Fortune Cookies

Despite all the efficiencies we enjoy in this era, much of life for most of us still involves waiting. Waiting in line at Safeway with your nightly dinner not yet cooked, where the only distraction is that beautiful security guard and her no-nonsense ability to capture the irony of the situation.

"Hey, baby, it's way too late for someone who looks like me to be here. Who's gonna be scared of little ol' me? They should have a great big guy here. Hell, I can't intimidate nobody, let alone some gang guys. Shit."

(Note to reader: I agree with her. I would much rather date this woman than pretend to be scared of her.)

Waiting in your doctor's office, or your dentist's, optometrist’s or therapist's. "What if this is as good as it gets? Movie Link .

Tonight, my fate was to sit and wait around my house for four hours for the Comcast repairperson to show up. You know how it goes. My high-speed modem started malfunctioning weeks ago. My son and I tinkered with the equipment, and were able to get ourselves back online now and then, but the problem appeared to be getting progressively worse over time.

By this past weekend, I was reduced to going to a nearby cafe in order to do my work from home. So I did what consumers do, in this age where our main identity in this culture is defined not by what we do or what we have to offer others but by what we pay for. I called Customer Service at Comcast and made an appointment.

It took a while ("all of our service representatives are busy helping other customers; your wait will be approximately...five...minutes"), plus, of course, the ubiquitous: "Your call may be monitored for quality-control purposes."

Right.

Long story short, Comcast never showed up. When I called at 8 pm, and explained that I had left work early to be here, and missed an important appointment tonight, waiting for their "technician," their extremely polite Customer Service Representative offered a carefully worded explanation: "Your problem may have been determined to be a network problem, in other words, not specific to your modem or router or computer."

The bottom line?

I have been unilaterally (by Comcast) rescheduled for a new appointment tomorrow, between 8 am until 8 pm! When I explained that I have a job that explicitly requires me to not be here from 8 am to 6 pm, the extremely polite Consumer Service Representative told me not to worry, probably the problem was outside my house, not inside, so that is why they rescheduled their visit to explore my problem in this way.

Well, after I wondered for a second whether I should share some relevant information with him, I confided that their technician cannot access my "outside" cable unless (s)he can get into my basement, which requires that I be here, with the key, which until after 6 pm, I certainly will not be.

Whatever. The answer from the extremely polite Customer Service Representative was that if they cannot fix whatever my problem may be on the outside, they will hope that I will call and schedule a new time when they can visit me again.

(This reminds me of a project a friend and I did together, exploring how many of our "service providers" were in fact ripping us off. We did this in early '05. I bet this friend does not even remember.)

***

What does any of this have to do with that Fortune Cookie photo posted above? Well, I guess I do love to try to take care of the people I love, as my recent fortune claimed, but the problem I, and all of us, face, is we don't really have enough of whatever is required to do so in the face of a consumer culture that renders all of us more or less powerless...

And, BTW, this is not as good as it gets. This totally sucks.