not so long ago, a son that they named Odin.  Not only does this conjure up images of great power for anyone who has played the Final Fantasy series of JPRGs (Zantetsuken!), but is also sufficiently unique that you’re not going to run into too many other Odins out there.

My name, on the other hand, is a lot less unique. While this has some advantages, like keeping Adrian guessing as to whether any of the people with my name on Facebook are actually me (answer: still no), I encountered a massive downside when moving to Washington state – someone with my first name, last name, and date of birth had committed a string of traffic offenses in New York State, which landed him – and effectively, me – on a national registry of people who ought not to have a license.  So after waiting for over an hour at the Department of Licensing here in Washington, and passing my knowledge test, I was told I couldn’t get a license until I could prove that I wasn’t the offender in question.  Which was difficult, because he never drove with a license, and didn’t have a social security number associated with his numerous offenses.  This led to a string of interactions with an organization renowned for exceptional customer service…

I had to call about 8 times or so before things were resolved, and had a whole range of experiences on those calls. A few highlights:

• Washington state sends you to the Driver Improvement division of the DMV, when what you really need is the Traffic Violations group.  A little transfer tag is par for the course in telephone based customer service.  However, Driver Improvement has a veritable maze of an IVR explicitly designed to prevent you from reaching a human being.  It took several calls, taking notes on their IVR, to even identify how to avoid the traps that get you into a “cannot possibly reach a human” branch of their IVR tree.
• Driver Improvement takes calls from 8:30am till noon.   Of course, you have to hold so long that you really need to call by 11:00am.  Oh, you’re in Washington?  Well in that case, the effective hours are 5:30am till 8:00am.  And this is what you need to go through to get told that you’re talking to the wrong place.
• Naturally, the first time I got transferred to the right place (Traffic Violations), I got put on hold and the call got dropped.  My only way back was… that’s right, through the 5:30am-to-8:00am-can’t-speak-to-a-person Driver Improvement group.  When I got through the second time, I didn’t even explain my situation, I was immediately begging for a number I could call if I got disconnected again.
• The opening conversations I had once I got to the right place went something like this:
• Me: “Hi, I have the same name and birthdate as someone in New York and need a ‘not me’ letter I can use here in Washington?”
• DMV: “We don’t do ‘not me’ letters”.
• The next conversation (with a different person) was only marginally more encouraging:
• Me: “Hi, I have the same name and birthdate as someone in New York and need a ‘not me’ letter I can use here in Washington?”
• DMV: “We can’t give you a letter like that… how do we know you aren’t that person?”
• There’s no such thing as a case or ticket number.  In fact, after I reached someone helpful – who ominously said that I might have to appear in front of a judge to convince him that I’m not Mr. Bad Driver – they got me to fax all my documents over so they could look into things.  I called back a week later to see how things were going.  They asked who was working on my case – in the same way that a waiter at a restaurant might ask you the name of the chef/cook who is making your meal if you ask where your food is. Once I found out – Alison was helping me – I made sure to write down her name, as indeed I’d need it on every subsequent call.
• Google has a very stringent set of standards and access control limiting access of employees to potentially confidential/personal information of users. The DMV? Not so much. Whenever I reached someone other than Alison, they’d often say “oh, she’s a manager, she’s in meetings!  Let me check for you”.  Then they’d go over to her desk, look through papers they found, and either they’d find my documents or not.  Then they could leave notes for Alison related to my file.