Terrible Customer Service

“There is but one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. Socrates”
Baklap, Avid Community Forums


Its body language is inconclusive –and I just stand there, while the bright screen gives out hope, and then snatches it away. Little wheels turn somewhere in its depths, like blood rushing through veins. Eventually, the mixed message resolves itself, and the damn thing spits out my parking ticket for the seventeenth time.

I'm outta luck.

“You are being connected to an emergency service,” the voice has a curious accent -Haitian, maybe? Who gives their machines Haitian-accented voices? Only in Miami.

People come and go –and their tickets seem to work just fine. Cheap paper-board squares with center-running magnetic stripes are chewed in, and, following a happy little beep, an exorbitant amount of money is exacted as ransom for the customer’s own vehicle.

“You are being connected to an emergency service.”

When you think about it, the idea of paying for a parking space inside a multi-level, machine operated gray monstrosity is already depressing enough without becoming aware of how much it actually costs. Let’s suppose that a mere four hours of parking cost a whopping twelve dollars –that’s three dollars an hour, seventy-two dollars a day, two-thousand, one-hundred sixty dollars a month. For a renting a patch of unpainted cement roughly the size of a narrow hallway, without electric, bathrooms, or privacy. Unless you park on the top-floor (and spend approximately thirteen minutes driving down a vortex before arriving, dazed and on the verge of puking, at the mechanical gate), you don’t even get a view.

You just get the certainty of dinging the neighbor’s Lexus, the asphyxia of exhaust fumes inside unforgivable architecture, the embarrassment of the fluorescent lighting, and the knowledge that, despite charging outrageous rent for their spare accommodations, the company is not responsible for… well, anything that may happen to you or your car.

“You are being connected to an emergency service.”

Something tells me it might already be too late.

--------------

I did two of my favorite things in the world today.

1. I sat, stoned out of my head, through a double-feature of perfectly-polished Hollywood crap.

2. I retained my superiority by pointing out someone else’s inferiority.

--------------

Both movies I saw were about grown men (and some women) running around in tights, fighting for something they believed in, and taking everything –every single thing- very, very seriously.

One of these was a comedy –it mined this ridiculous set-up for laughs. The other wanted the audience to jump and cheer, to feel exhilarated. Neither succeeded: I could hear the dry clack of the clap-board at the end of every cut –every gorgeously photographed, impeccably-staged, incredibly fake-looking cut.

--------------

“Change is possible,” I say, sensing in the older woman a hippie vibe that I thought would receive my joke warmly.

She stares. Her lips perfectly parted in a pleasant straight line.

“It’s encouraging to know that…hah…”

The lips curl up infinitesimally –a clue about the direction of a hint.

And, then, since I might as well finish ruining the whole damn episode now: “Very philosophical this thing, huh?”

And that was it, she looks away (did I just see her clutch her handbag?) and begins to hurry her husband.

“C’mon, Carl… the elevator’s coming.”

“Hold on…”

It was the chains on her glasses that confused me, that gave me the wrong impression: little translucent stones set in thin metal shells, like festive reins. Taken in together with the red flannel skirt and the shoulder throw, it seemed to signal a simple soul, a merrymaker.

“Carl, the elevator’s here, c’mon…”

“I’m trying to pay, here, Loise!”

In the one-act reel of the first impression, I saw her throwing her own organically-grown paprika into a stewing pot, conducting a reiki healing, posting passionately on her local-politics blog. And then I saw her laughing –a lot. Laughing with friends and neighbors, with children, with people behind counters, and in supermarket lines.

And I saw her recognizing cosmic, "isn't-our-modern-life-funny" jokes when she was presented them.

“Carl, c’mon!”

She is now inside the packed elevator, holding the doors open, while at least ten people try to decide whether to look politely peeved or politely bemused.

“This machine won’t take the goddamn dollar, Loise!”

“Oh, Carl,” she says as she steps out and frees the elevator with an audible sigh. “You have to do everything in slow motion.”

She might be, deep inside, a damn cool lady. Why else would she wear those glass chains?

But, alas. Not tonight.

--------------

I actually fear this might be about the marihuana. Someone must’ve seen me in some security camera, tell-tale tendrils of smoke hugging my black-and-white face like an octopus. Or maybe someone smelled it –sweet and acrid. Surely it’s more noticeable in the confined space of a parking garage.

Man, what was I thinking?

The sidewalk’s crowded with immaculate people, buffed and shiny, hair and clothes and attitude just so. I cut through the cliques and duck into the theater.

Someone who must be a manager, stands in the distance, talking to a ticket-taker.

(I wonder if it’s more embarrassing to wear the suit, and thus be recognized as “management,” than the ordinary, peon-colored uniforms. I think if I worked in a movie theater, I would prefer to wear purple and yellow polyester and ask people if they want some butter on that extra-large bucket of popcorn, rather than a cheap tie and shoes –and an unflattering mix of fabrics in my blazer. If I’m gonna exist at the lowest rungs of the economy, I don’t wanna be disguised as something else.)

“Excuse me, you work here?” (“Or do you just enjoy wearing Wal-Mart suits with shiny gold nametags to the movies?”).

‘Yeah… what can I do”

“My parking ticket doesn’t work… machine’s not reading it.”

“Yeah sometimes those don’t work.”

(“Sometimes” the parking ticket’s don’t work? “Sometimes”? How do you run a parking garage when the tickets don’t work “sometimes”? Seems to me that’s a good way to piss people off on a regular basis.)

“Go downstairs, in the garage, near the exit, there’s a little offi–“

“And it’s open now? Cause I just walked around down there, and it looked close.”

I have this really bad habit of interrupting other people when they speak. Sometimes, I think I do it because I’m intelligent and impatient, and I quickly understand what people are saying… and then just I want them to move on to the next relevant piece of information. But sometimes, I think I just do it because I’m a dick.

“Yeh… someone should be there. They’ll fix it.” The manager aims his corporate smile in my general direction and returns to his conversation with the ticket-taker.

As the escalator delivers me to the ground floor, I hear the diminishing voice of the manager eek out the last few words :

“…I said ‘girl, I can get you into the Superman midnight showing tonight –you and all your hot lil’ friends.’”

--------------

According to rottentomatoes.com, both movies I saw tonight sucked.

The site transmits this message through a simple graphic: a splattered tomato, rendered in bright green, and thrown –in the classic display of audience disdain- by some of the media’s most outspoken film critics.

"It's happened to all of us. You get revved to see a big Hollywood comedy, starring an actor so funny he could make you laugh in your sleep, and you're disappointed. Majorly."

"What a comedown, after the weirdly beautiful things Singer and his technicians did in the first two movies."

The good movies get shiny, whole red tomatoes. It’s less clear how fresh produce is a sign of audience approval.

--------------

I'm still pretty certain that the police will be waiting for me when I walk up to the office door –like a mouse walking into a roomful of sprung-up cats, ready to pounce.

A blue handicapped sign hangs from the white door –I had mistaken it for a bathroom earlier. I’m still not convinced this isn’t a trap.

I knock.

A pleasant-looking follow opens the door –well-fed, well-groomed, attired in the affluent threads of America’s immigrant classes- and reveals a tiny room, heavily air-conditioned, humming with several computers, and a whole wall of screens.

'The Control Room does exist!' I think to myself. 'I knew it!'

“Hi…” I say, suppressing a giggle. “My ticket doesn’t work.”

“Sorry about that… lemme see it.” A soft accent, not the stomped-on consonants of the uneducated.

He looks at some extremely small print on the front of the ticket, numbers hidden in the design. “It’s twelve dollars.”

A forlorn car honks in the distance, perhaps three floors up.

“Excuse me?”

‘Twelv… unless you went to the movies. Then it’s five”

Ok, that’s more like it. I show him my torn movie tickets with relief, as I fish in my man-purse for a five dollar bill.

“Lemme just scan this…’ he says as he holds the parking ticket in front of a red laser. “Oh… I’m afraid it’s going to be twelve dollars after all.”

More honking, now closer.

“Come again?”

“You have been here four hours and eight minutes. After four hours, the movie discount doesn’t count anymore.”

All of a sudden, I notice the sleeves of his white undershirt protruding from beneath his ironed shirt. Careless. Messy.

“But it took me more than eight minutes to figure out why the ticket didn’t work, and come here so you could you fix it.”

“I’m sorry, it’s twelve dollars.”

Oh, how I fucking hate you, Juan Valdez.

Turns out it is a trap after all.

--------------

Anyone who’s not convinced that chaos rules the universe, and that humanity’s feeble attempts to resist it are weak prayers against a raging hurricane has never dealt with computers. Or machines of any kind.

(Those people are not alive, anywhere in the world, as of July 1st, 2006.)

The worse machines are those who believe they're computers –like a certain stumpy little yellow box who thinks that an LCD screen, and a pixelized text display makes her “computerized” and “cool,” when all it really makes her is a “poser.”

“Change is possible,” she announces, before asking me to insert my ticket in a different direction. Because there is someone at fault here, and it's clearly not her: “To insert correctly, follow diagram below.”

We’ve programmed our own machines to speak down to us, constantly. This has to say something about our collective self-esteem, as a species.

--------------

“Do you think it’s fair!?” I yell as a I sit, legs splayed apart, on a cheap office chair.

“I arready answer that question.” He peers over me, looking directly away, towards a basket of screens showing strangers in elevators, mundane snippets of people walking down hallways, little squares of someone's evening, of life.

“Well, if you think this is fair, you’re already beyond the bounds of logical discourse.”

How did I get here? Again? I’m like a junkie who wakes up from a blackout, hands scratched and covered in blood. Someone else's blood.

Once, someone who employed me and was starting to lose faith in me crystallized one of my life’s central dilemmas: “Would you rather be good, or be right?”

Fuck, man. I wish I could say “good.”

I really do.

--------------

Here’s some of the things I call him, and some of the things he answers back:

o Me: “Monkey.”
o Him: “If you wan’ to call me names, tha’s your problem.”

o Me: “Button-pusher”
o Him: “Is my decision.”

o Me: “Poor”
o Him: “Yes.”

Here’s some of the things I think, but do not say:

o I’d fuck him.
o Where do they all get those same ugly-ass, short-sleeve shirts from?
o What if I ram the barriers? How far could he chase me?
o How about I just give you my credit card, huh?
o I'm still entertained.

--------------

It ends as almost all good student-films end: on a graceful but sour note.

About twenty-three minutes of intellectual abuse begin to wear thin. And start to bore me.

It's time to go.

So with an outrageous yawn of contempt, I leave a twenty dollar bill on the console. Five I legitimately owe; seven as extortion payment for his thieving, mob-connected boss; and eight dollars for him, as a generous tip for providing such outstanding service.

The air outside is warmer –and stickier- than the one inside the office.

--------------

As I drive home in the sweet-smelling cocoon of my rental car, I wonder if he felt ashamed by what happened. Will he talk it over with his girlfriend in the resigned tones of a customer service pro (“had a rough one today...’”), or with the barely repressed anger of those whose private insecurities are confirmed by the world at large (“I am worthless”). Will the story come out like steam, all sibilants and long, meaningful pauses, or will it drip out, embarrassed, when no one’s looking?

And does it matter?

Was this collision of minds, of spheres, meaningful? Did it alter either of our lives in any way?

Or do we simply go on –ghostly billiard balls, not bouncing against each other, not missing each other, but going straight through each other- without noticeable changes to our paths?

In a time when our useless metal assistants offer us the condescending comfort of hope -“Change is possible”- I decide to quit praying and rage with the voice of the revolution:

“... And the prophet promised that the technological is political
–that the private is obsolete.
What moves us can and must be shared.
In the onlife where men’s interactions are mediated by machines,
let it be known that change is not only possible,

It is imperative.”