Something is Better Than Half of Nothing

Rigorous:  Allowing no abatement or mitigation; scrupulously accurate; exact; strict; severe; relentless.

Honesty: The condition of being scrupulous with regard to telling the truth; not given to swindling, lying, or fraud; upright. 

(Ed. Note: lotta scrupulousness in there . . . )

Some more of the Frontier brand of customer service . . . 

In the last installment our hero Stevie Seaweed was stymied at every term by a seemingly intractable customer service apparatus.  Wiser than he looks, he withdrew to fight another day. 

I'm married, after all, aware that I can only win some of the fights which entangle me - sometimes regrouping is best.  Hiding is not unheard of.  Lying on my back, exposing my soft underbelly happens more often than I'd care to admit.  

Still, I soldiered on.

I procure a letter from the funeral home, packed with important dates and numbers, and send it to the customer service people.  I listen to Frontier MasterCard advertisements for about 20 minutes while they try to locate the fax.  I'm picturing a storage area that looks like the basement of an 82 year old compulsive hoarder - faxes piled everywhere, stuffed willy-nilly into filing cabinets, tall stacks teetering precariously, collapsing into dusty corners from time to time, old fluorescent light tubes dimly flickering.

My nice customer service agent comes back.

"We need the death certificate," she declares.

"This is not what you told me last time," I pointed out, entirely correctly, aware that I had no physical documentation that this was so.  A bad lawyer would quickly shred me to bits in a court of law.

She goes away, comes back, goes away, the process repeating itself a few times, interspersed with requests that I be patient, apologies for the delay, etc etc etc.

"What we can do," she says.  "Is give you half the refund now and half when we get the death certificate."

I'm impressed with these people.  They don't bend easily and when they do they don't do what they say they're going to do.  It's quite a system.  It's hard to beat a system like that.  After all, they have my money and until they give it back saying that they will give it back doesn't help me at all.  The saying is the easy part - the giving, apparently, is the hard part.  Remember how, when you were drinking and you told people you were going to quit or moderate your drinking - for the 973rd time - you didn't get a very positive response?  I'm kind of at that point with Frontier.

"Okay, fine," I say.  I have never expected to get anything so half of something is not nothing. 

"How much is the credit going to be for?" I ask, as a total afterthought.

The amount she quotes is the cost of the entire ticket, not the rebooking.  I almost laughed out loud.  I also got off the phone without pointing out her error.  The last thing I wanted to do was give her an excuse to pause the act of giving me something.  I figure I can call back if they give me too much.  See how they like it when someone doesn't give them something they want.

The Big Question: will I do this?

(Ed. Note: As of this very second nothing is still the amount I have been given).