I’m hoping the polite reply, with CC’s to the entire sales and marketing teams, suggesting that someone’s CRM data is flawed properly conveys my annoyance. Sending out cold-call emails insinuating we had previously discussed a project leveraging a firm’s product really touches me here. /me points to a “bad” place on the doll. Do people actually get these emails and think to themselves, “Oh, yeah, I entirely forgot about that storage project I hadn’t ever thought about before. We should totally do this.”?

Unrelated…sort of. Last Friday I received a letter from a provider of commercial services that was blatantly trolling for ways to avoid upholding their side of the agreement. It included a toll-free number to be called so this matter could be “resolved.” Calling the number, one is immediately shunted into an automated voice-analyzing system intending to “resolve” this with as little investment on their side as possible.

I fed it unintelligible-to-it answers to break out of the script and talk to a living person. Only, instead of getting a “concerned operator who is standing by” I’m subjected to several minutes of heavily clipped classical music while I wait. Eventually a “customer representative” picks up the line. So I put him on hold while I went and poured a beer off the tap. It felt good.

I think I’ll start putting people on hold who put me on hold. I need to get a recording where I play horribly compressed music and intermittently interrupt that to announce that, while I truly value the service their company is providing, I’m currently conducting other business and that the next available me will take their call as soon as he becomes available. Then I can put the phone next to it while I go pour another beer.

And while I’m here, can I point out just how dissonant many bits of corporate jargon are?

‘Customer representative’ is not someone representing the customer or the customer’s interests. A customer representative is representing the company in its interactions with the customer. It should be ‘company/corporate representative’.

And hold music. Why do we do this? And since we do this, why do we make it as annoying as possible. Vivaldi’s The Rite of Spring is akin to having a banshee screeching in your ear while driving in stop-and-go traffic. When you play it over the phone, it loses any sort of philharmonic fidelity that might otherwise redeem the recording. When you compress it to AM-radio levels of degradation and then push all of the levels up to their maximum so as to clip every single note, you have the musical equivalent of dragging your teeth while sucking on a lemon chalkboard. Yet this is how a company chooses to help me while away my day, waiting for them to deign to speak to me. Because they value me as a customer.

Sorry about all of this. Just having a more emphatic than usual ‘get off my lawn’ day.