How AT&T Made Me a Violent Person- Tuesday May 3rd

I am a pacifist. I don’t believe in the death penalty, or in rejoicing in Osama Bin Laden’s death. I think state-sanctioned murder is wrong. I hate war. I can’t watch boxing or scary movies.

Then, I encountered AT&T.

Actually I have long been a wireless AT&T customer, in fact my first cell phone was with Cingular- which became AT&T. I had a few struggles in the early ’00s but really they were my fault. If you don’t pay your bill for a few months things get hairy, and you can’t really blame anyone but yourself.

But you know how when you have to do something for work that you’ve been assured will be “no problem” so you tell your boss that it’s “no problem” then the next thing you know it’s a huge effing problem? And since you were the one who kept naively repeating what your AT&T rep told you: it’s no problem it’s no problem its no problem- suddenly you look like either an idiot or a liar? Or more precisely: an idiliar.

That’s the position I found myself in today when I was on put on hold for the fourth time in two hours. When the unsuspecting fourth AT&T customer “service” rep got on the phone I had to explain the problem. Again. I had to ask the person that if I sounded like a complete bitch to forgive me, it wasn’t his fault that the company he works for is obviously manufacturing a complicated conspiracy aimed at causing my co-worker and I to suffer aneurisms. I had to temper the hysteria in my fake laugh and fakely say “No problem!” when I was put on hold again when what I really wanted to do was smash the phone into my desk until it was an unrecognizable pile of Chinese manufactured plastic.

While I sat on hold for another 15 minutes my mind wandered. It ended up at a terrible place.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t know very many facts. I have a lot of vague theories based on things I heard while half-listening to NPR and driving badly. Sometimes I later discover that I actually had the radio tuned to KISS FM and it was Drex, not Michelle Norris, spouting off on the housing crisis. I try and be careful, which is why I’m warning you that I might not have this right…

If the Supreme Court decided that a corporation has the same rights as an individual (an American individual- not someone from the Arab world who’s been imprisoned at Gitmo for the past 10 years with no hope of facing a trail or a judge or being treated humanly or being charged with an actual crime) then theoretically a corporation should have the same vulnerabilities as an individual (being picked last for the softball team, getting too drunk at a breast cancer benefit and barfing in a fancy hotel lobby bathroom, repeatedly crashing their car into the cement pole next to their parking spot). And if a corporation can drive me to a level of rage-induced insanity I didn’t know I was capable of…perhaps I am capable of committing a violent act after all. Perhaps, if I could, I would murder AT&T.

I feel terrible writing that. What kind of a person am I? Even a thought-experiment about murdering a non-human makes me horrified by myself.

Then the AT&T rep got back on the line. “Huh,” he said “I think the person you spoke to earlier gave you the wrong information…”

I don’t know what he said after that. I came to a few minutes later, with my co-worker hovering over me with a worried expression on her face as my arms and legs jerked against the floor in spasms. “What happened?” I asked.

“I think you short circuited” she replied.

“Yes yes,” I said impatiently, “but did they fix the line?”

She nodded, “it’s fixed”. I burst into wracking sobs. My murderous rage was washed away by the tears of accomplishing a feat comparable only to climbing Mount Everest or hunting crocodiles with my bare hands or getting my Comcast cable fixed.

In the end, my pacifist nature prevailed. For now.