Hal, Space Odyssey: “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can hope to do.”

I believe community is made up of small and personal connections, a sense of being known, Kate is the office manager at Shushinki’s, my new car maintenance place and repair shop. She is new to me, or relatively. She remembers meeting me at a veterinary clinic where she worked more than a decade ago. She has a warm and direct away about her, she gave me a number to call if I ever have a car emergency and need towing.

Clint, her boss, collects matchbox cars, they fill the walls of the reception area. If you get there early, the reception area is filled with people chatting, drinking coffee and waiting for their cars.

My new idea is that have a personal connection everywhere I can go in my life.  Kate knows who I am, where I live, and what I do. She laughs easily, is careful to explain estimates. I am dealing with a business, but it doesn’t feel like that, I don’t get lost in the system.

Yet a part of our lives now is that we are all dealing with vast systems. We often feel lost.

I’ve had to deal with A T&T Mobile in recent weeks, it took two months to sort out some billing errors on their part, their computers and fees and agreements were so complex we could not find anyone who could decipher them or control them. When a computer comes after you in a big corporation, it can often be terrifying when a corporate computer comes after you, all kinds of sweet-sounding people promise to help you, but can’t.

If you wonder where Hal, the computer from Space Odyssey went, you can probably find him at AT&T. He doesn’t like me, and I have been running away from him all Fall.  He is smarter and more determined than I am.

As he expected, it ultimately was so frustrating and distracting I paid him a lot of fees, and I think he has decided to leave me alone. He is impervious to truth, reason or negotiation. The bottom line was this: I had leased my phone and paid it off. My bill was supposed to go down sharply, and instead, it doubled. No one could tell me why.

I must have made 20 phone calls, and everyone was very friendly and no one could make the computer system work or understand the arrangement over the cell phone bill. It was a genial nightmare, but a nightmare still. Along the way, we met some love customer care reps, almost all of them women.

The first one asked me about my holidays, where would I be spending them and who with?  She told me all about her nephews, with whom she was close, and great distances she would be driving to to see her family. It was disarming and eased the frustrations, even anger, I was feeling over all of this confusion and many hours on the phone.

After the Christmas story, she told me everything was resolved and asked me if there was anything else she could help me with.

Of course, it was not resolved and two days later I was on the phone with another lovely human being, also, a woman, told me the same precise Christmas story only she substituted nieces for nephews. She told me everything was fixed also, and Hal disagreed. It was not fixed, I got the wrong bill again, and for twice as much. Two more mysterious fees that no one could explain were added on.

I was to call At&T at least a dozen more times, Hal was wily and manipulative. And after the 8th or 9th nice/nephew Christmas story, it dawned on me that this was what  all of these poor people had been trained to tell frustrated or angry customers as they were compelled to offer one lie after another (this is the Orwellian part): we will get this resolved for you; we are sorry you are enduring this inconvenience, we were happy to solve this for you, you seem to have agreed to several fees that may not have been explained to you,  is there anything else that I can help you with?

But, ma’am, I say softly, you haven’t helped me at all. Have a good day, she answers, and thanks for calling us.

It was interesting, these good and courteous people could not control Hall or defy or countermand him, they all said at one point or another that they had to confer with supervisors or get “help,” but the supervisors or helpers never came to the phone or talked to me.

Like Hal or Big Brother, they were invoked, but never seen.

This, I saw, was pure Orwell, a relentless courtesy and empathy that masked a growing helplessness and frustration. Sometimes, I feel like I am swimming in a big screen, just another wavy line. And I am.

All told, I heard about a dozen versions of the niece and nephew story, sometimes the gender varied, sometimes the driving distance shrunk or grew, but the stories were all disarming and therapeutic. How, after all, can you be frustrated talking to a nice young woman who is trying to help you and who faces a two-hour drive between Atlanta and Nashville out of dedication to her family?

How can you be made at such a person, or the company that employs her? How can you not realize your concerns are small and petty and you float off of the phone feeling small and petty for even calling?

It is possible to fake empathy and connect with people, even if it is contrived. It still feels good to hear it, even if you know it is false. Or maybe it’s going to be a great Christmas for all the nieces and nephews in the Southeastern United States.

My Iphone bill might be twice as high as it is supposed to be, and I am being bombarded with text messages telling me I need to pay hundreds of dollars in various fees and charges for phones I don’t own, haven’t used, and know nothing about.

I don’t know what I did to Hal, but I am truly sorry, not hat this matters.

Yesterday I finally snapped there are only so many hours I want to spend on the phone talking to customer care without losing my mind. I have work to do.

In a sense, I succeeded. I did not yell at anyone or get nasty. In a sense, I failed, they simply wore me down. For the solitary consumer, there is really no way in.  As I did with Facebook when they billed me for ads I didn’t want or know about, and after months of trying to find a human being,  I caved. Eventually, I got a message from them saying I had a history of complaining about ads. I had never taken out an ad.

I understand why Communism was popular in the early half of the century, I imagine it will be popular here again. It was, after all, the biggest populist revolution ever.

In the case of AT&T, I had been on the phone for an hour and I was being told that the only way out of this morass was to pay some fees and then claim they were disputed. And as everyone knows, my phone has become important, I use it for a lot more things than telephone calls. So much of my life is in it.

After offering a long and convoluted explanation of why he thought I was receiving these charges, , a nice young man on the phone asked me about my holidays and began to tell me about his.

Reluctantly,  I interrupted and asked him (politely) how much it would cost me to buy my way out of this nightmare.

We were past the holiday stories, I was seeing white flags in my mind,  my customer care rep got very businesslike and stopped being so chatty. I was to hear no more about his selfless holiday plans. Well, he said, about $170. I went and got my credit card. What is this charge for?  He tried to explain, but could not. I told him it didn’t matter.

And I have no idea what this fee was for. But this is America, and you do not often win battles with gazillion-dollar corporations over fees. They know and I know it isn’t worth going to court over a fee, and there is no one to appeal to.

I got a very sweet e-mail from AT&T this morning saying my payment had been processed, and thanks, all of the other charges and fees I did not really owe seemed to have been dropped. And I got another message saying the bill would come down this month, and I would receive a deposit for the overage fees.

And the messaged thanked me profusely for using AT&T, and asked me to fill out a survey about my experience. Did I win? I guess so, it was just that I had to spend a couple of hundred dollars for the victory (there were fees for Maria’s phone as well.)

I passed on the survey, I don’t wish to dump on the poor people telling me all those holiday stories, maybe one or two of them are true, I hope so, all those nieces and nephews are counting on it. And I don’t want to irritate Hal any further. He could do much worse. In a time of universal deceit, wrote Orwell, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face.

I felt today that I have a boot mark on my forehead.

So this is why I was so happy to meet Kate yesterday.

She was direct, genuine and had the nicest smile. She is really the essence of customer care. She really does want to help, and she really does. Community is where you find it, in a world where everyone is telling you how much they care about you, but not everyone does. Community is so important to me, now more than ever.

I will fill my life with personal connections and with people into whose eyes I can look directly, and who know my name.

I’d like to dally here awhile, but I have to go Christmas shopping. I’m driving two days and nights through to the midwest to visit my two nephews there and bring then gifts, it will take a long time and be difficult, but I love them so much I cannot bear to disappointment them, as busy as I am. I’m glad I was able to help you, and let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

See if you can post nasty messages on Facebook at me now.

Have a great holiday, Hal.