The Unbearable Lightness of Tech Support

Before We Begin

This is my first weekend in a long time where I'm able to just think about my life in recent months and create some conclusions about it. On a bit of a sidenote, the story of my life has been a little bit also the story of understanding how different I am from the general populace at large. I've talked about this in other blogs post so I won't get too far into it. But I call this one the mistake of "thinking everyone is like you." I didn't really figure that one out until my 40s.

In many ways, accessing a better life and livelihood and mental space has much, if not everything, to do with understanding the nuances of our own psyche. And I used to think that everyone obviously does that in the way that I do, which is a very sinusoidal process, a sort of manic sense of philosophical deliberation, where you cycle through phases of often raucous and chaotic data collection, into a quiet solitude, wherein those data inputs are processed into something more meaningful. I would imagine many artists have a process similar to this.

So the big loud days of data collection are typically social in nature, and the slow quiet days of introspection are done from the comfort of my own little man cave. And I would have to go back to the early 2000s, and my fantastic studio on sixth Street in East Hollywood, to a similar time in my life where I had the right space for that second part of this process. Immediately after the three years I had in that apartment, I moved in with my wife, we had children, and for obvious reasons my needs for a suitably large man cave space took a backseat to the needs of my amazing wife, who was pregnant twice and a very hands-on mother, and just had a much stronger mandate for available space in whatever house we ended up in. I gladly took a backseat to these considerations: I did have a tiny office in Ashland. I think it was 100 ft.², and a similarly small one in New York, I think it was closer to 200 ft.². And I know they say you don't know how to appreciate a thing until it's gone, but in this case, I didn't really appreciate a thing until I got it back. Having this beautiful space to process all of what's been going on for the last few months has just been invaluable. And these last few years have really seen a huge shift in my sense of work-life balance, really beginning with that fateful Saturday morning, where I got a call from SpectraForce about being a contractor at the Corning site in Canton, New York, and now being a database technician on the California payroll. What a couple of years it has been.

And isn't it interesting how so much changes so fast when we relocate. I moved around a lot as a kid, my wife and I have had the habit of moving every three or four years since we started having children, so we are sort of used to it. But that doesn't mean it isn't painful, or that it also isn't a really useful way of interrogating our own habits and the hidden trade-offs that arise when we fall into the groove of daily life. But perhaps that's what I love about it - something something, moss won't grow on a rolling stone.

It's the Connection, Stupid

So the other thing that really comes to the forefront in these moments of transition is the relationship that we all have with big tech. Moving now involves the simultaneous juggling of an active mobile subscription, an active Internet subscription, & a smattering of utilities that vary by location, along with probably a handful of other media subscriptions ranging from things like Paramount Plus and HBO Max, to YouTube Premium, and I don't know, maybe Twitch and an active Xbox gaming pass. Some of those you can bring with you, some of those you can't. But something as simple as just changing your email, can trigger a process so painful that you just abandon the account altogether. That's how I feel about my Riot membership, where, inexplicably, because I changed the email address I have on file for that account from an actual mailbox to a forwarding address (literally same address, just handled slightly differently by the mail server), somehow that has displeased the Riot security gods, and I am completely unable to get the activation messages that would allow me to update my account profile. Right? Isn't it funny that we use that kind of language, at least I do; I use phrases like "displeasing the gods," "this algorithm doesn't like me," this commandline utility "took a shit." We use language as a way of euphemising the pain we have with anything that touches on the nebulous, quicksand hellhole that is tech-support. I am Gen X, and it's possible that one of the great narrative arcs in the collective psyche of my generation is the regression of tech support from the days pre-Internet, to where we are now - so that's what I wanted to write about a little bit. If anyone in your life ever uses the phrase, "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet was..." please send them to Sacramento to be my friend because it's nice here.

I could've also titled this rambling pseudo-memoir "why it's nice to have a phone number to call" or even, "you'll never believe how this hack saved SMBs thousands of dollars in support cost." But look, here's the thing.

And I will put you to the rule above, it's possible that not everyone thinks this way, but that being said, collective psyche and individual psyche are distinct but related. So a discussion around consumerism, and specifically consumer products in the technical space, I think, will invariably create a lot of recycled messaging because that feels more like a collective space. But anyway, what I'm trying to say is, when I look at my relationship with these tech companies that really are a part of the fabric of my life - I think by and large there's two main questions that I ask. How big are they?, meaning how much can I reasonably expect that this company has the resources and product knowledge to create an experience that is close to what I'm looking for; and, how easy are they to work with? The first one is a bit easier of a question to ask; this is typically what drives the original engagement. It's very easy to market on top of this touch point. We have what you are looking for. We've been doing this for years, we know all the nuances of the decisions you need to make around the thing you're looking for. Look at these nice product graphics. Buy now, and we will give you a 20% discount just because, well, because we like you.

But the second one is much more difficult to broadcast. And you could argue, and I would agree with you, that really it only comes into play later. There are some companies that are so easy to work with that I've never even had to test their support process. But I'll tell you the secret. At the end of the day, and I mean this, after two weeks of really constant pushing to get all of these needs addressed in a timely manner--whether it comes to renting an apartment, getting a breadmaker delivered, or buying a mattress--simply having a phone number to call was a common denominator for all of the experiences that really nailed their support. Of course, this is only anecdotal evidence, but trying to resolve something through chat typically took 3 to 10 times longer than it did if I could just pick up the phone and explain something to somebody. But maybe that's obvious. Here's what maybe isn't obvious, is that if you want to talk about singular moments of transformation, I'm sure there's a term for that on the sales side, basically a huge shift in emotion towards the positive, that came when I was having an issue with a delivery that I was hoping would have arrived by now, and because at the bottom of that email, I saw an 800 number that I was able to call on a Saturday morning and talk to Jeff. He was super friendly and not only answered all my questions in less than five minutes, but said something that felt really nice, which was: "if you have any more questions, just pick up the phone and call me right back."

That's a phrase we should be using more often.

I work with technology every day. Chatbots are great, AI is great. No, I did not write any of this with ChatGPT. I will die on this hill: the more we relegate things that used to be human interactions to algorithmic experiences that are always repetitive and redundant and often miss the point, the more we deprive each subsequent generation of the ability to work on their own conversational skills and ability to feel empathy. We shouldn't just be making sure that the economic environment is such that the next Google, and the next Apple, could be built by some other teenagers in their garage; we also need to make sure that the social and civic environments are such that future generations will also have a "Jeff" to answer the phone warmly and immediately put his customer at ease. Just like we have already lost, collectively, the type of stoneworking and masonry talent that it would've taken to build something like the Antwerp Cathedral of Our Lady, we may yet lose the type of empathetic discourse, "banter," if you will, that characterized the language of my young adulthood if we don't actively take steps to put the next generation in situations where they actually have to talk to each other.

Instead, we're going to end up talking to robots that have been trained on American sitcoms, and blockbuster movies, so that everything sounds like a cross between ET, Wall-E, and the robot from Futurama, and the kids will all wear T-shirts that say "Don't call me, I'm texting!" and all the babies will learn to use iMessage before they even have a first word. But everything will be fine because there are more casinos and you can still buy a flatscreen TV the size of your living room for $70 which, unironically, comes with a free subscription to the Oxygen network.

Eventually, Brawndo is cheaper than water because it's made with partially untreated sewage, but no can tell the difference because all their tastebuds have been zonked by the latest virus.