Pitchin’ the fantodPitchin’ the fantod
I gotta get rant-a-rific here for a few. I just got off the phone with a major American airline which I won’t embarrass by naming outright, but if you like, you could say its name rhymes with benighted. I was on the phone with them for a fucking hour trying to correct, or verify the correction of, a $75 mistake they made. And when I say I was on the phone for an hour, that means I was on hold for most of that time, listening to an endless loop of Rhapsody in Blue, except for the two times early on when the menu selections I made failed because those parts of this Dinosaur Corp.’s phone system no longer work, and the few minutes toward the end of this when I finally got to speak to a person (who was actually in the United States, which pleases me, atavistic chauvinist that I sometimes am (an effect of growing older, methinks)).
A fucking hour. It’s like I was dealing with an obscure bureau in some third-world country, address 1984 Kafka Avenue in Downtown Chaotica. An hour! A major airline! Now, I’m an old but I’m not ancient. I’m well over a decade away from retirement, should I in fact be able to retire. I well remember a time when in this country–in this country, boys and girls–that simply never would have happened. Americans had more pride than to pretend to run a business where people were kept waiting on the phone for an hour. I like to think we still do, but here I am dancing the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to a tune I don’t recall having any part in calling, and it’s a whistling past the graveyard for anyone to think it doesn’t matter that major businesses are run that way. Look around. See all the crumbling? Yeah, we sure as shittin’ all do. Anyone care to dance?
And at the end of it all, the poor soul who tried to help me, bless her heart, couldn’t provide any sort of verification that the problem had actually been solved, even though she said she’s pretty sure it was. But that’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to run a business like that, or a government like that, or a school like that, where there’s no one on duty, no one who can assist, no one who knows what’s going on, no one to take responsibility, no one who is willing and able to get to the bottom of things, no one to step up and say, We can fix this–we are better than this. It’s time to clear away the rot.