The new irony of customer service
By Christopher Schaberg.
In the classic 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the insatiable Augustus Gloop falls into Willy Wonka’s confectionary marvel, the chocolate river. As the boy struggles to dogpaddle in the cocoa current, his mother screams and shouts in alarm from the shore—“He can’t swim! Do something!” To which Gene Wilder’s eponymous Wonka responds by staring blankly away, gazing toward the camera, and saying, flatly, “Help. Police. Murder.”
I was struck by the ingenious use of irony in this scene—and throughout the entire movie. The late American writer David Foster Wallace defines irony simply: when what one hears does not align with what one sees or knows to be the truth. In the scene above, Willy Wonka clearly could not care less about the fate of Augustus Gloop or his mother’s hysterical cries for help; indeed, he is worried about his chocolate being sullied and spoiled by coming into contact with boy. When Wonka intones, “Help. Police. Murder,” the audience sees clearly that his words do not summon help, do not hail the police, and do not describe a murder (at least, not one that has happened yet).
In his 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace notes that irony is best used in an emergency situation: it is good at shocking us out of ingrained ways of seeing, by exploiting and exacerbating the rift between things we say and things as they actually are. Thus Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory works by using the simple pleasures of sweets to expose many of the dark sides of consumer culture: hidden labor, hoarding, addiction, greed, paranoia, etc. Wonka’s quirky chocolatier and his entire shrouded factory of fabulations serve to send up the grimy post-industrial world beyond.
The problem with irony, Wallace says in that same essay, is that you can’t rely on it for repeated use: it doesn’t offer a way to rebuild the relationship between reality and how we communicate about it—it’s just really effective at revealing contradictions that are often hiding in plain sight. Irony can work very well within the constraints of a film because it can set up a dynamic of contradictory sights and sounds, or events seen and events heard, and thereby level social critique, slapstick comedy, or political commentary. What irony can’t do so well, Wallace worries, is offer a constant attitude that one carries out of the movie theater and into the world—particularly when the world itself operates like Wonka’s chocolate factory: promising miracles, but always with a hitch.
We see this play out more than we would probably like to admit. Just look at the next pile of junk mail that lands with a slap or thud on your table or floor. Contemporary consumer culture assures us that all our needs can be taken care of by a simple phone call, using a conveniently supplied unique code number. The perfect mattress at a once-in-a-lifetime deal. A limited time offer for two pizzas for the price of one. Refinance your home—but you better act fast, this rate won’t last. Personalized mass mailings with imitation-cursive signatures. But junk mail usually gets folded directly (rightly) into the recycle bin, having barely been glanced at. We can recognize this shill without having to give it even a moment’s thought. We process these incongruous glittery leaflets with utter efficiency. This is our landscape of everyday irony, and we are generally unfazed by it.
Two recent experiences in the world of customer service drove this realization home for me.
A few weeks after setting up a new AT&T broadband service in our house, I received a notification of our first bill, along with a friendly reminder that I could easily access and pay my bill conveniently from my iPhone. I downloaded the “My AT&T” app onto my phone, and attempted to set up my account. Upon entering my account number and personal information, I ran into an error message instructing me to call a certain number if I lived in Connecticut (I live in New Orleans). Simply wanting to pay my bill and get on with life, I went to the AT&T website and looked for the option to “chat with an agent,” usually the quickest way to get to the bottom of most of our modern travails.
What I encountered in this chat session was a travesty of false promises, hollow assertions of care for my individual being, and basically bumbling incompetence masked as concern. The chat room revealed itself to be a veritable cabinet of curiosity for the many shades of irony that masquerade as sincerity, assistance, help. The strong, confident claims “I will help you!” and “We will resolve this together!” turn out to crumple and evaporate with the greatest of ease. They are ironic: they say one thing when we know the reality is that the chat window is an indifferent medium. They do not care. (I’m not even getting into the ambiguous technologization of subjectivity here, the real dark underbelly of mass-produced assistance as it exists in call-centers and behind chat programs.)
I was shuffled from “Ron G.” to a second representative, “Norman,” neither of whom had any idea how to fix the problem, and after 90 minutes of basically rehearsing the same information and describing the problem (really a silly, minor problem) again and again, I had to end the chat in order to pick up my son from preschool.
And as we bicycled home, I decided to simply give up; I didn’t really need to pay my bill from my phone, after all. I had just thought it’d be easy. I made a snide quip about AT&T on Twitter, though, which escalated me to the next level of ironies: a demand for a Direct Message so they could fix the problem; which turned into another customer service agent realizing they could in fact not help me, but another person could, who then demanded my phone number (which should have been, one would think, already associated with my account?)—and as I explained that I’d simply given up, the DM conversation took an almost discomfiting tone: “I need to talk to you.” I begrudgingly punched in my phone number, told them to try me the next morning, and closed the DM portal.
An hour later I received a phone call from an 800-number, and I wearily (stupidly) picked up the phone. In the background I could immediately hear the echo chamber of a hundred, a thousand other callers—all haggling, troubleshooting, assuring, placating, succeeding, failing, typing, trying again…. I wasn’t in the mood to rehash the situation, and certainly not ready to berate this unfortunate call-center soul, and though the agent pleaded to let them help me, I said that I needed to read to my child now but they could try in the morning. The next morning, AT&T called again—this time, “No Caller ID.” A new agent with what sounded like more authority—no background noise—asked me to explain the whole situation, which I described but prefaced by saying it was all very silly and I was really just incredibly astounded by the abundance of assurances of help which never materialized. I requested a modest credit to my account, for the waste of my time—which the agent then, unsurprisingly, said they could not provide under the circumstance. I thanked the agent (for what?) and hung up the phone, annoyed but determined to just move on.
As if to reinvigorate this galling experience, a week later I received an email inviting me to watch a video of my bill; an accompanying visual aid in the email showed a couple enraptured by a spectacle on their computer—presumably, they are being entertained while looking at their bill. I could not help but feel as though the whole order of things was brimming on the edge of an absurd crisis, akin to what the writer Lydia Davis once described as a “strange impulse” when everything ordinary might erupt in a “moment of madness,” only to snap back in place as if nothing had ever happened.
That same week, I had to take our car to the Subaru service center to get it looked at. Rainwater had been dripping in somewhere behind the glove box, and it was getting worse with each winter storm. The car was developing a funky smell to the point that my son would say “Eeewww!” every time he climbed into his car seat. They couldn’t locate the leak on first inspection, and so I had to leave the car over the weekend. I was told that the diagnostic fee would be $110, after which I could decide to move forward with a repair including that fee, or just pay the $110 and take the care elsewhere.
They called a couple days later, still uncertain about where the water was coming in; they had the whole front of the car taken apart. They assured me they would press on. I braced for an exorbitant cost, and my partner and I began hatching backup plans: We could sell the car; we don’t really use it that often. But what about midnight emergencies? Hurricane evacuations? Our summer trips to visit family in Michigan? The situation quickly became stressful.
The next day Trey from Subaru called; they’d figured it out. It was a clog of leaves and sticks accumulated over time and which had turned into a blockade of mulch in one of our air conditioner intakes; the rainwater would soak into it gradually, and suddenly spill over into the car. The car was ready to pick up. I didn’t ask about the price.
At the shop I tried to act naturally. I listened as Trey described the problem; he handed me a small plastic baggy of sodden dirt they’d extracted, and gave me an enlarged color photograph showing where they’d taken off the cowl and cleaned out the intake. They also gave the car a full detail. (I hadn’t seen it look so clean since we’d purchased it new six years ago.) He handed me my keys, and said “You’re all set!”
“Wait, you’re not charging me?” I was stunned.
“Nope, this is a one-time complimentary service. If you receive a survey in the mail, we’d really like to know that we did everything we could have done for you.” He waved his finger over the highest rating line of fill bubbles, the tens. “If there’s anything I can do right now to make sure you are totally satisfied, just tell me.”
I was dumbfounded, grateful, agog—and I grabbed my keys and practically sprinted out of there before they changed their minds.
In some ways, my experience at the Subaru garage could be seen as the exact opposite of my experience in the Kafkaesque world of AT&T customer service. However, the chilling thing is that they both operate at the exact same level of everyday irony. Trey was wonderfully generous, but did he really mean that he would do whatever it would take to make me totally satisfied? No. I couldn’t, for instance, have followed up with “You know, actually, this Impreza is getting a little tight now that we have two children; could we just swap it right now for a new Forester, and call it even?” The generosity was a calculated move to generate positive survey results—which I will gladly give to Trey—but only to maintain the system that is in place, never to change it. It also, of course, is an attempt to keep me as a loyal customer. But not for the transcendent purpose of total satisfaction. That phrase is ironic. It’s just not true, it can’t be. And yet, it flourishes— and we don’t even flinch.
Subaru prides itself on being a car company to which its customers are fiercely devoted. As its website enjoins, Subaru drivers can “love every mile.” A banner photograph displays a father sitting on the back bumper of a Subaru with three kids, parked on a dirt road road in green country; they are holding a radio-controlled airplane, and emitting attitudes of deep contentment. (Don’t look too close, or you may detect malaise.)
But clearly anyone who has taken a road trip with a child (not to mention three) has had the experience of not loving every mile. Moreover the day-to-day grind of a commute, the frenzied weekly grocery haul, the airport run—all these ordinary drives regularly fail to inspire our deepest feelings along the way. It sounds very nice, and Subarus may indeed be great cars—but this has nothing directly to do with love. It has to do with precise engineering, excellent manufacturing, and a savvy marketing model. Love is ironic: it is what you hear from Subaru, but not what you see. What you see is a car that works (pretty well, most of the time). This is a brazen extension of the postmodern, self-aware smarmy commercials of car companies in the 1990s that Wallace describes in “E Unibus Pluram.” For Subaru is using irony in the earnest guise of sincerity.
The critic Raymond Williams once lamented “real advertising” as “an ordinary form of public notice,” as opposed to “pseudo-advertising” which breeds “a stimulation of consumption” and “the continuance of…crazy peddling.” In my encounters with both AT&T and Subaru, I met the contemporary specter of Williams’s fear, a bold new irony that, as Wallace anticipated, becomes tyrannical in its pervasiveness: there’s simply no way out of it, since to feel like you’re satisfied is to have been absorbed into its endlessly productive force.
Consider one final example from my own line of work: at the end of each semester, for each course I teach, my university provides me with course evaluations that my students are to fill out. These forms are ostensibly driven at improvement, at making my teaching (and the product, higher education) better. They aim at total satisfaction. But the more I teach, and the more I witness my colleagues’ and students’ generally passive consumption of these prolific evaluations, and the more I see things on college campuses basically remain the same—I have come to realize that these forms too are strictly ironic documents.
This is not to say that the intention of the administration, faculty, or students is consciously ironic as we all dutifully distribute, fill out, and collect and tabulate the results of these evaluations, but rather that no one—not even the most entrenched director of assessment, or the most earnest student—really expects anything to change, at least not immediately, not for them. The more that our course evaluations seem to be geared toward improving the individual experience of the student, or the performance of the individual instructor, the more they assure a sort of diffusion of responsibility and a general resignation to things as they are. It is precisely the acting out of this evaluative, personalized ritual, semester after semester, that ensures that things keep going more or less as is, and that no one ever seriously evaluates the whole mess. The purpose of the evaluation is not to evaluate, but to have conducted evaluation.
And yet, perhaps paradoxically, the mess of higher education is good. This is what the liberal arts excel at, in fact: exposing students to a wide range of ideas, disciplines, approaches…and they quite intentionally do not fit together neatly or evenly. Dots get connected spontaneously, in sudden, mind-blowing epiphanies; and some curricular dots remain in isolation, forever…but nevertheless part of what makes one a ‘well-rounded’ individual.
On a smaller scale, what I love about teaching college is that what happens in the classroom is totally, inescapably singular: you can never step into the same college course twice. The notion that higher education is (or should be) standardized or concretely measurable is patently false, because college is a relatively loose structure that facilitates (but necessarily flexibly, messily) an experience of dynamic personal change. It is not a coincidence that this experience often aligns with the dynamic, transformative years when we shift—however awkwardly or gracefully—from child to adult. One’s whole experience in the world—of the world—changes.
This is what happens in college classes, at least at their best: people are given the time and space to develop, which means to change their minds, which means to go through a process that is mysterious, quasi-spiritual, and (hopefully) somewhat revelatory. Whether we are talking about biology, painting, or philosophy—I’m sorry, the experience of education at the college level can’t be measured so as to be “improved” for the individual student/consumer. It’s rather a one-time deal. To cast higher education any other way—in terms of deliverables, transferable skills, immediate payoff—is to say something ironic about it. It’s impossible to evaluate the mess that is true education, and yet we keep doing it, and assuring our students and ourselves that it’s for good reason, that it will result in something better.
All such promises of direct improvement, total satisfaction, and final resolution are likewise false. They are like Willy Wonka’s perfectly curated fantasyland that offers an infinity of treats, with no stomachache to follow. Of course, the golden ticket holders in the chocolate factory do learn hard lessons, over time; and by the end of the film, irony gives way to sincerity, and a gift.
In his famously enigmatic essay from 1936 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the cultural critic Walter Benjamin observed that as methods of mass production made their way into modern society, “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.” Benjamin was interested in how art could be revolutionary, even as it takes on new aspects and forms that stem from technical reproducibility and which threaten art’s age-old “aura.” Benjamin wasn’t trying to save “immediate reality” from mass production, though; he was just noting that it becomes more rarified. But little did Benjamin know that the orchid itself could turn out to be made of candy: redolent, scrumptious—and fake. We have reached a point where the whole world of everyday consumer life is candy colored and hollow—a new irony everywhere we look. Promises and appeasements are overflowing from the mouths of whispering call agents. And nothing is what it says it is. Help. Police. Murder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Schaberg is associate professor of English and Environment at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, and author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2011), _Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014), and The End of Airports (forthcoming from Bloomsbury in October 2015). His twitter handle is @airplanereading
