Customer Servicehas
been called anything from an oxymoron to one of the world’s greatest unsolved
mysteries. Apparently, somewhere in the middle, is a portal of sorts. A portal
to a dimension that can only be described as, The Call Center Zone…
"Sir, I'm going to reset
your cable TV box from my end and send an update to it, that should do it. The
reset will take about ten minutes..."
"OK..."
Two minutes later: "Sir,
is it done rebooting?"
"Nope."
"That's because it's only
been two minutes, it takes about 10 minutes. Give it more time..."
"Uh, sure."
Two minutes later: "Sir,
is it done rebooting yet?"
"Nope."
"Yeah, it takes ten
minutes, you have to give it time."
"Whatever you say."
Two minutes later: "Sir,
how about now?"
"Zip. Nada."
"Of course. Ten minutes
haven't gone by yet, sir, be patient."
"Of course."
One minute later: "Sir,
is there anything wrong with your phone? I don't hear any noises in the
background..."
"Um… you want me to make noises over the phone??"
"No, no: the reason I
keep asking you every two minutes is because not a single sound is coming from
your home. Normally there's some kind of noise on our calls. Kids screaming,
dogs barking, things like that. It's also a way we know we're still connected
to the customer. Is everything OK?"
"Well, it WAS... but
frankly now I'm a little self-conscious. I come from an Italian family, you
know, lots of screaming all the time... I've worked very hard for the silence
you're hearing. But now you're making me wonder if I've taken things too
far..."
Nikolai looks at me with that look he gives when he's thoroughly
confused by what's going on. Tech support woman interjects:
"No, no, no, I'm so sorry
sir, I didn't mean anything by it! Oh my god, I was just making conversation,
you know, since we do have to wait ten minutes! No, you're fine, no need to
worry... take as long as you need sir, I'm in no hurry, really..."
"Okie dokie." A few seconds later I start humming "O Sole Mio".
"Oh, I know that one...
It's Italian right??"
"Yup..."
"Is it the one about the
moon and a piece of pie??"
"I'm not sure. Hum a few bars for me?"
"You know: 'When the moon
eats your eye like a big piece of pie...' Oh... I'm sorry, can I put you on hold for a
minute?"
"Sure."
...
"Thank you for holding,
I'm back."
"No problem. Box rebooted, problem fixed by the way."
"Good! And sir, my
supervisor would like to know if I have resolved your problem to your complete
satisfaction..."
"Please tell your supervisor that you can sing Italian songs to
my cable box anytime. Fixed the problem, I don't really care what technology
you use. Your competition was using fiber optics, and they couldn't get it to
work if their life depended on it."
"Oh I'm so happy to hear
that! Thank you for being a valued customer!"
"Arrivederci."
Tech support woman giggles, and then hangs up. Nikolai rolls his
eyes and sighs. I don’t remember if most dogs sigh or not, but Nikolai
sure sighs a lot. Maybe it’s a Siberian thing. It couldn’t be an Italian thing,
because it would involve a lot of paw gesturing and a lot of barking.
Back in the USSR (Kyiv’s subway, photo by Sanskrity Sinha)
One
of my earliest (and few) possessions is a travel certificate that a now defunct
airline gave me when I was six months old. Let me pre-empt my wiseass friends here and say that, no, it wasn't aboard the Wright Flyer I. It was a
big 'ol jet airliner, equipped with four jet engines and six miniskirted
"stewardesses". Barely a jet, according to the Smithsonian museum,
but I'll take it. I probably smoked an entire pack of Marlboros on that trip,
as this was even before the days of "smoking sections". Oh, but the
miniskirts more than made up for it... six months old or not, Mad Men
world here I come.
When you travel long distances frequently from an
early age, your view of the world is going to be different from that of a
normal person. Just a few short years after my flight debut, I found myself in
Bogota, Colombia. "They speak your language, you'll be fine." I was the kid who always spoke with a funny accent, but I picked them up fairly quickly.
It finally hit me 40 years and a million kilometers later, as I was
wandering the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine. It's not the language, stupid.
First of all, let me get this off my chest: the Beatles were spot on about Ukrainian women… my sweet lord. But I digress. Within living generations, the
people of Kyiv have been pissed off first by Hitler, then by Stalin,
and now by Stalin's Mini-Me, apparently. You would think that by now they
would have a right to be fairly angry, and you would be right. But
something amazing happens when you figure out how to transcend differences.
Here's a short story of how I learned this lesson from a Ukrainian
bartender named Alexander the Great.
So there I was, not a word of Ukrainian, never
mind Russian. I finished my meetings, most of them with an interpreter, and I
needed a drink badly. No interpreter, just me, the underworld of Kyiv’s metro, and the
first bar I happened to come across. Before my interpreter left me to fend
for myself, I asked him how to say the one phrase with which I arm myself
whenever I happen to experience radio silence from Houston: "I am
sorry, I don't speak (fill in your language)". He told me, I memorized
it, good enough. Vodka & tonic, here I come. I looked around the smoky bar
as I walked in, and I observed what the first guy to walk in the place did.
Body language, eye contact, speak. My turn: same body language, same eye
contact, speak: ya pereproshuyu, ya ne hovoryu po- ukrayinsʹky. Bartender
looks at me for a second, then all of a sudden smiles and says "It's
OK, I don't speak much fucking English!" We both laughed, and I
decided I was going to try a universal language: I stretched my hand out to
him, smiled, and said, "I'm Joe."
Two hours, three tonics, and four vodkas later,
we knew this much about each other: he knew that I ("Joe Cocker" is
what he decided he was going to call me) was born in Argentina, had lived in
the jungles of Colombia (couldn't talk him out of that one, "jungles"
it was), grew up in Rome, and currently lived in New York City (close enough,
Cincinnati doesn't register on the world radar). I knew his name was Alexander
the Great (Alex, but he said I could call him the long version of his name),
couldn't decide between two girlfriends, was an engineer (he pointed at the
lights, but I'm pretty sure he meant electrical), and
that his uncle had been executed by the Nazis after an infamous World War II incident
called the "Death Match". I had actually heard about that
story during one of my meetings in Kyiv. My client drove me around the city for
about an hour before dropping me off at my hotel, and pointed out the
stadium where the match between the Nazis and the Ukrainian team had taken
place. The Nazis had challenged the Ukrainians to a football match, but after
the Ukrainians beat them, there were rumors that some of the players had later
been arrested, and some were even executed. There is some dispute over what exactly happened but come on: knowing the nazis I’m betting it definitely happened.
The story had made an impact on me, and when I
heard that his uncle was a part of it, I was moved. I asked him to
share a shot of vodka with me in honor of his uncle. I raised my glass towards
the photo of Alex's uncle in uniform and said “sapsybi”, and we
downed our shots. We exchanged contact information, I gave him one of my cards
and left a big tip. He looked at the tip, picked it up, and gave it right back
to me. I stretched out my hand to say goodbye, but he hugged me instead. In
just two hours, Alexander the Great and I had managed to connect, with about 10
words of Ukrainian and 50 words of English.
Almost ten years have passed since I met
Alexander the Great. Neither of us kept in touch, though I always hope he
remembers the time Joe Cocker stopped by his bar. He might even tell the story
that way, because our communication was actually more about the music than it was
about the vodka. After much prodding, I did sing the first few lines of "With
a Little Help From My Friends". For his part, he gave "You
Are So Beautiful" a try, and I have to say, he almost nailed it.
Cocker convulsions and all. But as far as connecting with another fellow human
being goes, it doesn't get any better than having a bartender in Kiev look at
you across the bar, and pour his heart out by telling you that, well, you are sofucking beautiful. To him.
It is right there and then that I began to
realize, not only is communicating hardly about knowing a language, knowing the
world is hardly about traveling. People are not small-minded because they have
not travelled: they are small minded because unchallenged fear is dominant in their lives. I
have met many self-professed road warriors who carry themselves around with
self-importance and arrogance. And I have met people like Alexander the Great,
the real road warriors in my eyes. The ones who have never travelled far by common standards, yet whose priority to connect are flying
them across the universe and leaving many road warriors in the dust.
Here's where one of the best lessons I learned gets
astrophysical, so fasten your seat belts: last I calculated, I have broken the two million kilometers of travel mark a while ago. Let's say I travel another
million before I die. So what. Approximately two million kilometers is what the
likes of Alexander the Great travel every hour. Well, technically, we all are
traveling that much, but no one is paying attention: six-hundred
kilometers per second (just over two million km/hr) is the resulting speed that
our spaceship Milky Way is zipping towards the Great Attractor (a
brilliant name if you ask me, a high-five to the scientist who came up with
that one). I have come to a conviction that guys like Alex are
intuitively aware of this universal law of gravitation.
So travel away, by all means, our world is indeed
a wonderful place. But if you don't work hard to connect with people around you, wherever you or they happen to be, then let me respectfully submit
the following for your consideration: getting on an airplane and traveling thousands of kilometers away is not going to magically make you capable of connecting with the world. As the great astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote in “Contact”:
“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of
such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut
off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've
found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” (Constellation
Vega Alien to Dr. Ellie Harroway)
