That’s
what the tag said.
“Do
not unplug power cord during using.”
Was
out returning some equipment to my local cable-internet-wireless
provider. Had to do the amazingly inconvenient check in process—NOT
the point of this essay, but absolutely worthy of 750 to 3,000
angry words at some other time—where, and no one will acknowledge
your existence at all in any fashion until you do, you head to
a tablet on a table and get to type in fourteen different pieces
of information that they aren’t going to use. (Seriously, why
can’t I just type in a name, click enter, and be in the virtual
queue? Why do these companies need phone numbers and email addresses
AND mailing addresses AND last four digits of
account number AND… deep breaths.
Why do they never seem to ask why I’m there? Never mind. Another
essay. Anyway…)
The
person in front of me was using the tablet on the counter, the
only tablet available for every customer entering the store to
use, and appeared stuck on the geometry question where he had
to solve for y and show his work. Was taking him some time to
sort that out. And I have to admit, that was a tricky one as well
as a bit of a must to solve since you need to have a correct answer
with full credit in order to be able to turn down the bundling
of services package once it was your turn to say “thanks, no,
I’m not interested in that” fifteen times before being allowed
to ask your question and for the first time state the purpose
of your visit. So, I was fine with him being cautious and careful.
As
I stood waiting for my turn on the holy single tablet for stating
arrival, I… actually… I need to comment on that…
One
tablet. I’m not kidding. Seriously. One. With a small and pretty
much unremarkable sign that was all too easy to miss on that counter
next to it explaining you needed to sign in upon arrival even
if you had a confirmed appointment in order to complete the check
in process. So, even if you had logged on at home and decided
to take advantage of the supposed convenience of making an appointment
online, you still needed to wait for that one tablet to be available
when you arrived. And, yes, as jokingly noted, the process did
not ask the reason for my visit.
Attention
unnamed company. When you want examples of why customers hate
you and consistently give you lower than stupefyingly bad customer
relations scores—often including comments such as “poor service
accompanying horrendously complicated processes that take forever
and accomplish nothing”—this is a place you could start.
(Ahem.)
There
I stood, waiting in line for my turn while hoping the random questions
were history based, because that geometry one didn’t look easy.
As the clock ticked, I started looking over the power cord on
the unit I was bringing back. That’s when I saw it.
“…during using.”
I
stared at it for a few moments, trying to figure out if it was
or wasn’t a joke. I mean, technically, it actually kind of works.
Don’t unplug it while it is being used. Or, in the midst of operations,
when it is working, that’s just another way of phrasing during
using. They might actually be serious about this.
My
head-scratching issue was that I couldn’t figure out if maybe,
in some cross-contamination of past future perfect tense and dangling
prepositional adverbs (or whatever), the phrase was correct and
I needed to put away the red pencil swirling the thoughts in my
head as I stared at the label.
Was
it right? Because it just seemed so wrong.
Eventually
I realized that my problem wasn’t really with whether or not any
of it was correct or incorrect. Instead, it was that it made a
massively awkward clonking noise inside my head as I read it.
Almost as if poorly translated. Offered with uncertainty. Seemed
unchecked. A guess, written in a hurry, and no one bothered to
proofread it.
It’s
at this point of an essay that I often begin making a bit of a
twist, positioning myself to arrive at some type of concluding
comment or thought. Wrap it up, so to speak. And I find myself
considering two ideas with no idea how to make sense of them:
a clumsy instruction note stuck on a power cord, which was discovered
while standing in a clumsy set up of a waiting area. Are we really
surprised when more than one thing seems off in a situation where
nothing feels right?
After
several phone calls, all of which explained the process in a different
way, I was told to expect to see some lovely accounting on my
next statement. Things like notations of charges for equipment
unreturned, which would be reversed and removed when the equipment
was returned. The calls were the way I followed up on an unexpected
email I received about three weeks after being told, having called
to request new equipment, that the older stuff was out of date
and didn’t need to be returned. I suppose if a company is going
to make things strange during using equipment, it shouldn’t be
surprising that interacting with them is stranger when you’re
done during using that equipment as well.