Don Tow's Website

Recently I have some experience with Verizon when I changed our telephone (both local and long distance) service from at&t to Verizon. That experience dealing with Verizon’s service order process and more generally speaking their customer service process was a very painful experience. It was probably the worst customer service experience I have personally experienced dealing with a major company in the U.S. It almost provides a textbook example of how not to provide customer service.

I want to share that experience with the reader by summarizing the problems that I encountered with Verizon. More detailed information about those problems are described in the letter attached below that I wrote to Verizon’s CEO and the Presiding Director of their Board of Directors.

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When as a young boy I immigrated to the U.S. more than 50 years ago, I found that the Americans and the American society were very much different from the Chinese and the Chinese society in Mainland China and Hong Kong where I was brought up.  Besides the language, there were differences in many areas, such as:

• Developing casual and long-lasting friendship
• View toward elders and authoritative figures
• Degree of self initiative and aggressiveness
• Willingness to speak up in a group audience
• Willingness and acceptability to blow one’s own horn
• View toward dating and marriage
• View toward opportunities
• Frugalness
• View toward fate, fortune, destiny, etc. 

In this article I will discuss the last difference only, i.e., view toward fate, fortune, destiny, etc.  I couldn’t figure out a simple term to designate this difference.  I considered terms such as superstition, feng shui, astrology, scientific versus non-scientific analysis, but discarded every one of these terms, because they are too limited and too binary for the purpose of my discussion.

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