the timboucher experience

So I finally gave in to all the hype and decided, however grudgingly, to re-join the “real world.” I bought a cell phone.

“It’s like your a citizen now,” an employer and friend said to me.

“You’re selling out,” a co-worker announced over drinks after work.

In a way, they’re both right. (”Oh, that’s a cute little phone,” another friend exclaimed.) After about three years of a blissfully cell-phone free existence, I decided it was time I finally manned up and made myself available for more regular and hopefully more profitable employment. I had also gotten very used to making do without one. The thing I’ve found about self-denial is that you can basically habituate yourself to anything. No cell phone? No problem. You find other means to coordinate activities with other beings. And you accept certain limitations of technology capability, social activity and systems of behavior as a result of making what amounts to - outrageously, I might add - the ‘extremist’ consumer decision, nowadays, of not having a cell phone.

Not having a cell phone means you never have to get all excited about doing something only to have your friend or whomever call you at the last minute to cancel. Not having a cell phone means not getting broken up with over text message during a staff meeting at work. Not having a cell phone means you are where you are, with the people you’re with, doing what you’re doing. And while things and people elsewhere may have real importance and meaning, they can’t intrude into the here and now unless your heart conjures memories or imaginings of them or they appear at your doorstep.

Maybe it is extremist. Not having a cell phone now means, in many cases, that you can’t get a certain job, or that you won’t land a certain apartment you’ve had your eye on uptown. You’ve got to be accessible, ready and able to buzz into activity with non-local electronic facsimiles of humans while temporarily suspending contact with whomever is actually sitting there in front of you. Using a cell phone is like going into a private trance. The world evaporates as your center of attention levitates towards magnetic satellites whirling around the earth… or something.

I could go on and on with the philosophical metaphors, but what I really mean here is business. That’s why I got a cell phone - to get down to business. I shopped around locally-available carriers. There seems to have developed over the summer a hot and heavy telecom advertising competition over the poor-people’s cell providers. Packages that offer things like pay only for the days you use (phones that function like parasitic parking meters, constantly needing to be fed credit card quarters) or the opportunity to pay a monthly fee in advance with no long-term contract, credit check or termination fee.

Those options are what drew me to Cricket, a provider operating within selected urban areas which - to be honest, I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about when I signed up. The last cell phone I had (whose glorious multi-media destruction is documented elsewhere on this domain), a rep of the provider actually had the gall to tell me that they couldn’t guarantee service in a building. **Oh that’s good! Cause I never go in those!**

Simply moronic. And of course, I still had to pay an early termination fee on my contract - despite that they had let the cat out of the bag that implicit within their service is an un-stated clause that you should already know, duh (stupid!): that they don’t guarantee service.

So when I sank a heavy rock into the back of my last cell phone and it emitted a little blue streak of toxic smoke like I had just killed a baby dragon, liberation was mine. Freed from the bonds of a technology which no longer served me, I rejoiced and drank a beer.

I pissed on a cell phone once in a bar bathroom. I convinced a friend that management had given him the phone so they could control him, and somehow miraculously, mysteriously and ridiculously, he actually handed over his phone so I could go piss on it. I brought it into the bathroom, immediately dropped it in the bowl, zipper down he walks in the door and says, “Um, do you think we could just go break it in the alley?”

“Too late dude, already pissing on it.”

Cricket, though, is all about respect. I’m sorry, they spell it, “respeKt” with a capitalized letter “K” thrown in for emphasis.

“We’re down, bro.” Their marketing messaged boiled down into one convenient misspelling. Because, what do they mean by “respeKt”? Maybe it’s different from *respect.* Maybe I’m the one misunderstanding something.

Cell phones are like jealous lovers. We end up needing each other too much, more than is healthy for us.

See, I was lured in with their circus tricks. Offer a bunch of promises up front of a free month of service and a fifty dollar mail-in rebate to cover the cost of the phone. Get the rube in the front door, where once they’re in you can continue to fleece them. I’m not some yokel though. Having broken their sacred icon once alread, I understand what maybe the occult essence of these phone companies perhaps better than some. I was ready. I kept all my screen shots. I saved all my web pages. I recorded their promises. I have it all documented. Once, twice, three times and then again for good measure. I knew where this was going.

But I was hoping it would be different this time. Why do products marketed to poor people always have the worst features and most restrictions? I was hoping to have found a company that at last understood me and my demographic segment, that respeKted me. At last! What a relief!

So, when I emailed customer support asking why my billing date for actual use of my phone shadily started six full days before I even received my phone in the mail and why I hadn’t received my promise rebate, you can say that I was hoping for a response, but not expecting much.

Thank you for your inquiry, an automated email alert from a no-reply robot notified me of receipt of my message with a copy of what I’d written (and backed up elsewhere).

A customer service representative in your area will contact you within 48 hours. Or thereabouts. I don’t have the actual wording in front of me - but rest assured I can get it. (That’s how much I truZt and respeKt phone companie5. ) Of course, no email response. Why even hire customer service agents if you can just use FAQ’s (they have one that answers “Why didn’t I receive a free month of service?”) and email robots to reply to actual human people.

So a couple weeks later, I notified customer service of the oversight, re-stated my request for information and assistance and stated that not being replied to *at all* was simply an unacceptable level of customer service. Two weeks will be up, I think next week - at which point I will reassess how to approach the situation.

I recently had the pleasure of attending an informal focus group (aside: “What is that, some kind of religious thing?” a friend asked when I brought up the event) for a friend of mine from college who is in the prototyping stages of releasing a line of designer organic products. I don’t know how the subject came up, but someone made a really interesting statement at our round-table (which was videotaped to add to the awkwardness - I felt like I was on “The View”) about how it seems that the only way she can ever get customer service “these days” is to tweet about a company.

Imagine that: living in an age where you’d have to post information about a company in a public place to get them to respond to you as a human: something they should be doing already as a privilege in-built to the provider-client business relationship. It’s a partnership. It’s not supposed to be a corporate algorithm for squeezing money out of people in exchange for inferior service.

Not that the actual call quality of Cricket is bad at all. I’m actually pretty happy with the quality of the technology. It’s nothing special, and I can’t use it outside my city really - but as a work phone that doesn’t matter to me. I suspect that my telecommunications needs will change in the near future, but that’s why I got a provider with no contract. I just want, at this point, to make sure I get what was promised when I signed up. It’s nothing major. It’s nothing that’s going to cost some corporation a billion dollars and will require them to get a bail-out. But the fifty or a hundred bucks at stake mean a couple weeks worth of groceries for me as a poor starving humanimal trapped on the ground floor of society.

More than that, few people “these days” ever stop to think of what cell phone technology really entails on many levels. On one level, we’re talking about being continually bathed and bombarded in electromagnetic microwave radiation in our pockets and separated only from the delicate complex instruments of our brains by a thin sheath of blood and bone. On another level, you run afowl of the endless warrens of hidden trick fees designed to punish the user, to thwart his reason with byzantine idiocy, to break him down psychologically, to make him look and feel stupid. *How dare you agree to purchase goods or services from us, puny mortal!* {Lightning bolt explodes} *That will teach you!* (All laughing)

And that’s leaving completely aside the third head of this monster, the perfectly out-in-the-open collusion between telecom giants and the omni-would-be-presence of the anti-terrorist-crazed Federal government. To pick a cell phone company is, in part, to pick a legal instrument by which the government (and who knows who else…) has in-built authority and immediate access to monitor individuals and their inter-minglings. Certainly, many of these same technologies could also be painted in pro-capitalist hard-on jargonography as the technological hope of a generation: the doorway to a technological future that opens upon a vista of untold imaginative and profitable possibilities.

Somehow, of course, through all this seems to get lost the actual experience of the human. Person-to-person quality interactions. Does your cell phone facilitate or obfuscate them in a cloud of radioactive blue smoke spelling out the letters, “R-E-S-P-E-K-T”?

• Gmail Wish List
• Speaking of Birthdays
• Contact me all you want! See if I care!
• I’m a huge moron
• [Free Business Idea] Mp3 To Cassette Tape Service