Oh, I had high hopes for today’s post, but my brain curdled into white-hot rage-paste after an entire morning spent talking on the phone to customer service representatives on my bank’s useless hotline. Press five if you want to speak to an additional automated menu! Press nine if you want to bite into your phone–glass bits and all–just to keep from hearing another automated menu! You must listen to ALL the options because they have recently changed!
art by Zach Johnsen
Yes, my brain is now a paste! Of rage! I could feel it happening–first there was a hardening, my brain-tubes felt like they were flattening into steel sheets and then, by the sixth or seventh call, the logical perspective-having part of my brain melted away and I grew increasingly horrified by the tone of my own voice, and by my failure to include even the least of my Midwestern niceties, and to consider how deeply crappy a day the people working for the bank hotline might be having, and probably have pretty often.
I will not tire you with the details of my banking drama, as it would be more boring even than talking about taxes. Besides, the story is nearly gone now, as I think instead of how it degraded with each retelling, how the early representatives got to hear a detailed account of my check card’s checkered history, how I’d labor to engage them, get them on my side, even try and make them laugh, while later workers got a curt summary that narrowed with each repetition, shaved down finally into boring bullet points until, by the end, I found myself refusing even to give the basics of the story and instead just insisted that I needed a new bank card and I needed it now! This kind of demand, said in a crazy-lady voice, prompted a series of security questions that I’d already heard enough times to be able to preemptively ask and answer the first on the list, which foiled my final opponent who said, with a mildly-crazy edge in his own voice, If you’re going to ask the question yourself I can no longer use the question to serve its purpose!
Next week then, a (non-bank-related) story. Bullet points at the very least.