John C.

I subscribe to both the NYTimes digital subscription and the NYTimes Cooking. Both are fine, giving me the quality that I expect.

I spent 30 years of my career designing and implementing computer systems for the publishing industry, including two different newspapers and several magazines, so I understand that technology can be frustrating and that the media industry is suffering right now. The Times suffered a technical glitch, apparently. That's not my issue. My issue is that their customer service agents were unable to resolve my issue after multiple phone calls.

Long story, condensed: I received an email that my "payment didn't go through." My automatic renewal would not work and the link to update the payment info also did not work. It took six phone calls, each averaging 30 minutes, to get around whatever the problem was - The online page took me to another site with a link that wouldn't connect. It appeared to be an internal issue on their site.

Most of the agents that I was connected to had heavy accents that were very difficult to understand.
My issue was a "one-off" sort of thing, that didn't fit into their scripts. They didn't have enough knowledge to comprehend the issue, much less to resolve it. They bounced me around, including to third-party vendors who also couldn't help.

Yesterday, one told me that my payment was processing and to be patient... that turned out to be untrue. Finally, ten days after this ordeal began, I got the subscription renewed.

I can hardly wait until next year when I have to update my credit card into because the card will have expired.