Bruce Cameron

Jun 18, 20140

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2009.

As I write this column, I have literally been brought to my knees by the customer support department for my “ISP,” which stands for “Internet Slow Provider.” My computer keeps reporting that the Internet doesn’t exist. Yet I know this can’t really be true — if it were, someone would have sent me an e-mail about it.

I’m on my knees because I have been instructed to turn off the power strip under my desk, though the part where I bang my head is something I thought of on my own. While I do this, I speak to Customer Support overseas.

Me: If you’ll check your records, you’ll see that I have called about 15 times the past five days, and the problem is not with my modem. Understand? It is not the modem.

Customer Support Person: I understand what you are saying, sir, but the problem may be the modem. Turn it off for one minute. We will wait together.

Me: Maybe it would help if I told you that every time you eventually conclude the problem is with your system, and then you give me a Priority Repair Number, OK? And the Priority Repair Number means my problem is posted to a status board that everyone can see. You get paid on how fast you close the cases on that board, so as soon as my name goes up, you’re going to check it off as fixed, even though you’ve done nothing!

Unfazed, he takes me through the list of Fun Things to Make the Customer Do. “Please determine that the wall socket into which you are plugging your computer is valid,” he tells me at one point.

Me: How do I do that, lick it?

There’s a pause while he checks his list. “That would not be the recommended method,” he tells me.

In the end, he informs me that the problem is in their system.

“I’m shocked!” , I say.

He pauses again — maybe he thinks I’ve decided to lick the socket, after all.

“I am giving you a Priority Repair Number,” he tells me.

I grab the pad where I keep all my Priority Repair Numbers. “Please,” I say, “I beg you. I implore you. Do not close my case until I have Internet connectivity, OK? I’m getting bursitis in my knees. I beseech thee in humble entreaty.”

“You can call our automated 24-hour-a-day system to check the status of your Priority Repair,” he says, adding, without irony, “or you can look it up on our Website.”

Even when my computer is working, it seems to take the command to bring up a Website as tantamount to asking it to clean toilets. Just a few years ago, my PC was a sparky kid who jumped to attention when I so much as gestured with my mouse, but now he’s like a grumpy old man who refuses to change out of his bathrobe in the mornings. Many days he won’t wake up until I “boot” him several times, a verb laden with way too much temptation.

This is all on my mind when, at the grocery store later that day, I’m invited to try out the computerized “self-service” lanes, to which I reply “if it’s ‘self,’ it’s not ‘service.’”

But I give it a shot. It turns out that I don’t know the product codes for onions, but that’s OK: I can pick them out of a lineup, as if they’ve just robbed a 7-Eleven. The problem is that brown onions look a lot like yellow onions and pearl onions and also sweet onions, and I can’t tell the difference between organic and inorganic. (Can that possibly be right? Inorganic onions?)

Here’s an even better question: Why am I participating in a conspiracy to eliminate grocery-clerk jobs? Why do I put up with bad service and PCs that function for only a few years, letting companies cut corners and people? Maybe it means cheaper goods, but at what ultimate cost? Wouldn’t I rather have an Internet connection that’s working? Wouldn’t I rather have people working?

When I get home, I call the automated Priority Repair System. My case is closed.

I’m back on my knees.

(Bruce Cameron has a website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com.)