Rant: "The AT&T stuck-on-hold frustration blues".

What do you do when you feel helpless? What if you are stuck in a loop where you can't get through to the people running the show?

You decide you need to shake things up.

Today's Guest Post came to me with a warning that it wasn't "blog worthy."  It was a rant, he said. Not analysis of anything.

Jeff Lowenfels wrote after spending some eight hours, mostly on hold, in the frustrating phone-tree loops where the voice says to press a button to go back to the main menu. He wrote that the experience gave him better understanding of why many Americans voted for Trump in 2016, and voted for him again in 2020.

Trump is a disrupter. He is bad at running things but he is good at breaking them and letting people know that he doesn't care one bit that he is breaking norms and not "playing fair." Jeff learned that if you want an AT&T service call you don't push 3 for service. Do that and you will wait forever. Push 2, the button to buy something. Then a live person comes right on.

Isn't that disrupting the system?  Yes. It is both an expression of frustration and a way to survive. After three hours on hold, nobody in their right mind respects the old rules and system. You want to shake things up.

Jeff is a college classmate who practiced law in Alaska, but became famous there by writing a popular gardening column, doing so every single week for 45 years so far. He is the author of the best-selling

Jeff Lowenfels

Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Nutrients, Teaming with Fungi, and his most recent, DIY Autoflowering Cannabis.

A reverie, a rant, and an empathetic insight.

Guest Post by Jeff Lowenfels

Every Anti-Trumper has participated in more than one conversation with a Trump fan, puzzling over how they can support the guy. What are they thinking?

Whole CNN and MSNBC shows are dedicated to trying to find the answer. The Atlantic and The New Yorker struggle with it. What we get is advice on how to how to listen more carefully to them, how to empathize with them, and to be very careful casting personal blame on them for the disaster the Trump presidency has been to rules, to norms, to laws. But look at what Trump is doing right now. He told his co-conspirators he would pardon them if they kept mum or lied under oath to protect him; they did; and now he's pardoning them! What more do you have to do to destroy a system of laws? 

We argue about a future for Trumpism with or without Trump himself. It has become a sport. We forget that we should be looking for why people supported Trump and, more important, why some still do, after everything.

I was not thinking about the Trump issue as I reviewed my AT&T bill and found a number attributed to me. I am paying for a number I didn’t even know I had. And for some reason my voicemail stopped working. So, I did what anyone would do. I called AT&T. 

As a college grad, I did this after I Googled the issue and tried 16 different ways to fix it myself. It didn't work. You know where this is going if you were a fan of that TV show “Friends.” Remember that episode where Phoebe was put on the voicemail line, but accidentally hung up after 24 hours of waiting?

I dialed. I could not get a live voice. All I got was the same recording of music and a whole lot of advertising for Direct TV and a public service request about Not looking at your phone while you drive.  AGGGGGHJHHHHHHHHHHH. Over and over and over, telling me to stand by. Hour one. Hour two. These are the very same voice messages they must use on Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

After the third hour of trying to get a live person on the line, I didn’t think of “Friends;" I thought of Nashville and the bomb in front of the AT&T building. (I’m joking. Really. If the FBI is monitoring this blog don’t come after me.) I am just saying I know why the AT&T building might have been a target of a crazy trying to get attention. Three hours on hold!

Suddenly, Trump’s election became clear to me. What do folks want to do when things don’t work? How can they get meaningful help when you don’t have the time, the energy, or the smarts to ask the damn Artificial Intelligence voice mail machine loop the right question?

You break the system, or try to, and you don't care too much about how exactly you do it.

Over the past 15 years or so people have been replaced by machines and AI and voice mails and recorded messages. You can’t get a real person! And darn right people get angry, because the modern world has stopped working for them. The system sometimes meets the needs of the people who made the system--for AT&T, or the people who run or own AT&T, or the government, but not you and me. We want solutions, not loops that pull us back into the very system that isn't working. ATT is a metaphor for the big, impersonal, frustrating everything-system. The government. An economic system that is depressing wages. The healthcare system. The child care system. The immigration system. 

For a whole lot of people "the system" doesn’t work and you on hold getting nowhere.

OK, so, along comes a guy who says the government is a swamp. He points this out in ways you can relate to. Not enough water pressure in the shower? Can’t use hairspray? Can’t mine in a park? (if I hadn’t been brain damaged by those damn AT&T ads, I would give you better examples, but those were the kinds of idiotic things Trump complains about.) And his audiences related. Yeah, those little frustrations. Like the AT&T phone loop.

You get an incorrect utility bill, a lemon car, the wrong product shipped from China, slow cable TV, or big stuff like your job not paying enough, or competition with Mexico, or some new regulation, and now your employer shut down for COVID, and kids not in school. What to do? 

Do you want to vote for people with experience in the system, the people who built the system? Of course not. You want to vote for someone new and different who says he will take a muck rake to it and clean the swamp? 

So of course Trump had appeal. He wasn't going to sit on hold why Congress dithered. He would do things his way, heck with norms, heck with checks and balances, heck with subpoenas, heck with oversight. "Git 'er done."

But he didn’t drain the swamp, of course. He's Mr. Swamp. He gave pardons to the swamp-dwellers. He made racial tensions worse. He didn't fix immigration or trade with China. After four failed years, I think some stay with him because he is saying that he is the only one who can fix things. The Senate and House? Ha! They are tools of the system. He says he is the shake-things-up guy--and all the people who oppose him and are appalled by him are proof of how strong the system works to protect itself against him.

Back to my AT&T story. I finally gave up on day one. Day two was not much better. I did discover if you call someone at AT&T to buy a service, they answer, live, in about 20 seconds. 

I spent another two hours with this group, having convinced them I am an AT&T shareholder and was really upset. They took pity on me. They weren’t able to fix my voice mail, though, and when they put me on hold to get tech help, I ended up in the AT&T dance line again, with the same music and ads. 

Determined now to solve the problem, I dialed 611 about 200 times and tried to get the AI to understand I wanted to speak to someone LIVE. Whether I came up with the right words or it was just my random turn, finally, it happened. It took the AT&T tech 35 minutes to fix a problem I know half a million people must have.  

Artificial Intelligence phone-menu hell is just the kind of experience that might cause someone to vote for Trump. He isn’t a nice guy, or good at managing or building things, but he knows how to get angry, and that’s something Americans can relate to. 

All-told a day was wasted, but the phone problem is solved, and I had something priceless, a better understanding of why people would vote for a guy like Trump.