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 Control-Alt-Delete-Delete-Delete
By Jim Shahin
I ENDED UP
out here on the very frontier of home computing, which is to say
desperate and alone, not because I am advanced in technology (I am
actually in the remedial technology class) but because of something
I like to call the service economy.
It
was a lovely Sunday afternoon. Outside my window, birds chirped,
children laughed, and motorists even stopped for pedestrians.
I was on my computer, trying to get online using my Internet service provider, or no good, lousy, stinkin’ ISP, for short.
After
several unsuccessful attempts to get online, I dialed tech support and
got the moat around the castle known as the Phone Menu.
“Are you currently a member?” asks the cheerful female Phone Menu android on the other end.
“Yes.”
“Great. Let’s look up your account. Please provide your phone number, area code first.”
I do.
“I think you said —” the android begins and then states a number. “Is that correct?”
“No.”
I
think I see a cloud forming in the sky and hear a baby crying in the
distance. “I’m sorry, please say your phone number or press your phone
keys again,” she says.
I slice my way through the jungle of menu options until, finally, I end up at my destination: tech support.
I
explain that I have been having repeated problems getting online using
the service, although I can get online using my browser. The person on
the other end, a male, presumably real, sounds confused.
I,
too, am confused. The ISP I have used for years touts itself in its
television commercials as offering great service. It is the only thing
left it can tout. Every other ISP out there offers either cheaper prices or more advantages.
The
confused tech-support person coaches me to grab my ISP’s folder and
drag it to the trash. He explains that we are going to replace the
existing, malfunctioning software with new, working software.
“Now,” he instructs, “empty the trash.”
There’s
something about this instruction that awakens my instincts to danger,
like a deer hearing the crack of a branch in the forest. I ask whether
I will lose my address book. I wonder, too, if I might lose anything
else valuable, like my years and years of purposefully stored incoming
and outgoing e-mails, which is to say, pretty much my entire personal
and professional history.
“No,” he says.
Apprehensively, I trash the folder.
You’ll
recall my saying at the outset that this is a story about service.
Which means that, by definition, this story is predictable. Which, in
turn, means that you’ve probably already guessed what happens next.
Sure
enough, my years and years of purposefully stored incoming and outgoing
e-mails, which is to say, pretty much my entire personal and
professional history, are gone. Vanished … into thin (cyber)air.
Frantically
searching all over my computer for where the “filing cabinet,” as it is
called, might have disappeared to, I hyperventilate as I get online
(courtesy of my ISP) to seek help from a technician who, not
comprehending my problem, promptly does not solve my problem.
The
realization comes to me in waves: Thousands of stored e-mails,
detailing a decade of communication with hundreds of family members,
friends, colleagues, editors (okay, so there is some good in losing
everything), are lost, like paper to a house fire.
That is how I
ended up out here, on the fringes of home computing. After my breathing
stabilized, I had a local computer-repair shop remove my computer’s
hard drive, and then I carefully packaged it and mailed it off to a
firm that specializes in data retrieval.
Data retrieval. You’ve got to hate the timbre of that phrase in your ear. It sounds like one of the departments in the mid-1980s movie Brazil,
a dark comedy about an absurdist future of technology and bureaucracy
run amok. And now I feel like I am actually in that movie.
Meanwhile,
I did something even more absurd. I wrote to the CEO and the president
of the ISP, thinking, theirs being a company spending zillions of
dollars to convince the public that the most significant difference
between it and the others is its service, that they would make things
right. They’d at least send a note of apology or, if the legal
department considered that potentially too responsible, a letter of
concern.
As I waited for a reply, I got my hard drive back from the data-retrieval firm. None of the data could be retrieved.
Over
a month and two letters later, I finally received a response. A tech
guy called. He offered me a couple of months of free service.
Some
folks might regard that offer as absurd, even insulting. Not me,
though. Not even when my no good, lousy, stinkin’ ISP announced a few
days later that it was providing e-mail and a host of other services
for free to everybody (loss of cyberhistory unnecessary).
No, that’s what, these days, I call service.
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