Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Orchestrated "grassroots" smear campaigns are business, not personal

If you ever wondered how some of these stories about candidates seem to spread "spontaneously", this detailed analysis on the Jawa Report will give you more information than you ever imagined.

The basic formula is that a professional PR firm plants imaginatively creative and false videos on YouTube and gets a cadre of sockpuppets to spread the word.

Once the smear is exposed, the original videos are taken down from YouTube and all traces of upload are removed. This leaves copies of the video circulating as a "Grassroots Phenomenon". This is Astroturfing at its finest.

The Jawa Report story points out that the voiceover on one particular "grassroots" attack video is performed by the same person who does the voiceovers for one of the candidates. The PR firm behind the grassroots campaign is tightly connected to the same candidate and the uploads and sockpuppet comments were done during normal working hours. This would strongly indicate that this smear campaign was business, not personal.

Actions such as this will lead back to the candidate involved and will generate extreme negative publicity.

Neither party should allow this to happen on their behalf as it will rebound on them.

UPDATE: Within hours of the posting of the Jawa Report, all of the videos were removed from YouTube and the accounts of those who had uploaded the videos had been closed. Exposure was all it took to make this orchestrated "grassroots" smear campaign vanish. If it had been an actual campaign by real people, they would have been basking in the attention and the heavy traffic they had generated.

Strangely unreliable customer service at Countrywide

Two years ago we ran into a Countrywide loan officer who didn't have both oars in the water. We refer to this loan officer as Mrs. Glib because she made reassuring statements that were not supported by facts. I wrote about our adventure with Mrs. Glib on this weblog and thought we has seen the last of this kind of unreliable service from Countrywide.

Recently, we were encouraged to make a new mortgage agreement with Countrywide and we dealt with a loan consultant who seemed to be quite knowledgeable and sincere as well. He was quite thorough and took pains to explain every aspect of the financial transaction we were interested in.

At the end of our conversation, he repeated the essential facts to us so that we would all be on the same page. He even rechecked the spelling of our names. His final words were that we would receive a loan package through Fedex to review and sign and return and that a "loan processor" would help us answer any questions that we had with the package.

We commented afterwards, how refreshing it was to deal with someone who knows what he is doing.

Little did we know...

The loan package arrived and it looked as though it had been prepared for two other people! My name was misspelled throughout 20 30 pages of documents and the financial data we had provided had been altered repeatedly and differently on different documents.

We thought, what the hell, we will just call the name of the loan processor who was supposed to help us with any questions. This "loan processor" woman blithely chattered away and skillfully avoided answering any questions we had. In twenty minutes, she provided not one factual answer.

When Gretchen pressed her for specifics, she brightly said that these were preliminary documents and it didn't really matter if there were errors on them. Gretchen called her on that and said, "We cannot sign these documents! They are full of outright falsehoods. You have changed the data that we provided and the loan payments bear no relation to the numbers that were given us by the loan officer."

The loan processor started speaking faster and faster as if she could baffle us with BS. Gretchen tried to get her to slow down with no results. Gretchen finally cut her off gently and said, "We may not have a deal here. We are going back to the loan officer and see what is going on."

The loan processor continued to chatter until Gretchen finally hung up.

Gretchen sent the original loan officer an email. We received a conciliatory email back.

He was saddened to hear of our difficulty.

Interesting choice of words. I thought it was significant that that he was saddened, but not surprised. I wonder if he is one of the few competent people working there. What an environment to work in!

Is Countrywide coming apart at the seams? This was more like dealing with a used car dealer than with a financial institution. I felt we were experiencing a new kind of bait and switch operation. If it was just incompetence, I will feel strangely relieved.

Has anyone else been dealing with Countrywide lately? How was your experience?

Aloha to another broken business model

The closing of Aloha Airlines is a tragedy for the nearly 2000 employees involved. They were given less than 48 hours notice that they would be out of work.

Here is the spin from Aloha management:

Airline president and chief executive officer David Banmiller said "..unfair competition has succeeded in driving us out of business, bringing to an end a 61-year-old company with a proud legacy of serving millions of travelers in the true spirit of Aloha."

Hawaiian blogger Rosa Say takes a more realistic view of the situation and I agree with her no-nonsense viewpoint:

"Broken business models, inferior customer service, and management which does little to nothing about both of those things is what causes businesses to fail. Tough competition and rising costs may accelerate your demise, but you can’t blame those two things for everything."

Rosa's personal experience flying Aloha Airlines is a large part of her feelings. She reported that service levels on ‘Aloha’ Airlines were horrible.

Times are tough and there are always competitors who can outspend you, but there is no excuse for providing crappy service and blaming the demise of your company on "unfair competition".

Read Rosa's article Working Beyond Their Means for an excellent presentation of the whole story.

A disaster in the making

We have a local gas station, Floyd Express, where some of the pumps don't work and unsuspecting motorists can get threatened with arrest by the local sheriff.

UPDATE: you can avoid having this happen to you by insisting that you get a receipt for your credit card purchase of gas. See my latest article on avoiding problems at the gas pump.

Background data: In Virginia if you drive away without paying for gas you could lose your driver's license and receive a fine of up to $250.

In Floyd Express, at least some of the gas pumps doesn't work. You put in your card, get authorized, pump the gas...and then you don't get a receipt.  Some times you get a message to see the cashier.

So what you say, you don't need a receipt, you paid and got the gas.

What you don't know is that they may not have recorded the sale and they may call the sheriff and tell him you drove off without paying.

The authorizing message that shows up on the pump was initiated by one of the clerks inside, not by a computer. You have no way of knowing whether they recorded the sale or not.

I have been buying gas there at least twice a month and have received receipts about 50% of the time. Sometimes I have seen the message to see the cashier and have gone inside to find out that the printer was out of paper. Other times I have just ignored the message and went on my way. I did not know how lucky I was.

My wife, Gretchen bought gas there today, swiped the card, got the authorizing message and pumped the gas. She was in the local coffee shop fifteen minutes later when the sheriff's deputies arrived to arrest her. Her friends in the coffee shop were convulsing with laughter as Gretchen was giving the deputies a piece of her mind and local columnist Tom Ryan was busily making notes for his next Enquirer article. Gretchen was not amused.

She went back to the Floyd Xpress, accompanied by two sheriffs deputies, and summoned the manager after the clerk behind the counter said she had no record of the sale. Things went downhill from there.

The staff finally admitted that all of the pumps allowed people to pump gas without authorization and sometimes the transaction doesn't go through.

There is no warning that your card has not been approved, other than the fact that you have received no receipt. Since the printers are often out of paper, how can you be sure?

Would you like to gamble that you might lose your license because Floyd Xpress doesn't record your credit card purchase properly?

Make sure you get a receipt for your gas purchase.

Seems like they should fix the pumps. They know they have a problem but have not fixed it.

UPDATE:

This topic came up at the dinner table last night and someone suggested that Floyd Xpress might be trying to save money by not getting the upgrades necessary to get immediate authorization from the credit card company.

Such is the power of the Internet that a probable answer came with the first comment from Michael Kohne. Read it and decide for yourselves.

UPDATE #2:

I appreciate the effort that people are making to present both sides of how this situation should have been handled, but I do not allow more than one personal attack from a commenter, so if you would like to make a point, try to keep it factual.

Several people felt that the store was in the right and that customers do not have rights. That is their prerogative, but when a gas pump gives misleading information, whose fault is that? The authorizing message on a gas pump, followed by a message to pump gas is universally understood to mean that your card is being charged. The absence of any other message does not give a consumer a clue.

The store should upgrade their software as has been suggested elsewhere or post a sign on the pumps that patrons must come to the cashier to confirm their credit card charges. Then the problem becomes public knowledge.

We customers are not always right, but we are customers and pay money for purchases and for good customer service. If a merchant feels a patron has left without paying and knows who the patron is, it is a simple matter to call the patron and ask them to return and complete the transaction. Calling the Police or the Sheriff's office instead of the customer is assigning blame to the customer instead of working to find a better solution.

Bottom line: the pump/billing system appears to have been known to be faulty by store personnel for some time and yet no care is being taken to make sure that customers are warned of the problem. False arrest or the threat of arrest is no joke.   In a more litiginous part of the country, the store would have been sued long ago.

When I hear that something has been done about this, I will post all of the information here.

I hope it happens soon.