Tell Tech Support to go where?

Scholars and other people a whole lot smarter than I am have pondered the existence of Hell and what it might be like to live there. Some say it’s a fiery pit with devils carrying pitchforks and burning brimstone. Others say it’s a frozen existence. And there are some who say Hell is separation from God.

Here’s my idea of the place: a huge, windowless room with a maze of cubicles; within each cubicle there’s a desk, a telephone with headphones and a computer. The maze stretches as far as the eye can see, and farther. People sit in those cubicles and talk on the phone, but their words are gibberish.

Hell is tech support.

Is there is anything that makes you feel more vulnerable, helpless and scared than having to deal with tech support? I recently had to call the satellite TV people because I accidentally hit something on my remote that I shouldn’t have and I lost the TV signal. Nothing I tried worked, including an incantation and three kinds of incense, so it was time to call the company’s customer service.

The company has three listings in the phone book, each sounds like it could be the one I need, and each has a customer service number. The first guy told me I don’t have a service agreement and he can sell me one.

Me: I have an agreement. I just want to know how to get my signal back.

Him: You don’t have the right agreement. You’re paying too much. I can sell you one for $3.95 a month.

Me: I just want to get my signal back.

Him: We’ll get that for you. Now which major credit card do you want to use?

(This goes on for a while and I lose patience. I wonder if his mother knows he strong arms people for a living. Getting nowhere with this kid, I ask to speak to his supervisor.)

Him: OK, but it’ll be a 45 minute wait.

Me wondering: has he ticked off so many people it will take 45 minutes for his supervisor to get through them all before he gets to me?

I hung up him. Then I tried another listing, and got another kid who mostly guessed what would get the signal going again, but he got it done. But I had to ask him several times to speak slowly. And he didn’t even sound foreign. He just talked too fast.

The foreign tech support people may know precise but mispronounced English, but they’re lost when it comes to the nuances of the language. When the woman trying to help me with my laptop left me on hold until my fingers cramped and my phone battery died, I hung up on her. She called back and said we must have been disconnected.

Me: I hung up. I figured you went to lunch.

Her: OK.

A perfectly good sarcastic remark and it just hung there in the air like stale smoke.

I considered the possibility of an eternity of dealing with tech support. Then I realized, I’ve already been to Hell and back.

Reach Out exceeds my grasp

I noticed it first when I was talking to a young person. Then I noticed that most young people say reach out when they really mean contact.

It drives me nuts.

The recent overuse of reach out reminds me of some people’s insistence on using the non-word ‘ginormous’ to mean really big. It’s a combination of gigantic and enormous, but what’s wrong with using gigantic or enormous? Or really big? Why do we need to slap those two words together to make a third?

And why do we need to say reach out when what we really mean is contact?

Wondering if I’m the only person who cringes when I hear the expression, I looked it up on Visualthesaurus.com. I am not alone.  From the website:

“From Bnet.com: "Every time a prospective vendor tells me they are calling to 'reach out' to me I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling them to keep their hands to themself [sic]."

“And from AskTheManager, a business blog: "The image of someone reaching out to us is more than a little creepy. ... [L]eaders should use: Contact."

But I am telling my age apparently. According to Visualthesaurus.com, ‘contact’ at one time gave people a fingernails-on-a-blackboard reaction. Back in the day, contact meant two surfaces touching each other, and applying that word to person-to-person communication was risqué, if not annoying.

But in the 1970s — the age of transactional analysis, navel-contemplating and deep introspection — reach out became widely used but had more of a sense of urgency. Remember The Four Tops song, “Reach out, I’ll be there?” It implied more than just call me. It said call me when you’re really down and out, and need some special attention.

Then AT&T came up with reach out and touch someone. Meaning contact them by telephone. Again, it implied that someone you have ignored for a while needs to hear from you. Reach out. Take a chance that person won’t hang up on you.

Those days of encounter groups, crossing social barriers and other forms of reaching out have gone the way of the Edsel. Now everyone walks around in his own little fog looking down at a cell phone and reading or writing a text. If there is any reaching out it happens when someone stumbles in a hole and tries to right himself before he falls, taking his phone with him.

Maybe that’s why young people use reach out so often — to keep from tripping while texting. Or maybe they think it’s an expression that needs to be revived because they have no idea how to communicate face to face. To them, it really does involve reaching out the way it used to be meant.

I still don’t like it.