TA Professional Perspectives

  On a hot July day, my mother's air conditioning unit - a floor model just past its one year warranty - gave signs of distress. I call this machine "the white elephant in the room": it's big, noisy, has a curved back and an enormous arching hose (the trunk!) attached to a round hole in the window panel.   My mother, two years shy of her 90th birthday, is prone to bouts of techno-rage - with good reason, given the current sleek, smart(?) but hard-on-old-fingers-and-eyes designs: she is afraid of touching tiny, finicky and mysterious buttons, and not very able to do so lately. Seeing the "elephant's" panel  displaying "FL" instead of the familiar "24" (the default temperature in Celsius degrees), and feeling that the flow of cool air is no more, she got a bout of anxiety and call her private technical support (and general life line): me.  Sensing what's coming,  I gear in remote customer support mode: I try to calm her down and, as

                                  It is the same thing happening when one calls a government office, an appliance vendor, a bank or a telecom. Name it Customer Support, Client Care, Help Line or any other appealing and appeasing name the outfit cares to give to their call centre, you are at the mercy of  whoever picks up the call (supposing that it is being picked up, which in most cases it still is). You called because you either could not figure something out despite consulting google and company FAQ, or your issue is one of a kind, out of this world and well over the power of a chatbot to decipher, or because you are too old to figure it out with these means and you need old-fashion support. But you have to be lucky, incredulous and persistent. Having worked in IT built the resilience and understanding necessary to sustain one's inquiring effort to its successful resolution. Lucky - so that someone picks up the call in a reasonable amount of time. Incredulous - because you shoul