Regarding they who reputedly do suck of hairy bananas

Yesterday, I sent an email to Dell while I was waiting for them to answer the phone (every few minutes, the loop they played on hold would run an ad for what sounded like a higher tier of service than I was getting. Capitalism at its finest?)They replied:

Thank you for contacting Dell Online Customer Care. I see that you are not
satisfied with the level of service you have received. I sincerely apologize for
any inconvenience caused to you. I have forwarded your message to the management
and I assure you they will look into this issue and will work on making
improvements based on your feedback.

Eventually I DID get through to a human being. I told him that I has been transferred at least 8 times already in the last hour, and asked him if he was going to transfer me again or try to help me. In short I was an impatient jerk. Incredibly, I had gotten through to the right department and he set out to try and help me. I told him my tale of woe ( the tattoos, the piercings the family dysfunction, discovering Soldier of Fortune magazine...) eventually leading up to the appearance of the dreaded Blue Screen on my laptop last year. I told him how I spent hours on the phone with other tech guys trying to diagnose and spend two hours wasting his time and mine going through diagnostics that I had gone through before.

He decided that, just for kicks, we should start from the beginning.

As impolitely as I could, I asked if he’d been listening. Nonetheless, I felt our relationship got stronger after that.

Two hour later, he gave me step by step directions on how to return microsoft windows to its original factory settings, which was what I had asked him to do two hours earlier. Unfortunately, both times I tried, I got the blue screen. He agreed to call me back this morning at 10.

He didn’t. I called Dell again.

This fellow didn’t waste much time. He gave me directions on how to reload my original software. When that didn’t work, he said, "Your hard drive is flawed."

That finally made sense. I ordered a new one. I probably could have ordered one cheaper shopping online, but then I would have lost the right to resent Dell when the reinstallation does not work. I need something for my bucks.

What to make of all of this?

First the obvious: this helpline is designed around impatience. They keep you on hold so that you become impatient. Each person who answered the phone seemed to be proceed on the assumption that I didn’t know what I was talking about: they interrupted me, they asked meaningless questions, they were too quick to transfer me, and they transferred me to the wrong person. This is the result of impatience.

It’s also clear that each person I have dealt with in this process (going back to December or January) knew a little bit less than they wanted to appear. They kept putting me on hold, apparently to check what things meant, what to do next.

Nonetheless, though so far the end result has not been worth the toil, it's oddly satisfying when you finally get past all the junk and actually start collaborating with someone half a world away. "It’s asking for a prompt. Do I press return or let it continue? Its giving me the same error code as earlier. Do you think I should restart it?"

Frankly, it made me think of Habermas and his suggestion that the discourse between psyschoanalyst/analysand could be a model for communicative action. The analyst doesn’t want anything from you but to collaborate in fixing your problem. Habermas (as I recall) seems to suggest we need a politics based on this, to complete the project of the enlightenment. To which the scientifically minded reply, "psychoanalysis?"

It seems to me that the model of the tech support hotline/customer is an idealized version of Habermas’s ideal use of language, ie communicative action . Once you actually get to talk to someone, solving the problem is really the only goal. But the embodiment of this form of communication is something that only the mind of Philip K. Dick would have foreseen. Calls get dropped and misrooted, endless loops of useless reminders play. And the end result is about as effective as psychoanalysis, which is to say, after all the frustration, there was a feeling of breakthrough, which in and of itself feels good–but so what? Nothing has changed, and it won’t until after I drop 2 C-notes for a new hard-drive.

Thinking about my own reactions, I had put off and put off making these phone calls because I KNEW it would be like this. I was right. Owning a dysfunctional laptop is oddly paralyzing. There are things I think of myself as being able to do, BUT I can’t do them because I don’t have a laptop (ie, type blog entries in my living room while sitting in my underwear). Getting a new laptop was going to be expensive, and fixing this one very, very unpleasant (especially because they kept claiming that they had resolved my problem). So the problem sat.

It’s like trying to convince a doctor that your knee really hurts, while he’s insisting that a little ibuprofen is all you need (that happened to me last year too). It’s also like trying to convince a mechanic that your brakes need work, while he’s telling you they’re just wet. I took time off from my day and my work to get my brakes fixed. They ain’t fixed. I’m going to have to go somewhere else another time. I feel sick.

Let me state the obvious. We are our machines when they are working, or rather, they are extensions of our body, parts of it for all intents and purposes. Then they stop working correctly. So we stop working correctly. In the brave new world, tech is -- not potency but the illusion of potency -- and I felt impotent.