Do you all ever become enraged over syntax? -- Belle
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December 28, 2008, 10:00 pm
The Return of the Old Grouch
By Stanley Fish

When you live in two places and decamp from one to the other every six months or so, there are any number of things that have to be done. (I know that at least 50 readers will want to rebuke me for complaining about problems only the privileged can have, but perhaps we can agree to get past that.) Closing the house, switching the mail, storing the porch furniture, suspending cable service, draining the pipes. But the one that gives me a headache even before I attempt it is the phone call to AT&T, or, rather, the 20 phone calls to AT&T.

The first obstacle, of course, was getting through to someone. The prompts did not correspond to any of my concerns, but finally, after pressing a number of zeros, I was rewarded with the voice of a live person who said, “With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?�?

Visions of Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine the telephone operator danced in my head, but I bit my tongue and made my simple request.

“I’ve been away for some time and my services were reduced. I’d like to have them restored to what they were when I left in June.�?

It turned out that this was not possible. Even though I had paid to retain my phone number, I was going to be treated as a new customer, which meant that I would have to answer a bunch of questions and decline services I had never had. After much back and forth I signed up for a package that included voice mail.

I should have quit when I was (somewhat) ahead, but I couldn’t resist returning to the greeting, with its double and ungrammatical “with.�?I explained that the second “with�?was superfluous, as the second “to�?would be if the offending question had been, “to whom am I speaking to?�? or the second “about�?if the question had been “about what are you worrying about?�?

Somehow that didn’t make much of an impression on her. She said that her instructions were to greet callers in that way and that she would continue to do so. I replied that it was scandalous that a multi-billion-dollar world-wide telecommunication corporation would order its employees to commit an egregious (and comical) grammatical error millions of times a day.

She said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.�?

I lost it. It has nothing to do with feelings, I ranted. It is a factual matter as to what is and is not syntactically correct.

She changed the subject by informing me that the social security number I had given when she asked for it was not the number she had on record. I asked her to change it, but she pleaded incapacity: “No, I can’t do that. I’ll connect you to the department where they can.�?

That was a promise made subsequently by five other people as I was repeatedly transferred to someone who told me, “No, I can’t do that.�?Everyone I talked to assured me that within seconds I would be talking to the right person. My last interlocutor took pity on me, and although he too was not the right person, he knew someone in his division who was and said he would talk to him directly. When he came back, it was to tell me that the social security number on record was in fact the one I had given him. The whole thing had been a wild goose chase.

I was more exasperated than relieved, and I made the mistake of re-raising the “with-whom-do-I-have-the-pleasure-of-speaking-with�?matter. He listened and suggested that I make a complaint. You mean call another 800 number, I wailed. No, he replied, I’ll do it for you, just tell me what you want to say. I went through the nature of the error, but when I talked about the unseemliness of a major corporation managing to sound pompous and ignorant at the same time, he interrupted me and said that he would not transmit that kind of language. I thought about pointing out that this was a complaint, not a love letter, but I just gave up.

This epic was not over. When I got to Florida after a three-day drive I found that I didn’t have voice mail. I called and was told that there was no record of my having placed an order. I was assured that the matter would be taken care of in 24 hours. It wasn’t. I called back the next day, but a mechanical voice informed me that there was no service on Sunday. (Don’t people make phone calls on Sundays and pay for them?) Finally, on Monday, I reached someone who assured me that I would have voice mail the next day, and he turned out to be right.

But by that time I was beyond caring. I told him that I had decided to write a column about my AT&T adventures and that, in fairness, I thought I should talk to someone in the corporate structure. He said that he would put me through to the right department, but when someone picked up, she identified herself as “Directories.�?

What?, I asked.

I’m in advertising, she replied. We send out telephone directories. Do you want one?

I explained what I was trying to do, and she laughed. I laughed, too, the best moment of the experience.

Every weeknight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann, who never met an exaggeration he didn’t like, names that day’s “Worst Person in the World�?(it’s usually Bill O’Reilly). In the same spirit, I hereby nominate AT&T as the worst company in the world. I admit that my evidence for this judgment is scant and anecdotal, but I stand by it anyway.

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/the-return-of-the-old-grouch/