HUMAN WRECKAGE

Don’t Call Us

We can work in factory/And make misery/Frustrated Incorporated – Soul Asylum, “Misery”

I’m schizophrenic. Not because I’m crazy but because misery loves company. But life took a real positive turn on Thursday, floored me. I was looking up at the peaks of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” through one of those decorative, off-the-rack, temporary Facebook armchair social activist picture profile frames – mine was “raindrops on roses” brushed with kitten whiskers; non-binary unicorns with Lifesaver rainbow horns, raspberry blue Jell-O dyes on their manes and lovey-dovey, flirty ping pong ball-sized eyes elegantly dusted with Revlon eyeliner.

Ann and I had to telephone a couple of company toll-free customer service numbers. Those types of calls take some working up to, girding. Too much time and effort for no expectations, a certain less than satisfactory resolution. It’s frustrating to navigate the prerecorded keypad prompts for up to nine service options, none of which include your particular problem. When somebody actually picks up, you pray they have a clue: I’m thinking of the lovely lady in Manilla who assured me a furnace repairman would be at the Crooked 9 shortly, 24 to 48 hours hence. January, 40-below. I said, “I don’t think you understand.”

Along with Rogers Communications, Air Canada is one of Canada’s most despised companies. They have more in common than the patriotic corporate colour they share. They are the lynchpins of their respective oligopolies. Ann and I received notice from Air Canada informing us that the seats we had paid to preselect on one of the return legs of an upcoming overseas trip had been arbitrarily reassigned. We’d been separated and consigned to middle seat hell between strangers (I distinctly recalled using a row mate’s roll of belly fat as an armrest on a flight to Denver). A second notice from the airline then informed us that that particular flight would depart two hours later than scheduled.

Seven weeks prior to our departure I was stalking around our very, very fine house seething with air rage. Ann figured the required call to Air Canada customer service might be a more productive exercise if she placed it. Ann had to gird. She gave herself a pep talk: “I will be firm but polite. I will be firm but polite.” The recorded message promised a callback from a human being within 20 minutes and, by God, didn’t an Air Canada agent fulfill that bullshit promise. It took another hour but Ann managed to rearrange our return itinerary. Saints be praised, an Air Canada miracle even though the airline had created the problem and then left it in Ann’s hands to fix.

Her positive result was mildly elating. I was inspired to step up my game, make that second, procrastinated customer service call.

Eight or so years ago Ann and I undertook some extensive renovations to the Crooked 9, exterior and interior. An incidental was the installation of hardwired (battery backup) combination smoke-carbon monoxide detectors. One started chirping two weeks ago. We changed the battery. The unit kept chirping. We opened all the windows. The unit kept chirping. We removed it from its ceiling anchor. Ann suggested she review the user manual. While she was doing that a second unit began chirping, the same pattern, the same song. Built-in obsolescence; they’d gone a little beyond their intended lifespans and needed replacing.

Ann and I drove over to our usual Home Depot. The orange shelves were bereft of suitable replacements, bare. We spoke to a clerk, an “associate” in Home Depot human resources corporate jargon. This gentleman, a big box retail employee, knew his patch. He said his lack of inventory was a consequence of increasing demand for copper, a fine conductor. There are new demands on the metal, from EV batteries to solar panel arrays to crypto-currency mining, electricity’s gotta move.

I’m not sure what disturbed me more: the prospect of Ann and I dying in our sleep or the dangling wire holes in our ceiling. After a grudging and fruitless Amazon search, I summoned the verve to telephone Kidde, the alarms’ manufacturer, product number at hand. I reached Cheryl in South Carolina. I asked her where she was only because I’d learned that Canadian furnaces weren’t a huge concern in the Philippines and, anyway, smoke alarms probably don’t rate in Bangladeshi fast-fashion sweatshops or offshore sub-contracted call centres.

Cheryl said, “I’ve had so many calls from across the U.S. and Canada about the same problem.” I related the anecdotal copper theory. She said, “I’ve not heard about that. I will have to look in to it.” I asked Cheryl if Kidde offered a substitute alarm product and would it mesh with the existing anchor already screwed to our ceilings? “The harness? Yes.” Cheryl recited a product number one letter off from our dead units. “What’s your postal code?” Cheryl didn’t say “zip.” I instinctively liked Cheryl, her casual Canadianism.

I can’t imagine Cheryl is passionate about her job at the other end of a toll-free line. But maybe she does genuinely like other people and, truthfully, Ann and I often wonder what that’s like. Some people are wired differently. Cheryl is the embodiment of the Universal Law of Wham! If you’re gonna do it/Do it right, now! Cheryl is good at her job. Maybe she should run Boeing.

“There’s no inventory at Home Depot-Strathcona.” Yep, been there, done that. “Do you know Home Depot-Westmount?” I said we did, our fallback, alternative location. “There are three ‘contractor’ three-packs available on aisle 3.” Really!? And you know this from South Carolina? Now I’m getting a handle on conspiracy theories and privacy concerns in the digital age.

Aisle 3 in Home Depot-Westmount looked exactly like its sister aisle in Home Depot-Strathcona. Empty. Ann and I told the hovering associate what we were seeking. I handed the kid a slip of notepaper with Cheryl’s product number written on it.

“I’ve got this?”

“You’ve got this.”

“I don’t know.” Cheryl does.

It took a while, and a ladder. The Kidde contractor packs were inventoried on a top storage shelf of the orange rack, still sealed in their shipping carton.

Our new smoke alarms are a slight upgrade on our defunct ones. They not only chirp, they talk. And they’re bilingual too. They’ll be as annoying as Air Canada should they ever be triggered although I suppose that’s the point.                       

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.