"Your Call is Important to Us" - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“Your Call is Important to Us”

In the garden of my electronic dreams:

1. Electronics manufacturers and service providers would build better stuff and hire more skilled people to make the gadgets work and the electrons flow instead of hiring script-readers who take an hour of the customer’s time to explain in vague terms why nothing is working and somehow infer that it's your fault for not knowing a superheterodyne bus bar from the Tiki Bar, but, hey, “Your call is important to us.”

2. The FCC and the FTC would DO THEIR JOBS about sneaky offshore billing, foreign and domestic scams, tricky contracts, and corporate bullying of the vulnerable.

3. “Tiffany” and “Brian” at customer service would be honest about what their names really are and what country they are calling from, and that they are working at a ‘phone bank for rotten wages because they were never able to pass freshman English.

4. Any service provider saying “Your call is important to us” would not be executed – not for a first offense, that is.

5. Whatever sick, twisted wretch who generated the latest (Famous Brand Name) series of browsers should receive life with only a slim possibility of parole.

6. InterGossip providers would stop LYING about everything.

7. InterGossip service for the rest of us would work as well as it does for rioters.

8. For every minute a customer is on hold he or she receives a dollar off the next bill.

9. Criminals, not police, would have to wear body cams, and if the cameras didn’t work then the U. K. Daily Mail and the electronic mob would presume guilt.

10. There would be no telephone trees (“If you know your extension…”). Just answer the da®ned phone.

11. Every time a customer receives a message saying “All our lines are busy right now…” the president of the company receives a mild electric shock.

12. Customer service representatives would answer the question that was asked, not drift off into an alternative universe.

13. NO ROBOTS (“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that…”).

14. Every time MicroPlop declares a browser outdated (“heritage” or “legacy”), the customer receives a $500 rebate for the nuisance of having to learn the eccentricities of an unnecessary new dashboard which doesn’t work as well as the old one anyway and which loses all your bookmarks and addresses.

15. Every time a tech company says, “You’re due for an upgrade” instead of “We want to sell you a more expensive ‘phone,” someone gets a spanking.

Bonus: Mark Zuckerberg would be arrested for his haircut, and his barber subpoenaed for testimony.

And, hey, your call is important to us.

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