I had been waiting for a good thirty minutes, hanging in space at the end of a telephone line. I waltzed from one “customer service” manager to the next, never being able to set foot on anything solid. At each level, I was told again that my call was important to them. You know this refrain.
Life is short. Unless you wait with your ears hanging on the phone. Why must all these companies that rule over our lives feel the need, at a time when we are making us wait, to broadcast music that is so insignificant? Even an elevator hardened to the worst melodies would probably prefer to crash rather than endure it.
While we’re at it, I’d like to listen even better to the rather grotesque remarks, based on third-hand documents, that Gilles Proulx is making this season on the radio about the history of Aboriginal people. Radio VM, the ultra-Catho radio station, entrusted him without batting an eyelid, in addition to a program devoted to the life of Sister Angèle, with nothing less than the project of documenting the history of the Aboriginal people. The show is called First Nation. Was there no one else to deal with these issues? The elevator of reason seems to have broken down on the programming side.
— Your call is important to us. Sorry for keeping you waiting. For identification purposes, can you give me your eight-digit ID number, please?
— Um, you’ve asked me that five times already since I got online. I’m calling to resolve this, among other things.
– No problem sir. Can you give me the ten-digit file number and amount paid for your penultimate invoice?
I felt neglectful. After all, I told myself, I must be the only one guilty of not having memorized my credentials, in case I need them when I’m away from home. And why haven’t I memorized, like everyone else, the exact amounts of my last bills?
For your protection, the employee repeated to me, “the system needs to identify you.” When you work so well in a company, why should you leave it?
I dared to ask him if, “for my protection”, it was not possible to identify me instead using more human data. My mother’s name. My birth date. My place of residence. The color of my eyes. The name of my first dog. That of my beloved cat. The size of my shoes. The brand of my favorite cereal in the morning, which is the same one that I also eat in the evening when there is nothing better to swallow. Can these kinds of questions still mean anything in a numbered society?
The gentleman on the other end of the line seemed perplexed. He just told me again that, for security reasons, the system needed to validate my identity.
There will soon come a time when, “for identification purposes”, your mechanic will ask you for the serial number of your winter tires. He will look at you with big eyes if, by lowering yours, you claim to ignore him.
The sun does not revolve around the earth, but many companies would like to convince you that life revolves around their products.
While I waited on the line, I could at least read the news and feel the world’s breathing while I tried to calm my own.
In the United Kingdom, after pushing oil production further than ever, the government of former banker Rishi Sunak is abandoning a vast fast train project. In the era of Thatcherism, the train had pretty much derailed after the hasty and ill-advised privatization of the network. The Iron Lady did not believe in collective virtues, but in those of the individual and the profit industry. So much so that British society has missed the train of modernization of its public transport, in a decorative and almost drowsy apathy shared by many peoples.
To make up for this delay today, the British fast train project had become expensive. It still had to offer, long after other European capitals, a significant means of regulating the growing flow of traffic. Ultimately, only the already started segment of this TGV will be completed. The conservative government of Rishi Sunak decided this. He says, to justify himself, that he will save money to repair potholes in the roads. It’s a bit like cutting off the power to afford more candles…
In Lac-Mégantic, the federal Minister of Transport, Pablo Rodriguez, announced with great fanfare that work to bypass the railway line in Lac-Mégantic would finally begin. “This is the start of something important, it’s something we’re starting now,” he said. We only had to wait ten years… Doesn’t this detour of a decade ultimately mask a deeper problem? How many more disasters are we willing to live through so that oil money continues to derail life?
In the meantime, the same music continues to be heard everywhere. For example, it is enough for the CAQ government to lose a complementary election and for the Parti Québécois to boast about it for Prime Minister Legault to put the stillborn third link project back on its improvised track. In a proven form of populist condescension steeped in blatant disregard for science, these people fear only one thing: seeing their world order swept away. Such a lack of imagination forces us to wonder if finally someone on the other end of the line is capable of taking us for something other than numbers.
“Your call is important to us,” another company clerk told me again.
I ended up hanging up on him.