A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

A CORPORATE OBITUARY, FROM MEMORY AND EXPERIENCE: Many years ago, one of my issues of Mad Magazine included an economical two-page spread on the evolution of an American business. In the first panel, a matronly woman in an apron and a gray bun opened a shop called Mom's Homemade Cookies in the shadow of a giant factory crowned with a monstrous "FOOD INC." sign. In the next panel, the line for Mom's stretched out the door and around the block, past the Food Inc. factory. Mom's expanded, then franchised; Mom herself traded her apron for a dark suit. The Food Inc. factory went vacant and the sign came down. In the last panel, the factory came back to life, its workers raising a "MOMCO" sign, and in its shadow, a matronly woman in an apron and a gray bun opened a shop called Aunt Ida's Homemade Muffins.

Some time ago, some guys in Seattle opened a Belltown cafe called the Speakeasy. It had a life before the Internet, but the Internet infected a lot of things, and the Speakeasy became the first Internet cafe to breach my consciousness. Back then, announcing that one frequented the Speakeasy was a declaration, a merit badge, and it was only natural that the Speakeasy would service (or exploit) that allegiance by becoming one of Seattle's early Internet service providers. Servers and switches bloomed, above the cafe, on the upper floor of the Speakeasy's expansive two-story building (which, if my fading memory is to be believed, pushed out my beloved pool hall, the 211 Club). After some years, the cafe burned down, and the Speakeasy survived only as an ISP, renowned (then) for its neighborhood-cafe service ethic and its customer advocacy (from which was born the Speakeasy service-speed test). Speakeasy continued to grow, until, in 2007, it was purchased by Best Buy. Speakeasy's customer-first culture clashed with Best Buy's customer-never policy, and in 2010, Best Buy sold it.

Believe it or not, the company that bought Speakeasy was called Megapath. Megapath is not the name of a real company. Megapath is the newest venture of Arvin Sloane and Alexi Volkov, or it is the shadowy sponsor of an army of lobbyists seeking subsidies for harp-seal-based cosmetic gasoline, or it is a supergroup featuring Keanu Reeves and Jared Leto. Megapath sounds like the mutant offspring of a satirical soulless transnational corporation and a Japanese doomsday cult.

Instead, Megapath is the mutant offspring of a satirical soulless transnational corporation and a Japanese doomsday cult. Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. I learned today that it is organized around three fundamental principles:

1. Megapath has no first names. With whom am I speaking? My name is Glenn. Glenn who? My name is Glenn. Last name, Glenn? My name is Glenn. Glenn, tell me your last name. My name is Glenn. Spoken with that clenched-tooth cheeriness that says, only, cult smile.

2. Megapath has no phone numbers. When you call Megapath, and you can feel free to confirm this, you are ushered into a telephone menu so labyrinthine that it could not be a joke, because that joke has been told so many times that it cannot ever be funny again. A full day into a catastrophic customer service disaster that burned through all levels of staff at my firm, whenever we wanted to speak to the people who had already promised to fix our problem, we still had to please listen to the full menu again and again and again.

As a gift to you, here is my trick: when caught in such traps, avoid the "technical support" options, and instead press the button for "order services." You are almost certain to reach a human being nearly immediately, and you can tell that human being that you will make sure that everybody at every level of the company understands that he is personally and solely responsible for losing your business if he does not connect you with a live human being in the technical support department. Sometimes these people don't care, and sometimes they know that nobody will believe it is their fault, and very rarely they are smart enough to know that, duh, you don't even know their last name. But usually they are armed with a healthy paranoia and a corporate directory, and they can find you some actual person on the tech support side.

This person is useless for anything except putting you in touch with his supervisor.

The supervisor is the one from whom you will learn Principle 2. What is your phone number? We don't have direct phone numbers. What is your extension? We don't have extensions. Oh, so that's the game we're playing. Then what is your cell phone number? I don't have a cell phone.

Allow me to interrupt myself a moment. There comes a time in almost every failed customer service interaction where one party must lie, and the other party knows that it's a lie. The point of a lie is not always to deceive, though. Sometimes the point of a lie is to grant a fig leaf so that the parties can retreat from an impasse with dignity. This lie therefore need not be believable, but must be at least minimally possible. Megapath was not going to give me a phone number, and I was not going to accept "it's not our policy to allow you to contact persons responsible for your case." A fig-leaf lie was necessary, so that we could move on. But "I don't have a cell phone" is not a fig-leaf lie. You don't have a cell phone? Are you a human being? Who works in a tech company? What kind of a lie is that? He might as well have said "I do not have a cell phone because I am a raccoon" or "cell phones have not been invented yet."

In any case, short story long, I did not get a cell phone number from Glenn. (Incidentally, how did I know Megapath was a transnational? Glenn. Only Canadians, ostensibly nice but cruel to their core, name their children Glenn.)

3. Megapath does not communicate by phone. The only acceptable mode of communication within Megapath is a new language called "ticket." Have you called the tech yet to find out where he is? I opened a ticket. Have you contacted your vendor? I opened a ticket. Make sure that they know that they have to call me at any hour of the night if they need site access. I opened a ticket at a level two escalation so that the night supervisor would see it. And since you get off at 7:00 and the night supervisor comes on at 7:00, can you please pick up the phone and just call him so that he knows that? Sir, I already told you, I opened that ticket.

Tickets are everywhere now. Some self-satisfied Chip or Kit at Harvard Law School probably sainted himself for inventing the ticket. Like all horrible ideas, the ticket system mutated from a perfectly benign cell -- the idea that, in dealing with customers, everything should be written down so that whoever is working on it can see the entire history. But that cell metastasized, and now the ticket system is just a way for people to get shit off their desk without taking any responsibility. Of all the problems with the ticketing system, the worst is that everybody acts like the ticket is the one responsible for all failure. That wasn't on the ticket, and I only just now picked up the ticket, and I wrote that on the ticket, and I escalated the ticket, and somebody else should have picked up the ticket. Before tickets, somebody had to say "this job is my responsibility and I will see it through." I feel very strongly that the next person who explains to me that he is not responsible because he wrote or escalated a ticket is going to get his ticket punched. And by ticket, I mean penis.

So there you are, fake-named transnational cult corporation, look what you've done to Mom's Homemade Cookies. May Aunt Ida get here soon.