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Project Dad #4: Customer Service Voice

Gasp. I need to stop telling myself “now is the time when things will get better,” because it’s just a mean trick. My tendency to overestimate how much I can do in a given amount of time is legendary; my list expands infinitely into the misty future.

But I wanted to tell you about the Customer Service Voice. This might be the thing that breaks me, my friend.

Let me explain how it all began. It has become clear that the First Law of Project Dad runs: All tasks, no matter how mundane, must expand to fulfill the maximum potential for complexity. This law supercedes any and all actions of the puny force affected by the law, which is me. Thus the bank with Dad’s safety deposit box is the only bank in town closed on Saturday mornings. Thus the ride to the eye doctor is mysteriously cancelled. Thus the disability check comes in just as I reach the goal of “spending down the assets.”

This would all be fine, I mean, this is how things go, and I could jump around like a cranky gnat, yelling and bitching and having no effect whatsoever on the imperturbable creaky machinery of the long-term care industry and its numerous spawn, and the world would continue merrily on. But. All of these chores that build the brick wall I am throwing myself against, they involve other people. My intersection with these people involves also intersecting with the system* they work in, and when there is a problem, it is usually because my request and I do not fit neatly into a slot in the system.

This is where the Voice comes in, the Customer Service Voice. When it becomes clear (as it always does) that Team Project Dad is different, that for one reason or another we do not meet the criteria of the Population Served or the Target Market or just the plain old average of all the different possible people with their innumerable different possible issues, that is when whatever poor person I am tormenting has to bust out the Customer Service Voice. I’ve used it myself in various grim minimum-wage scenarios; it’s sometimes the only barrier between you and the person you’re about to disappoint, maybe piss off, definitely inconvenience.

The Customer Service Voice works like this: as it grows apparent to you both that the person you’re speaking to can’t help you, the voice rises in pitch (nonthreatening, to soften the blow to come). A faintly Midwestern whine enters the tone; vowels are extended and consonants are clipped (folksy, hey, I’m just a regular person like you, please don’t let me be the one you flip out on) – “okay” becomes “ooooo-kheeee.” The vocabulary changes; the words get bigger, the phrases (“check with Legal,” “our policy does not allow,” “not possible at this time”) become more rote than meaning. The Customer Service Voice is an advanced, exquisite, means of telegraphing the message: You are special. You are different. You are making us work hard to figure you out, and damned if you aren’t going to pay for that.

It has gotten so that I can pinpoint the moment the Voice happens. On the phone, there’s always a pause as the person you’re talking to stops the train, switches tracks over to the “special requests” section of training, stalls while they figure out if they need to bother the supervisor about you. In person, it’s usually the sudden lack of eye contact that gives it away, perhaps as your victim casts around for the person with authority or with the key to the register.

It’s no one’s fault that we are not an easy match for any goods or services, not ours and not the employees of the underfunded, overworked bureaucracies on which we cast our hopes. But this knowledge does not actually do me a whole lot of good as I resist the urge to yell at yet another person who has to reluctantly make my life harder, swallowing frustration daily because there is no one to pinpoint as the bad guy. The Customer Service Voice, my ever-present bane, is the symbol for all these masses of people on the one side who want to help but can’t, and on the other side who need help but can’t figure out how to mold themselves into the proper pigeonhole, and in the middle all this fucking wasted energy spent categorizing, and checking, and balancing, and hoop-jumping, and peeling off slivers of resources to be doled out grudgingly and with suspicion.

*Brief diversion for inside joke: the phrase “the system” has become iconic among those in the know, as it is something my father tends to go on about in bad moments. If he’s not figuring out the system, he’s working the system or being mad at the system for not providing him with decent food, or for some other complaint less grounded in reality. So you have to laugh at how, three months into this thing, here I am with a bee in my own bonnet about the system. The line that delineates healthy from sick, able from unable, becomes murkier every day.

Posted by hilatron at May 11, 2004 11:57 AM | TrackBack