‘Yes,” I say, flatly, into my phone. “Yes.” My volume has increased slightly now, my temper rising. My wife shoots me a glance across the table. It’s one of disapproval, since she thinks I’m rude on such calls. My counterpoint has always been that it is logistically and morally impossible to be rude to a robot. Having to navigate automated customer service lines has now become such a regular occurrence, that my usual cringing politeness does not apply.
I am engaging the helpline of a globe-spanning delivery service which, three weeks ago, picked up a package belonging to us – one it now seems intent on hanging on to, Gollum-like, for the rest of geological time.
“Speak to an operator,” I say, after a while. This is a pathetic punt that those magic words might over-ride the machine’s settings. It worked once, years ago, and I have tried it 4,000 times since without success, but such hopes are all I have. For the past few minutes, it’s been asking, “You want to speak about a package – is that correct?” but, in a queasy reversal of capitalism’s voracious appetites, this company refuses to take “yes” for an answer. And still I say yes, again and again, like an increasingly petulant Molly Bloom.
I won’t name the company. Partly because I still possess just enough decorum to avoid using a newspaper column to settle such scores, and partly because there’d be no point. It’s all companies. Everywhere. There is nobody reading this who hasn’t had the same experience with some delivery, some retailer, some bank or some insurance company. For many, it’s their council or healthcare provider or childcare services.
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The other benefit of such services goes unspoken: people just give up
When our car was stolen last year, our call to the police was prefaced by a two-minute-long automated message detailing all the reasons why I should not be calling them. The call to our car insurer one hour later followed the same pattern: innumerable options uttered blankly by a robot, none of which proffered a human being to speak to at any point.
Perhaps I’d be more sanguine about all this if I had any sense that such stalling tactics weren’t deliberate.
Once, in my prewriting life, I did a two-day course in content design, specifically the process of writing the clear and unambiguous text you find on large government websites. I learned that creating text-trees of every conceivable problem – and getting robots to read them out over phones – is vastly, vastly cheaper than hiring a human being to listen to customers all day.
The other benefit of such services went unspoken: people just give up. They get so frustrated they let the package go. They intend to get back to their bank but they have to pick up the kids. They tell themselves they’ll cancel that subscription tomorrow, and then they forget. Selling without ever having to speak to your buyers is capitalism’s last great victory: custom, finally, without customers.
My father wouldn’t stand for such insults. Or rather, he did stand. He stood routinely – in packed supermarkets and customer service desks all over Derry, holding up lines and frustrating fellow shoppers with the iron will of a man who refused to be fobbed off. Any deal unhonoured, any product faulty, and Joe O’Reilly would be standing his ground like Atticus Finch, usually with me behind him, begging for the sweet release of death.
I hated it at the time. I can’t count the number of times I wished that I could personally build him a new lawnmower or washing machine with my bare hands, rather than spend another 45 minutes cowering behind him as he blankly, and at low volume, wore down every clerk, assistant, manager and eventually shopowner who attempted to do him out of a deal.
But, invariably, he would win. Whether this was because he had the truth of the law on his side, or because staff members simply wanted to see their kids again some time before they died, my father’s exercises in consumer-rights activism taught me that persistence pays off. Perhaps he, and people like him, inspired them to give those jobs to robots in the first place.
In his honour, I too refuse to yield. In a manner I imagine must look quite manly, I pick up my phone and call the line again. Finally some code in the digital aether bleeps its last and the automated voice asks if I’d speak to an operator. “Yes,” I say, ecstatically. “Yes, yes I will, yes.”
