In the movie version of the low-budget tv series, “The A-Team”, there is a running gag about CIA agents who all identify themselves– whether in Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, or home in the good ole USA, as “Mr Lynch”. The Kafka-esque or perhaps, Beckettian (thinking of Godot…) nature of the joke resonated deeply with me today. How?

Well, prosaically enough, my telephone land-line simply ceased to function a few days back. I think it is a modem problem— but insoluble via customer service half-way around the world. So…. I was offered an array of options for a technician to visit my home: three hour windows of customer (my) availability were required. I picked one.

Roughly two hours of waiting in, a representative from the dispatcher called me: seemed as if the technician would be late. He wasn’t answering his calls. My immediate sense was worry: was this a case for 911? for CSI New York? What happened to this fellow out there on tough city streets in his monopoly-monogrammed van?

It was only a moment later, when I realized that the emotion of organizational dysfunction was being actively extruded: over the organizational boundary and into the customer. As new container of my own anxiety– waiting at home for a repairman who never ultimately came after 7 hours— and the firm’s rationalization. Indeed, 5 separate customer service agents responded to me, as did 3 agents of the dispatcher. Four asked me to grade their helpful performance on a survey they promised I would get, assessing their utility. Each was Mr Lynch: each had the same message and the identical inability to summon another serviceman in a city of millions served by a large monopoly. Each directed my call to 10 minute waits for the dispatcher– and if I was lucky and someone picked up before i hung up (my limit is 20 minutes)– I was told about their inability to find that poor poor unanswering tech: and the promise that he would come, if late. Of course, he never came.

Godot indeed! I still had no telephone service.

When all was said and done, they left a voicemail on my cel-phone: we could try again two days from now (tomorrow is booked, they said): I, of course, yoked to them via my need for a phone, will await them, as did those two other helpless chaps, their Godot.

The modern perversion is that this kind of customer service serves the customer— except in redoubling the anxiety that prompted an appeal to customer service in the first place. The organizational deceit is that the frustrated customer is unaware that “service” is anything but: 1) linguistic hypocrisy and 2) exploiting the customer to absorb organizational incapability.

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