The Haggler: Alan Alda and the Customer-Service Headache - Haggler

Most ended with a variation of “I’m never buying another H.P. [fill in the blank] again.” Only one e-mailer, Robert John Bennett of Düsseldorf, Germany, managed to pivot from this unhappy sentiment to a pretty good punch line: “I gave up and bought a Toshiba laptop, which has worked like a charm for three years, and put the H.P. in my storeroom in the basement of my apartment building. The storeroom was later broken into and the laptop stolen. The police investigated, and the excellent German insurance policy covering household effects reimbursed me for the full price of a brand-new computer.”

Then the kicker: “I, of course, feel sorry for the thief.”

That rare mix of frustration and comedy – the Haggler’s favorite cocktail. Which brings us to a new letter:

Q. McAfee can’t seem to resist messing around with my e-mail. Here’s the story: I had been using McAfee, which sells antivirus software, on a PC for a while, but I stopped when I switched to a Mac. Months later, thanks to McAfee’s murky opt-out policy, I realized that the company was still charging me for a subscription. Or trying to. My credit card had expired, and I ignored McAfee’s entreaties to post new credit card information, thinking that would end the subscription.

Unfortunately, McAfee continues to monitor my e-mail, providing daily reports of messages it has intercepted and quarantined. Some of the quarantined e-mails are come-hithers from Russian women, who are apparently very lonely and would feel much better if I just clicked on their link. But others are important to me, so I’ve contacted McAfee several times, requesting that it stop performing this service that I don’t pay for and don’t want.

I haven’t received a reply. I tried chatting online with a McAfee rep, an exchange which could be described as occasionally hilarious but unhelpful. A job for the Haggler?

Alan Alda

Manhattan

A. Whatever the flaws of its response to this modest imbroglio, no one can accuse McAfee of coddling a celebrity. Yes, our writer this week is that Alan Alda. He sent a transcript of his online exchange with a McAfee agent, who, it turns out, was typing from an office in Chennai, India. In this excerpt, which has been condensed a bit, Mr. Alda is trying to persuade this rep to cease the alerts about the quarantining of some e-mails and to put an end to the quarantines themselves:

Mr. Alda: This week several e-mails sent to me that were important were quarantined. I didn’t know about it until I got the alert. I would like to stop the quarantining. Not just the e-mails telling me about it.

Rep: I have successfully canceled the auto renewal feature for your McAfee account so you will not receive any renewal notices to your e-mail address.

Mr. Alda: Good. But will that also stop the quarantining?

Rep: You need to contact our technical support. But in order to contact technical support you need to have a valid McAfee account.

Mr. Alda: I am now in the land of Kafka.

Rep: Do you have any valid McAfee product?

Mr. Alda: No, I don’t. I haven’t used McAfee for years. I’m willing to pay for a service I have not used for years, but I don’t like the idea of paying to stop using it.It’s Samuel Beckett meets offshore Internet customer service. At the root of this problem is a bit of confusion, and the Haggler will summarize it here:

Mr. Alda thought he’d ditched McAfee’s spam protection when he switched to a Mac, but the company that runs his e-mail domain, Tangonet, subscribes to MX Logic, a spam filter product owned by McAfee. To cancel MX Logic would require that this company get in touch with McAfee, because it’s the one paying for MX Logic. In other words, Mr. Alda should have been talking to Tangonet.

But because he once had a McAfee subscription with a different computer, and because he was still getting renewal requests from the company, Mr. Alda figured that this issue was his to fix.

So it’s a simple misunderstanding. The confounding part, and what McAfee executives say they find embarrassing, is that the Haggler’s intervention was needed. Referring to the online chat, Jason Grier, who runs the global support team, said: “The question is what do you do when you don’t know what to do. The first thing you do is raise your hand and get a supervisor involved. And clearly that didn’t happen here.”

Mr. Grier was also concerned that nobody returned the e-mail that Mr. Alda sent. Mr. Grier said that was because the guy who heads the team that handles such issues was out of town, dealing with a family emergency. The Haggler suggested that any system that grinds to a halt when one person takes a leave is a system badly in need of some tinkering.

He agreed: “This will cause a thorough review of our process and we will fill any hole we find.”

Tangonet, in the meantime, has made some adjustments to the filtering of Mr. Alda’s e-mail, and it seems to be working fine. Let’s give Mr. Alda the last word:

“Once we cleared up the misunderstanding of which software was quarantining my messages, I was able to stop that feature and still keep the function that blocked e-mails from Olga in Russia. Although, I kind of miss those e-mails. I think she really liked me.”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

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