Recently, I’ve been in an unfortunate position where I’ve had to deal with businesses where I’ve needed to get in contact with them in order to resolve legitimate issues. In a perfect world, this doesn’t happen, but as we all know, this world sure as shit ain’t close to perfect.
In the past, I’ve often times felt fairly confident that if I can get a live human being on the phone, I can typically make it to a satisfactory solution. Given the circumstances of my latest scenarios, I felt good about my chances at being able to get resolution, provided I could get someone on the phone.
The problem is, that in both instances, both companies have made it impossible to get human beings on the phone that are remotely capable of providing any sort of resolution. And I’ll go ahead and name them, I’m talking about RunDisney and IKEA here, as prime examples of businesses that operate in what I’m calling phone ghosting, or the act of making it impossible for customers to even have the opportunities to resolve their issues over the phone.
So let’s start with RunDisney; as anyone who’s ever done a Disney run in their lives knows, registering for RunDisney events are expensive, frantic, chaotic, and tend to happen in the blink of an eye. Every run they produce inevitably sells out, and they always need to be registered for, months in advance.
Mythical wife and I both registered for the Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Two-Course Challenge; back in March, because we go to the Food & Wine Festival every year anyway, and we’re both runners, and we’ve both developed this taste for collecting Disney run medals. But I reiterate the March part, because the run itself doesn’t take place until November.
Naturally, a lot of things can change over eight months, like getting married and knocking up my new wife and having a baby on the way; and we both are astutely aware of RunDisney’s pretty iron-clad rules and regulations when it comes to no-refunds/no-transfer of run registrations. But even those have some flexibility in them, especially when it comes to medical things, like being pregnant and being not medically cleared to run 13.9 miles over two days in Florida.