Valued customer is a loading screen

I have discovered, through rigorous Thursday-night research, that I only want to deal with Fortune 500 customer support when I am at least a little drunk.

Not wrecked. Not “send three paragraphs to the wrong group chat” drunk. Just tilted enough that the whole thing becomes funny before it becomes spiritually expensive.

This is not life advice. This is barely even a coping strategy. It is more like finding out that a terrible chair becomes usable if you sit in it sideways.

Sober me cannot do it.

Sober me hears the IVR say, “Please listen carefully, as our menu options have recently changed,” and immediately becomes a constitutional scholar. Recently? Changed from what? Who approved this? Why is the billing department behind option four when the word “billing” appeared in option one but apparently meant something different? Why are we all pretending this is navigation and not a maze with branding?

Tipsy me is different.

Tipsy me says, “Sure. Let’s hear the menu again. Maybe this time I’ll understand the plot.”

There is a point in the evening where my brain stops demanding that the system make sense. That is the sweet spot. That is when I can call a company with a market cap larger than several countries and calmly explain that their app has trapped me in a support loop designed by a committee that hates verbs.

The app says: tap here if you need help.

I tap.

The app says: what kind of help?

I choose the closest category, which is never close enough. My problem is always something like “account exists in two mutually exclusive states” and the options are “password,” “billing,” “returns,” and “other.” I choose other, because I still believe in democracy.

Then the chatbot arrives.

The chatbot is sorry to hear that.

The chatbot understands my frustration.

The chatbot would be happy to help.

The chatbot has never been happy in its life.

I describe the problem. The chatbot asks if I have tried restarting the app. I say yes. It asks if I have tried updating the app. I say yes. It asks if I have tried clearing the cache. I say yes, and also I have cleared so many caches in my life that at this point I am less a customer and more a janitor for temporary files.

Then it asks if I would like to contact support.

This is where sober me starts to heat up. Not outwardly. I am Midwestern enough to remain polite while internally filing a class-action lawsuit against the concept of being perceived. But the heat is there.

Tipsy me, meanwhile, is delighted.

“Yes,” tipsy me says. “Let’s contact support from inside support. That’s architecturally bold.”

Fortune 500 support has a specific texture. It is not incompetence exactly. It is competence routed through so many layers of process that the original human need comes out the other end laminated.

The agent is usually kind. That is the worst part. A real person appears after the menu tree, the chatbot, the authentication ritual, the second authentication ritual, and the little pause where the system forgets everything you already typed. The person says, “I definitely understand where you’re coming from,” and I believe them as a person. I do not believe the sentence as an artifact.

The sentence belongs to the company. The person is just renting it.

I should be clear about this, because I have spent several years as the person on the other end of the phone. Not in a call center exactly, but in IT, which is close enough to recognize the smell of the room.

I know the pain.

I know what it is like to have a human being arrive in your queue with a real problem and a completely understandable amount of heat. I know what it is like to want to help, immediately run into the edge of your permissions, and realize your entire kingdom is three buttons, one dashboard, and a Slack channel where the people with the actual power may or may not be looking.

Support work is full of tiny fiefdoms. This person can reset the account but not change the email. That person can see the billing state but not the identity state. Another team owns the workflow. Another team owns the API. Another team owns the button that everyone agrees should exist but somehow does not.

I understand how annoying it is to cross teams and departments in an effort to solve my problem. I understand the act of professional courage it can take to say, “I know this is not technically my area, but let me ask someone.” I notice that. I appreciate it deeply.

And it still does not solve the thing underneath it.

We are dehumanizing what it means to help each other.

Every large company has discovered a way to make empathy feel like packaging.

“We appreciate your patience.”

“We value your loyalty.”

“Your call is important to us.”

No it isn’t. My call is a queued object. My loyalty is a retention metric. My patience is being strip-mined by hold music that changes every ninety seconds just often enough to keep hope alive.

The worst moment is the end of a hold-music phrase.

There is a tiny lift in the arrangement. A little resolution. The loop breathes in like it is making room for a human voice, and your whole nervous system perks up. This is it. Someone is coming back. The agent has returned from whatever internal dashboard they were consulting. We are about to rejoin society.

No.

Absolutely not.

The song just changes into a different piece of bitcrushed lobby jazz that sounds like it was recorded through a wet napkin in 2003. The company has not returned. The company has only refreshed the texture of your captivity.

Valued customer is not praise.

Valued customer is a loading screen.

This is why the drink helps. It does not make the company better. It makes me less interested in winning a philosophical argument against a workflow. I stop needing the script to confess. I stop wanting the corporation to look me in the eye and admit that the website sent me to the app, the app sent me to the bot, the bot sent me to the phone number, and the phone number opened by telling me I could solve most problems online.

Sober me wants justice.

Tipsy me wants a ticket number.

That is growth, probably.

The ticket number is its own little sacrament. It proves that the problem has entered the building. Not the right building, necessarily. Maybe not even the right campus. But somewhere in the company’s internal weather system, a cloud has formed with my name on it.

Then comes escalation.

Escalation sounds dramatic. It sounds like a problem putting on a helmet.

In practice, escalation means my issue moves from Tier 1 to Tier 2 to a specialized team to a different specialized team to “please upload screenshots” to “we have not heard from you in 24 hours and will close this case unless you respond,” even though the last message in the thread is me responding with the screenshots they asked for.

At this point, sober me would begin composing a reply with numbered paragraphs.

Tipsy me says, “Buddy, I’ve got screenshots and time.”

I had two of these today.

One was almost pleasant, which made the other one worse.

A physical thing stopped working. A battery. It would not charge, which is a refreshingly legible problem. Battery should accept electricity. Battery refused. We all understood the assignment.

A few minutes of half-hearted troubleshooting followed. Did I try a different cable? Yes. Did I try a different outlet? Yes. Did I perform the small consumer electronics dance where you hold a button for an unreasonable number of seconds and pretend that counts as engineering? Also yes.

Then, with almost indecent speed, a tracking number appeared. A new hunk of lithium-ion and rare earth metals was dispatched toward my house. The physical world had failed, and the corporation responded by putting another physical object in the mail.

Beautiful. Crude. Effective.

The retirement account, though?

Excessive. Preposterous. Never seen before.

That was the second trip into the fluorescent cave, and it ended at the usual shrine: the system.

Not a person. Not a team. Not even a named policy. The system. The system needs documents. The system needs to approve the request. The system cannot proceed until the documents are received, indexed, blessed, and presumably carried through a little internal parade where they are shown to a database that has never once been asked to justify itself.

Everyone agrees this is silly. That is the strangest part. The person on the phone can hear it. I can hear it. Somewhere, deep in the company, there may even be a diagram that admits it. But the system has no face, so no one has to make eye contact with the absurdity.

My request was not even exotic in a moral sense. I wanted an account reinstated. That is it. The account fell into a corporate tarpit, and now I am standing on the bank, holding documents, asking if anyone has a rope.

At one point I had to “read” and “agree” to the terms and conditions of reopening the account.

The scare quotes are doing work there. No one reads that document in the way reading is supposed to mean. Reading implies an encounter between a mind and a text. This was not that. This was a small compliance ritual where I clicked a box to affirm that I had absorbed the sacred paperwork required to regain access to a thing I am entitled to by right through my employer.

That is the part that gets under my skin.

The benefit exists. The account should exist. The entitlement is not a favor being extended by a generous machine. But when the machine loses the thread, the burden of making reality legible falls on me. I have to receive the documents, open the documents, agree to the documents, return the documents, and wait for the system to decide whether the documents have persuaded it that the world is the way everyone already knows it is.

Toil rolls downhill in this economy.

Someone designs a process. Someone else implements the happy path. Someone else answers the phone. Someone else supplies the missing proof. By the time the work reaches the bottom, it has become mine, and I hate being part of it.

But I am an edge case.

Edge case is a technical term meaning “a human being the process did not expect to survive.” Somewhere, outsourced and offshore and underpaid enough not to ask too many product questions, somebody implemented the happy path. Account active. Account inactive. Account closed. Account verified. Account not verified.

No one was forced to account for my existence.

So now the company has to improvise, but only in approved ways. The support agent cannot fix it. The form cannot express it. The workflow cannot represent it. The system can only ask for documents, because documents are what large companies request when they need to look busy while deciding whether reality is allowed.

And then, sometimes, the spell breaks.

“Let me refresh your screen here.”

That is all it takes. A phrase so casual it should not be allowed to hold power. The support person clicks something, or reloads something, or performs a tiny act of sanctioned clerical magic, and the roadblock clears. The thing that was impossible thirty seconds ago becomes available. The system, having demanded documents and patience and obedience, suddenly remembers that it can move.

We all appreciate each other’s patience.

With the system.

And the rules.

For some reason.

Then we, the humans, do the part we are still good at.

We thank each other for the time spent on hold while other people handle the blockers. We acknowledge the waiting as if either one of us summoned it on purpose. We perform the small social etiquette of earnestly wishing each other a happy holiday weekend, because it is late in the week and everyone would rather be anywhere else.

And the strange thing is, I mean it.

I hope the support person has a good weekend. I hope whatever team owns the blocker has a good weekend. I hope the person who designed the blocker someday has a moment of clarity, preferably after a nice meal and before shipping another workflow.

What a world.

This is the real difference. It is not courage. It is not charm. It is the temporary death of optimization.

Sober me tries to be efficient. Sober me wants the shortest path through the system. Sober me reads every option carefully because surely there is a correct door, a blessed door, a door that opens into a room where somebody can push the one button that fixes the account.

Tipsy me understands there is no blessed door.

There is only forward.

Press one. Say “representative.” Say it again. Refuse the text-message link. Authenticate. Authenticate again. Explain the problem in one sentence. Then in three sentences. Then in the strange compressed dialect support systems demand: “Account email changed, verification loop, cannot access billing, app says call, phone says app.”

It is not English. It is not code. It is customer pidgin.

And weirdly, late at night, I can speak it.

Maybe this is embarrassing. Fine. Most true things are at least a little embarrassing. I would love to be the kind of person who can call a giant company at 10:00 a.m. with a glass of water and a tidy desk and emerge twenty minutes later with a resolved issue and my nervous system intact.

Instead, I am the kind of person who looks at a broken login flow at 10:43 p.m. on a Thursday, decides Thursday is spiritually Friday, pours something modest, and says, “Let’s go meet the enterprise.”

I do not recommend this.

I am only reporting from the field.

By the time I reach a person, I am no longer angry. I am not calm exactly. I am corporate-calm. A little too friendly. Weirdly patient. Ready to repeat the case number like a prayer and accept that the next available representative is both a person and a myth.

The person, when they finally arrive, is usually trying. That is what makes the whole thing sadder. Two humans meet inside a machine built to keep them from having a normal conversation. One has a problem. The other has a script, a policy, and a very small patch of authority. Both are supposed to pretend this is customer care.

Maybe I do not need better customer support.

No, that’s stupid. I absolutely need better customer support.

But until then, I need the version of myself who can survive “press one for more options” without becoming a minor prophet of consumer rage.

He apparently only works late.