A head banging experience

I purchased a new memory-foam mouse pad earlier this week. Had it custom made. It says: “Bang Head Here!”

I decided to order it because over the course of nine days consumed by 27 time-sucking phone calls to the cellular company’s customer service during which I was put on hold 61 times and disconnected seven times I was in danger of sending myself to the emergency room for treatment of a severe head injury from … banging my head on my desk, repeatedly.

I won’t go into all the gory details here except to say this: all I was trying to do was help my mom transfer her cell, which has been on my account for seven years, to another less expensive carrier and determine what impact this would have on my bill.

The first was a walk in the park, albeit an unkept park with tall weeds and lurking snakes, compared to the second which was an excursion through the bowels of hell barefoot and blindfolded.

The only thing that was clear after the first junket into the telecom multiverse was that removing mom’s phone line would increase the basic rate of the other two lines associated with the account. What was so unclear as to be akin to trying to see through a black hole was how much that increase would be.

I figured a telecommunications company would be able to, well, communicate clearly and accurately. I quickly discovered, after the first dozen or so calls and at least as many follow-up emails and texts, that was a complete fantasy much like the one I have about an unknown, excessively rich relative dying and leaving me an inheritance that exceeds Elon Musk’s net worth. Yet another life disappointment.

Over the course of the conversations with the 27 different agents, I was quoted nearly as many different base prices and service bundles. This despite the fact that I simply wanted to keep the remaining two lines’ services exactly the same. I thought I had this nailed in one call until, I received both a follow-up email and text confirming my services and cost neither of which had any similarity to what I had been told and agreed to on the phone 10 minutes earlier. And thus began the head banging as each subsequent agent I spoke to said similar things like “I don’t know why you were told that. We don’t offer those services at that price.”

It didn’t seem to make a hill of beans difference that I had the employee identification number as well as the order confirmation number for the first call as well as for the 26 subsequent employees I’d spoken to and orders I had placed. Apparently, the telecom customer service agents don’t really record calls for training purposes and customer satisfaction or even take notes for that matter and unanimously believe and have no problem saying, in essence, that all their colleagues are lying liars who lie.

It was enough to bring a grown woman with a headache, lump on her forehead and most likely a concussion to tears.

But I persevered. And while I struggled on, tangled in the conglomerate’s miasma of bureaucracy (and incompetence) I got curious about the about the origins of the expression, which summed up my experience. So, I did a deep dive into “red tape.”

Red tape, actually red ribbon, was used as far back as the 16th Century when Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman emperor used red tape to bind important documents. By the 17th Century the practice of binding legal documents with red tape had spread throughout the western world and American colonies.

By the American Civil War the practice of tying things up with red tape was entrenched in our government’s administrative practices so much so, in fact, that in 1864 the War Department purchased 154 miles of the stuff. This was enough, so it is said, to stretch from the War Department’s Winder Building in Washington, D.C. to the Confederate fortifications in Petersburg, Virginia.

At the end of the war Civil War veterans’ records were bound in red ribbon, and the difficulty in obtaining those records to file pension claims led to the American expression of “red tape” to describe having to go through excessive rigmarole.

So after nearly 60 hours of egregious hullabaloo with the telecom company, I’d learned an interesting historical tidbit, bought a new mouse pad, consumed half a bottle of aspirin and pretty much resigned myself to the fact that next month’s cell phone bill will leave me in shock and awe. Thank God I have a soft spot to bang my head.