Earlier this month, I found that I had to get a new cell phone. My carrier was Sprint but since they got bought out, or “merged with”, by T-Mobile, I was going to have to get a SIM card or face no phone coverage. And coincidently, my current phone was too old to accept the newly updated SIM cards that T-Mobile was offering.
So I found myself shopping for a new phone at a brightly colored phone store (I think Lovecraft’s Colour Out of Space was actually magenta) and dealing retail salesfolks whose formal training usually involved a fifteen minute video on diversity and an index card of things to say. Fortunately, the people I was dealing with were slightly more intelligent than your average retail store worker.
I found out that I did qualify for an upgrade and that I would get 50% off a new phone. Considering that I had my phone for over four years at this point (a personal record with modern “smart” phones), I felt like I should have gotten more, but I’ll take it, especially considering how expensive cell phones are. I’d rather buy a gaming PC. In fact, you practically are these days when you buy a cell phone.
Anyhow, I had to wait a couple of days for them to get the phone in stock. I found out that my wife qualified for a full upgrade, even though her phone was newer, so we had to wait for her phone to come in stock as well.
So the day the phones arrived, I showed up and started the whole paperwork process because you can’t just buy a phone and sign up for a service, you have to buy into a contract and sell a piece of your soul.
But then a problem occurred. On the final page of the digital app that processed the paperwork, the program crashed before I could sign and submit it. When the retail worker (let’s call her Donna) brought it back up, we found that my account was now in “Tentative” status. No big deal, right? All Donna has to do is approve my account and continue the process, right?
Yeah, that’s not how things work in the real world. Donna had insufficient permissions to do so. So she had to make a call to T-Mobile tech support. Except this wasn’t a common problem for tech support to handle. So for the next five hours or so, Donna made calls to various departments and people to see if someone, anyone, could solve the problem we had.
And, of course, no one could solve the problem and half of them couldn’t understand the problem at all. This is because like Donna, they’re training consisted of a 15 minute video about diversity in the workforce and an index of steps to solve the problems they would face.
In essence, they were all cogs in a large corporate bureaucratic system with little room for flexibility or fluid functionality. Hell, I suspect that if someone could fix the issue, he would’ve been fired for overstepping authority.
So at the close of business that day, I went home with no phone service, my current cell phone having been reduced to nothing more than a small tablet. And no, WiFi Calling wasn’t an option either.
I didn’t mind the situation, actually. I wasn’t mad at Donna or the many tech support operators she talked to. It’s not their fault that their system was utterly incapable of handling a problem. If anything, I’d blame the software architects and project manager who designed the system in the first place, who were probably either an outsourced software company or a bunch of H1B Visa recruits whose competence was way below the average skilled American worker.
And, to be honest, I’m not important enough to anyone to merit a phone call. And yes, 911 calls will still work even without any viable SIM card or working phone service. So if I had any medical emergencies, I would’ve been fine.
In any case, the situation was resolved within 24 hours and I got my new phone. But at the end of it all, I realized that our technocratic society is probably doomed to failure, like ever other society, but human beings simply aren’t going to be allowed the freedom or trust to maintain it.