Can you hold please?
(won't someone please pick up)
Oh wow, there are people out there! Hi people!
This week I have been on hold with various forms of customer service and help desks for more than six hours total. I am not exaggerating. I wrote them down and tallied them: 6 hours and 36 minutes of hold time. NOT TALKING TIME. Hold time with the music and the incessant interrupting messages telling you that your call is very important.
This, my friends, is ridiculous.
In addition to this hold time, I also spent a lot of time typing messages to AI-powered auto-responding popup boxes trying to explain my situation so that I could be connected to an agent (presumably a human one) who could help me.
This also, in my opinion is wasted time, since invariably you have to repeat the entire written conversation to the person once they talk to you. Maybe even more than the hold time - after all, you can fold laundry while you’re on hold.
Someone once said that you have to have agency to be the hero of your own story. Is it any wonder that most of humanity is struggling to feel heroic in a world where asking a simple question means losing hours to machines that ignore you?
Can you imagine your six year old comes to ask you for a snack and first you make them write it down and then you make them wait outside a closed door for half an hour before you allow them to slip the paper under the door. Then you open the door and make them tell you again that they are hungry. You ask how hungry. You ask them to describe the various things that they might want to eat, if you have them. You eventually tell them that no, you don’t have any of those snacks in the house. You then show them a video about how snacks are made, you tell them snacks they can get from their aunt if they do some chores for her, you explain that snacks are a privilege and that if they bring home straight A’s you’ll give them the key to the snack drawer, and finally, when they start to scream about how hungry they are, you roll your eyes, tell them they are a child and get them a glass of water instead and close the door before they can respond.
That’s pretty much all of us these days when we need a little help. My kids told me stories of travel issues in airports that were at least this abusive that young adults had to maneuver in person (one in particular was a six hour ordeal over a lost passport that was at the arrivals ticketing desk and the 18 yr old was at the departures and the agent there insisted that no one had turned her passport in - though a fellow passenger - a stranger/seatmate - had flagged her down in the airport to let her know that she had).
I face this sort of thing when I deal with technology and multiple email addresses and company vs private email addresses on the same device (everyone from your dry cleaner to international governments are demanding personal cellphone numbers to “verify” your business dealings)….
And yet. All it takes is one terrible pun or silly observation of something ironic that is true, and a customer service person will say to me, “oh my, miss, I haven’t laughed so hard in I don’t know when. You really made my day. I hope you have just the most blessed day in the world.”
For example, this happened:
Website help desk guy: I’m going to put you on hold for four to five minutes, okay?Me: Wait! Don’t! No! 45 minutes? Really?
Him: Forty-five? Oh my god no! Four. Or Five. 45 would be crazy! How you could you think that?
Me: Well, we’ve already been on (checking) an hour and fifteen.
Him (long pause): “Fair point.”
And we both burst out laughing.
So keep being observant and finding things funny. It really does help.
Writing News:
No new publications this week. Some rejections. Always fun to get those.
(Actually I don’t mind them too much - it means that I was sending out. That feels productive, to be honest. And when I get a rejection I look the piece over and if I still like it I send it right back out.)
I am off this week to the annual AWP writing conference - this year it is in Los Angeles. Reach out if you’re in the area! I’m there from Wednesday through Saturday (though of course I’m on conference time) - hosting the Annual Writer Parent Meetup (it’s a party with a secret glowstick code this year!) - if you’re a writer who happens to also be a parent, come to it! RSVP here.
I’m at booth 354 if you’re at the conference. Let’s have coffee. I love coffee at a conference.
Also if you missed me on this podcast when I sent the link last week, maybe you want to listen to it today….
I saw a cool weird art film called Seven Veils this week and then some terrifically distracting theater: Malaise dans la Civilisation (yes, I did choose it entirely on the name, so what?) — which was basically a campfire skit done by French Canadians to entertain themselves, and make the point that we don’t pay attention as humans. Then I was really lucky to get to see a producers reading of Bigfoot the Musical. It was a terrific cross between Urinetown and Bat Boy - screaming hard rock, set in the 80s, 90 minutes without intermission….absolute gem. I can’t wait to see where it lands. And finally I took my daughter (who was in town long enough to hug me) to see SMASH on Broadway in previews. We were massive fans of Theresa Rebeck’s first season of SMASH and reluctant fans of the second season of Smash after she was fired from her own show. And now I am an even more reluctant fan of the musical based on the TV series about two screenwriters writing a musical destined for Broadway which is about to open on Broadway and actually has been transformed into a musical about producing a musical that is already on Broadway.
It’s the meta part that I love. And I think they really missed an opportunity to hearken back to the TV show that started it all. Just one person’s opinion.
Take people to this show who love long legs. Fans of Chicago. Fans of the Rockettes. The dancing is fluid and magical and the costumes are by far the most glittery you will see on Broadway this season—if you remember gowns with great joy you will love these costumes. They took a two season show with depth that exposed a lot of the darkness in musical theater and they transformed it into a show about Marilyn Monroe—in which the musical itself is unspoken metaphor for the starlet.
So, yeah, meta.
Random Final Thought:
Which was the first purchase, the shoes or the tights?