Last week I signed up for a subscription to Runner’s World Magazine.

In tomorrow’s post I’ll tell you more about why I did this, but this turned into a two-parter because the subscription process became its own ordeal.

I decided early in the day this was going to happen, so that afternoon - it was Wednesday - I popped on to sign up real quick.

Wednesday, as it turned out, was Global Running Day, which I think is what’s to blame for what ensued.

I wanted an online subscription - if you’ve ever clicked a Runner’s World headline somewhere online, that brings you to a paywall (which I’ve done many times). This subscription would give me access to reading those.

That subscription costs $60, which I figured would be money well spent, especially with what I’ll tell you tomorrow being the main impetus.

BUT when I went to enter my credit card information, the connection timed out as it was processing my payment. It did this a couple of times in a row.

I gave it a rest for a bit, then went back to the page and the same thing happened maybe an hour later.

This is when I realized the most expensive subscription was on sale and maybe it was a Global Running Day situation and there was more traffic on the site than usual.

So I figured what the heck maybe I’ll call and see if that would be quicker.

It was not.

I called and was on hold for a while, and when I finally got through the lady said they were indeed having a timing-out issue with the credit cards on the website but instead of taking my payment there she said she would figure out if that issue was still happening and she put me on hold.

I think she did it wrong because I immediately got a selection menu,

I figured she might come back so I tried just not entering anything and the voice was telling me it did not understand my selection, which felt to me like I should make a selection.

One of the choices was a management line, so I chose that.

I was put on another queue.

Eventually I got a person and explained the situation and she started to take my information over the phone.

Before it processed I jumped in and asked if they were going to give me any kind of discount for my troubles. I kind of had this in the back of my mind when I called in the first place, but after the double-hold situation I felt like they had to make something right. I was surprised they didn’t do this without me asking for it first.

She finally looked up discounts and gave me the subscription for $12.

So that was cool, and I’m glad I have a subscription.

But this is something that harkens back to my freelance writing days when I was working to get articles published in magazines - so many media entities merged that it was impossible to get individuals, even as editors. Runner’s World, for example, is not just Runner’s World, it’s Hearst Media and the organization runs a bunch of different magazines and the quality all around suffers.

It’s not a great situation for writers, that’s for sure.

As a customer, I’ll enjoy the online subscription now - maybe some day I’ll put that writing hat on and see if I can submit something online, even.

But (sorry, old man complaint) it’s too bad this entire story is pretty indicative of the state of the magazine industry.