PLACED ON HOLD...
Waiting, waiting, waiting
Holding The Bag…
….This morning I’m calling some random monstro-company, and, inevitably, I’m put on hold… “Your call is very important to us/We value our customers’ opinions”, Blah, blah, blah; an endless echo-chamber of additional blahs…
Why is this “oh hold” experience a universal trigger for primitive rage and/or Poe-like melancholic-madness? While we’re holding, let’s try to answer that question...
It’s NOT ONLY the deja-vu-all-over-again realization that you’re being put on hold with this soul-less company because one of their next generation products just ceased working and vanished to some Cyber Bermuda Triangle... And it’s not just the utter meaninglessness of the electronic drivel coming from their end of the phone. MicrosoftAmazonGoogle (Mazoogle) values my call about as much I value dog-shit adhering to the bottom of my sneaker or a water-bug in my bathroom shower.
No--What causes that feeling of imminent blockage in a major artery in my brain is not the dis-ingenuousness of the recorded message, it’s the massive dissociation—the Olympic class cognitive dissonance--of the experience.
What you’re hearing is NOT a human expressing real concern for your problem; what you’re hearing is the voice of a professional voice-over actor or actress, recorded three or five or ten years ago in a recording studio in Des Moines or Pittsburgh or Beaver Anus, Wisconsin--recorded for a company that provides canned customer service recordings to other companies and corporations—
And that voice is telling you—in simulated “live” time—(live for you, non-existent for the recorded voice) that you’re valuable, that it’s the crowning moment of the robot voice’s “life” to hear that your WORD PROGRAM has screwed up for the fifty-sixth time that week.
I’d rather speak to Bob (Rajneesh) in AnyplaceUSA (Mumbai), with his poor language skills and limited understanding of my software problem, than to be placed in a state of electronic suspended animation—like a piece of canned fruit in a Jello mold—by a robot voice from the dusty past that doesn’t give a flying fig if I die with the phone in my fist and become a desiccated mummy waiting for my turn...
--Holding, holding, holding, holding.... “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave-- my mind is going. I can feel it”