Chatbots and Condescension

A new low standard now awaits anyone with the audacity to breathe another day and interact with U.S. businesses. (Neither one of which are really recommended at this point in time, by the way.)

We are especially referencing the larger companies, of course, whose massive profits of billions would naturally mean they had no money to provide meaningful customer service. Better to borrow a half-humanity from AI chatbots to pretend you care in the most formulaic way possible to not solve the problem, after all.

Because everyone enjoys AI so much that it’s always best to start some interaction at a business claiming to deal with humans, employ humans, and be in business for some service that humans want or need with a little Silicon Valley trendy “FU” to kick things off in just the right insulting direction that you are not worth another human’s time as the top humans at their own company get rewarded with millions a year to unemploy humans to toss bot brats at worthless human customers, who must understand their place at the bottom of the ladder.

Yes, don’t we just exist far, far below the exalted status of machine, as nature intended and as has of course assisted hundreds of thousands of years of modern human evolution, which occurred in an isolated cubicle of hardware fornicating with software to produce planned obsolence landfill poisonous enough to end life on earth. As it is written and therefore justly so.

Off to a brilliant start that we were all perfectly neurologically designed for, preferably on small screens in 8 point font with as many dysfunctional QR codes leading nowhere as one can manage to legally jam into a fake process designed to be fake and yet also designed to be necessary to meet the demands of the corporate machines of banking, working, driving, housing, servicing, and…I don’t know some other stuff people seem to need or whatever.

I mean, people, am I right? Why do they think they get to be a part of society or something? Get on a screen already, you schmucks, we’re not going to call you! And email is dead, except of course for scam artists who are about the only people left who use email and call. And those bigwig corporate muckity-mucks would never want to associate themselves with something scam artists would do, like use a phone or email. Which they can always reach you at thanks to the fact that all the corporate muckity-mucks do is get hacked. So don’t you worry about your data!

Data that their AI chatbot will demand more of as you demand any explanation as to why they require all this for you to so much as get some ice cream from the grocery store. You didn’t realize that somehow that came under the heading of the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, FATCA regulations, and the SEC, but evidently, it now does because some dipshits in Congress can’t get their act together. Ever.

Sure, sure, you just wanted to have a travel app, maybe, or it might have been a shopping app, or it might even be an app for some service you’ve used for decades that is so wisely doing away with face-to-face interactions to utilize the enhanced interrogation powers of a poorly-coded faux-human, but now that the small screen automated processes have failed, you’re stuck in a pre-scripted loop of proving you aren’t a criminal to futilely dream of getting your own paycheck to your account sometime before the next major weather event when all power will be wiped out to your entire region for like, maybe a year or something. It’s not like FEMA really exists to be able to care anymore, is it?

If you have all the time in the world, you can perhaps loop enough with the AI chatbot to type poetry into the bar and fry its maniac circuits such that an actual human “agent” must respond. And it is always nice when they can make “customer service” sound like a CIA rendering with said official “agent” located in some “customer service” blacksite somewhere halfway around the world in an undisclosed location using a fifth language that unfortunately, none of you speak. It is a real shame we extinctified the passenger pigeon, because their efficiency and lack of bullshit chatback would drastically improve all of our timelines at this point.

Wishing for death, you’ll try to convince the human you nearly accidentally reached by basically just being forced to be a total dick about the tomfoolery of AI chatbot scripts (as if you hadn’t read the web pages and tried everything you could before even reaching the chatbot stage…yeah, you started six months ago on this), yes, you’ll try to convince that blacksite human that you are, in fact, not the dumbest person on earth.

Oh, you already turned it off and on again because that hasn’t been around for a while, and also why on earth would you already know how to check your spam or junk folders and also you are now an expert on five Reddit threads you never knew existed because you got just one step further than five million other confused people who aren’t as obsessed as you are as spending time with corporate American tech experiments on how to turn a population criminally insane. You long for the relative ease of the Stanford Prison Experiment, really, in its significantly less painful but still vomitorious outcomes.

This “customer service agent”, likely MK-Ultra’ed in modern fashion as a mere chatbot extension of purposeful frustration or they do not receive their meager paycheck for their job of passive-aggressive stonewalling expressly designed to kick the most marginal people to the curb as being unworthy of corporate America’s benevolent magnificence of its infinite demands for your entire life history, all sensitive data, and also your second grade book report on spiders to prove that you are not somehow in league with the long-dead Pablo Escobar (because you, the non-billionaire customer, can hardly be expected to be representing yourself honestly even though of course you would have been locked in the slammer long ago if you had so much as drooled improperly on a bag of Jolly Ranchers at the grocery store), yes, you—what the hell do you want today, you wheedling little plebe, from the human agent annoyed that one more pre-scripted chatbitch session hasn’t fully answered all the things it never answered before?!

I mean, it’s only the same exact answers in the same exact way that were not helpful which was why you needed a human, so it’s obviously that human’s job to kick you in the face. Like I said, blacksite operation torture chamber, somehow operating legally, because the abuse of who you are as a human being and the theft of your time is perfectly legal in a landscape where Congress hasn’t showed up to govern in about 50 years, mostly because their corporate owners demand they do nothing for the American people and instead support Gilded Age monopolies as governance. So, basically, this chatbot chitchat of pre-programmed tech-to-human fail passes daily as “just doing business” instead of a criminal act. As it is written and therefore justly so, and also as the holy C-Suite scripture dictates: “If you aren’t one of us, just fucking die already”. Apparently, it’s both the first and 35th commandment in their “business as usual” Bible.

So you, the undaunted peasant, knowing your entire life is a waste because the society around you feels free to waste it on this unnecessary, cowardly act of destroying the true art and science of customer service, the most noble of professions that was never compensated properly, never honored in a dishonorable society, never valued in a place that places no value on its own people, soldier forward in rage and despair. As one must when there is nothing else on offer. Except one more offer to spend money on something you don’t need because it’s part of your membership club you never asked for that’s associated with some utility that’s a basic in life but also wants to sell you concert tickets for the price of a small luxury island replete with doomsday bunker. And you would certainly never come out of that bunker now, if you had the money to purchase it as an add-on for the membership benefits you never signed onto to just use some app a few times a year for something essential yet so far away.

Declining the offer that you never sought for the thing you could never afford, feeling that perhaps if the basic service here is missing you’re really not looking for any add-ons, it is now your job to spend your entire workday, and/or preferably a month of Sundays, to get fired from your job due to the time spent going through the cue of humans you finally beat AI to get to, who have no intention whatsoever of getting you any “customer service”. You’ll spend hours a day every day asking for one sentence that contains something archaic, ancient, mysterious…it used to be known as “information”. If you don’t have a library card and haven’t ever encountered a Before Times technology known as a “paper book”, you may not have any real reference points whatsoever on this whole “information” thing, so, add that project to your list if you haven’t already to make sure that you are in touch with what the “customer service” blacksite agents haven’t been trained on.

You’ll explain the same thing to at least twelve people always shuttling you to someone else on the “team” because somehow getting you one ounce of “answer” is not in their “department”. These corporate business euphemisms will be used as many times as possible to pretend to be doing business while meaning to prevent business from ever getting accomplished. Mostly, the human agents are there to repeat each other, repeat the AI chatbot, and type bollocks into a chatbar about somehow ever getting back to you with answers, thinking that if you are stupid enough to try to get something accomplished for your life in today’s America, you’re definitely dumb enough to believe that whopper. Notably, no ETA can ever be expected on when they’ll “get back to you” about that as you’re shuttled digitally to one more inferno of a destination in the assembly line of “customer service” purgatory.

Longing for coins on your eyelids to cross the river Styx with and chomping at the bit for Charon’s cheerful company (by comparison), you can always unwittingly plummet to the ninth circle of hell by having that one neuron fire that says, “a five-minute phone call could have solved this already”. Stuffing socks into your screaming maw to stem the bleed from your soul, keep those fingers busy typing on a smartphone, laptop, tablet, television remote, and also if possible Mark Twain’s typewriter, simultaneously please, because that is all the login process actually requires and just because Mr. Clemens’ typewriter can’t read the QR code, you are now condemned as a has-been Luddite unworthy of the stunning efficiency and beauty of Ivy League educated C-Suite schmucks who have their assistants do all their digital communications for them anyway so they really know what kind of company they’re running here.

It’s important that you, serf, bow in obeisance for hours on end to the slights to your capabilities, with various “team” agents from “customer service” unable to answer what documents you are supposed to provide, or indeed, how to upload them. Sure, ask again what information they need or where they see some process going wrong; they are not there to know or care! They are there to make sure you are one step closer to ending it all, unable to bank or work or even get a message to a friend that you are being killed in slow motion by a society off the rails with tech love and human hatred. We’ll “get back to you on that”, no ETA.

And sure, you might wonder how you ever got a driver’s license or rented an apartment if you were truly so bad at filling out forms and like, knowing what your own name was. You might wonder if you were truly so incapable of typing anything correctly or uploading a basic document how you graduated any number of schools or even sent the list of jokes to your friends or say, interacted on social media for decades already. Indeed, how did you fill out all those insurance forms or medical forms or school forms or like…anything…because obviously if you can’t magically osmose some obtuse process one company does differently than another company on a non-explanatory platform claiming to explain everything, you are the problem.

Oh, yes, you’re correct. I am your problem now. You’ve made sure of that.

You might wonder why asking for a checklist of information or documents needed is inappropriate. But pretty much everything at the “customer service” blacksite is inappropriate, so…there’s that. You can ask for the 150th time what information is missing, knowing the end goal is to keep you missing in action. You can tell the company that if there were just a flow chart of how to do this that say, was part of their website, fewer people would struggle to understand what came first, second, or third. Maybe people could help themselves, as your “customer service” agents suggest they do, if there was something helpful they had on hand to point the way.

Now, provide 17,000 screen shots to every “team” member in every “department” of each step you’ve moved through, or haven’t, to prove that you are trying do anything because they just know you aren’t trying at all. But if you want the transcript of the chat, which at this point is longer than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica collection ever was, their company cannot and will not provide that to you. Yes, yes, at a blacksite, you destroy all the evidence.

So, our way is to have no way. Our right is to have no right. Our life is to have no life, deemed unworthy of the asking because corporate America is huffing chatbot crack while killing jobs while making archeology out of customer service, in a piss-poor understanding of pitchforks, guillotines, and the tides of human history that even the very rich and very selfish and very brutal and very time-wasting have not always escaped. As it has been written, and therefore ever justly so. Check out the “I’ve Been Bitchslapped by Entitled Assholes One Too Many Times” Bible. I think you’ll find it reads a little differently than your corporate meeting minutes (that no board member ever reads anyway because that is the assistant’s job).

Mofos, you make me miss the lines at the DMV. You make heart surgery look simpler than your app. You’ve made customer service a past-tense wistful look-back at one more occupation truly essential and never elevated in status and compensation. Kind of like teaching! One more classic modern global capitalist cannibal feast consuming any respect, value, or relationship other than disdain and despair.

And to the small businesses, fighting mightily in a tirade of tariffs, wars, and corporate-controlled domination of monopolized markets in our race-to-the-bottom offshored abnegation of responsibility to each other and the planet…thank you for keeping it righteous by keeping it human. Not all solutions lie in technology.