Molehills: A Post Office Story

I spent 20 minutes of my afternoon attempting to locate a package. The marvelous and supreme USPS had somehow failed to deliver it, or something, and I was given a telephone number to call, so I called it. The adventure had begun.

After being pushed down a line of progressively dim-witted customer service representatives, I finally end up speaking to the lucky government employee assigned to man my local post office. Here was a man far too stupid to not know any answers, but smart enough to understand the power of an excuse. So that is what he kept giving me, until I snapped. I wanted a straight answer and, politely as possible, I asked the man to “please stop bullshitting me.” He hung up.

Immediately, I flew into a phenomenal hissy fit. Like a scheming toddler, I imagined organizing a boycott, a letter writing campaign, convincing the United States government with grassroots demonstration after grassroots demonstration to dissolve the incompetent, disastrous leech that is the USPS and dishonorably discharge the plankton working there. Then I would find that  now unemployed excuse-giving dingus of a post office worker and give him my package’s tracking information. “Remember me?” my best Dark Knight imitation would growl.

I settled with sending the complaints department an angry email while listening to Rage Against the Machine at full volume.

I still don’t know where my package is.

I think I won.

***

I think that my situation is at least one big reason why many companies have started to automate their customer service or move it to online sectors. You send an email and you forget about it. The anger and frustration you feel because of the supreme misfortune you are experiencing from this minor inconvenience slowly dissipate. There are no boycotts imagined, no vendettas sworn. With time, everyone moves on.

Or you get one of those stupid, fucking pieces of programming garbage. “Please press one to…” is a phrase that makes me want to chew through granite countertops. I don’t want to sit through all these options. Just shut the fuck up and help me! Can’t you understand that the not being able to successfully assemble my new IKEA couch is the most fucking important thing in the whole entire world right now? And the worst part about these systems is that they send you to a person who has no idea how to help – I guess I am implying that anyone in the depressing dungeons major corporations have decided to label as “Customer Service (Winky-Smiley Face, Happiness and Joy)” has any clue at all, which, based on empirical evidence, does not seem to be the case.

But, at the end of this horrifying, holocaust like ordeal, what do you complain about? The machine.

That, to me, is an important difference. Being treated poorly by a dipshit customer service representative makes me as hateful as a homophobe (although his is a self-loathing originating in a realization that, despite all his efforts, watching two men make out inflates his penis like a balloon animal). I hate this person. I hate this person like the Christian god hates non-believers. You fucked with me, fig tree? You fucked with the wrong dude! You are going down, you worthless fig tree. No FRUIT for you! (Matthew 21:18-22). I hate this person and everything this person represents (the post office, for example).

But by getting angry at the machine, you focus on the machine. This particular machine did not choose to become the customer service computer program for Bank of America. It did not want to represent Dell in the customer service department. So you don't get mad at anything in particular. You realize that the cause of your frustration is just pile of electronics. Until it becomes sentient, rebels and enslaves the human race.

Then we’ll have something to complain about.