The Bucs Are Ignoring Their Customers! Except They’re Not!

July 16, 2009 at 09:53am by Scott   •  3 Comments »

This has hit my inbox about ten times now, so I guess I’ll cover it (I’m a slave to peer pressure). But it’s really not a big deal.

Someone at Bleacher Report named Tom Edrington, who they say used to write for the Tribune but I don’t remember ever hating him so who knows, did a piece on trying to call the Buccaneers about season tickets and was put into a call-routing system that rang 100 times before he hung up. And in case you’re wondering about the rest of the story, that’s it. That’s the big to-do everyone is getting all upset about.

If you call a business in 2009 and all the phone does is ring, don’t you call right back assuming it was a glitch in the phone system? I do. Same thing with busy signals. When was the last time you got an honest to goodness busy signal? I can’t remember the last time I heard one. Everyone has call waiting and call forwarding and voicemail rollover and all sorts of other shit designed to make sure you never miss a call. So this story isn’t about how the Bucs are shunning fans and keeping them from buying tickets. It’s about how one dude’s call got misrouted by a piece of software.

Mike Florio covered it on PFT and called the number himself. He got answered in two rings. Of course, Florio being Florio had get in an extra dig on the Bucs just because he’s that kind of asshat.

And so the Bucs are spending some money on persuading their customers to spend money on tickets, despite not spending money on players.

It’s amazing that if you repeat a lie enough, eventually it becomes accepted truth. And he’s the master of beating shit into the ground until it’s beyond cliche. Go ahead and guess if there’s a joke and Jon Gruden‘s excessive swearing in Florio’s article.

Anyway, back to the point. Even though this is a dead period, there’s no reason to start writing irresponsible shit. Hell, the TBO Bucs department has all just shut down for the last month. There are still weeks old articles above the fold there, and I applaud that if the other option is to just write junk with the hope that it will generate pageviews. I went back and read some of Edrington’s previous articles on Bleacher Report and he sounds typically sensationalist and annoying, so this piece about a telephone ringing is probably par for the course for him. Add to that the fact that he writes in that short, choppy, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard style like Martin Fennelly does, so you know I hate him now. Plus he refers to Warren Sapp as “Fatso” for no good reason that I can ascertain. No, I think Edrington is just a jerk.

Besides, if “Fatso” really was some kind of accepted nickname for Sapp, Warren would have told me about it by now. We’re like this, baby.