Customer Disconnected: A Consensus Collection by Josh Case
Nobody’s calling technical support and spending 20-40 minutes on hold to congratulate you and your engineering or industrial design teams on the creation of the most user friendly, durable, nearly transparent personal computer ever made. They’re pissed. Unable to work. Confused. They have spent 3 or 4 thousand dollars on a machine that does squat, and they want to get the fucking thing going. Fine.
Having heard this, you usually know that there’s something special going on within the first twenty seconds of the call. This is why many of these recordings begin with seemingly natural exchanges. There’s something special in the greeting; rapid breathing, rehearsed friendliness, some kind audible dysphoria - subverbal clues that tell you, “Hey… you’ve got a screamer...” A whiner. A lunatic. A lawyer. A grown man with many powerful connections and a radically overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
Mash the record button now.
My posture would change; I would take my feet off of my desk and sit straight. Sometimes I would stand up on my cube to throw paper at co-workers not busy on other calls, pointing to my headset, nodding, grinning, inviting them to listen in as this pre-eruption customer and I turned over all of our cards. We were surreally cordial, slowly revealing our obscure strategies.
Waiting.
Thinking back, I would frequently find myself sticking a just a little too coolly to the corporate policy, unwavering, just a little more rigid than absolutely necessary, knowing that I was adding wind to a coming storm, focused on how the call would fit into this collection all the while.
The archive is often recollected on individual employees’ personal fileservers. It is edited down to contain only the calls that appeal to that individual, be it the angry (“I WANT A NEW MOUSE GIVE ME A NEW FUCKING MOUSE I HAVE A FUCKING COLLEGE DEGREE!!!”) the insane (“you know, you won’t find me in your system, because most of my works in national defense, religion and terrorism have not yet been updated to the President Of The United States, who is listening now…”) or the just plain stupid (“…cd-rom drive, oh shit..I thought that was a cup holder…”) This installation has attempted to assemble all of the calls available and deliver them fully with no editorial framework.
In time, I left the company and the collection behind. The calls had been collected before I arrived, and I’m sure there are new ones being added as you read this. The collection has no custodian; it does not even have an official right to exist in terms of corporate policy, but it continues to grow just the same.
Enjoy.
