I hate asking for help.
I hate using the phone.
Calling customer service for help is pretty much the worst thing in the history of everything ever. Ok, I exaggerate. If only just.
Last month, I had to call the manufacturer for one of the library’s printers. The thing was slinging an error that was as clear as mud. Even my ol’ stand-by Google was no help. I found forum after forum that had me try this and that but neither worked. Next, I went to the manufacturer’s site and logged in. I crossed my fingers, my toes, and my eyes in hopes that they’d have an online ticketing system.
They did not.
So I had to do the worst thing in the history of everything ever. Call their customer service.
When my call was answered by a robot, my hopes fluttered. I had an error code, surely they programmed the bot to handle such cases. Computers are at their best when they’re working with numbers. Surely they could set up the bot to log the error number, my phone number, and create a case number.
They did not.
After giving the error number, Marvin the Paranoid Android transferred me to a call center.
When my call was answered, I was surprised to learn that my T-coil headset worked too well. I could hear too much. It reminded me of those fraught first months with bionic ears: everything was louder and my feeble little mind was overwhelmed. It took me months to stop being exhausted. But I didn’t have months to adjust to this phone call. Nobody wanted that. So after hearing the woman say something – I’m assuming it was her name and “how can I help you” – I described the issue. Instead of hearing her voice I heard something unexpected.
I heard the enthusiastic clickity-clack of a mechanical keyboard. The vast majority of keyboards today are membrane keyboards, which use a rubber or silicone membrane beneath the keys, resulting in a quieter but less tactile typing feel. (Read more about the difference here.) I didn’t expect to hear such a racket. And I’m not so sure I did. There was a hitch in the sound right before the keystrokes started. I think it was piped into the call to simulate typing.
When automation allowed the phone company to lay off switchboard operators, people complained about the silence that greeted them instead of the operator’s request of “number, please” when they picked up the line. So, the phone companies added the completely superfluous dial tone to assure people that the line was, indeed, open. I think that’s what the call center was doing; assuring people that the person was taking note of what was being said. Even if it IS the person’s actual keyboard, the company made a conscious decision to buy a mechanical keyboard. The default keyboard these days is a membrane. You have to pay extra for a mechanical one. But anyway, I kept holding my breath, waiting for the racket to start up while the customer service person was talking. Fortunately, it never did. Unfortunately, there was another source of background noise instead.
I’m pretty sure that the woman I was speaking with was using a headset. I’m pretty sure that headset had an omnidirectional mic. Which means that I could hear the susurrus of other calls being fielded by other people. It was distracting as all get-out. The possibly-fake typing would stop and my call center person would start talking. But all the while I heard other voices in the background. I couldn’t make out what was being said but it was loud enough that I could almost make out a word here and there. A lifetime of hearing loss has ingrained in me an instinctual strain to hear. Anytime I hear something on the edge of my range, I strain to hear what it is. I can stop myself from doing so. As it gets louder, it reaches the threshold of my hearing. Causing me to start to strain to hear. Then it fades, as the volume of conversations are wont to do, and I let go of my auditory colander. Because my brain is not good at filtering out background noise – if you don’t use it, you lose it – there were times when the woman’s voice would be lost in the noise. And there were other times when her voice was the problem itself.
She had an accent.
I’ll give her credit: the volume and speed of her voice presented nary a challenge. But that’s the thing about hearing loss, challenges abound. The accent was incredibly tough on me. I couldn’t place this accent. I was too busy attempting to decrypt what the hell she was saying. I had to have her repeat the confirmation number a bunch of times. I never knew if I got it right, I just gave up. I could have repeated it back to her. But with keys and conversations and accents assaulting me, I was exhausted. The five-minute call felt like five hours.
I understand the harm automation does to people’s livelihood. It’s been putting people out of work since before the apocryphal General Ludd and his Luddites trashed mechanized looms. But I’ll be damned if I don’t want call centers to go away. As I see it, the problem is with society. It would be better if the norm was to retrain people whose jobs are being automated, not let them slip between the cracks. But that’s a rant for another blog.
We have the tech to
make it better than it is
And less than six mil.
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