Your Call Will Be Answered in the Order Received..

Guy calls on the phone. It’s a Saturday afternoon; post Christmas and pre Super Bowl, prime time for home theatre sales. Even though there are ten people working, the store is packed with customers and the phone rings something like eight or ten times before I’m able to excuse myself from my customer to answer it. Before I can even identify the store or myself the person on the other end is on his harangue:

“It’s about time someone answered. What’s the matter with you people over there? I need to know if you have this TV I’m looking for. You must not want to make any sales, letting a customer wait like that…”

On and on he goes. I can’t even get a word in edgewise. In fact I’m seriously considering telling him that he may want a television, but I can’t help him because he called the county morgue (mention death obliquely and you can be sure to throw the other person off balance). Eventually he takes a breath and I’m able to squeeze in asking what I can help him with.

It turns out that he has no idea what television he wants; in fact he’s just looking for information. I suggest that television is a visual medium, seeing it is much better than talking about it, why not come on down and I’ll be able to show him all the differences in the various sets. I also make mention that we have a store full of people here right now and if he liked I’d be happy to call him back when we’re not so busy so we can talk at length about his needs.

Again indignation roils up in his voice. “I’m on the phone right now, you want to make a sale then you can talk to me right now.”

I decided I didn’t want to make a sale, at least not with him, and hung up the phone.

Talking about it later over a couple of adult beverages with Kaz the Sales Manager we were laughing at what a jerk that guy had been. It’s my belief though that people aren’t born jerks, they make themselves into jerks over time and there is usually a reason or three for that happening. But it was more than the jerk factor that got me about this caller. It was his attitude that I was nothing more than an information source for him. My hanging up on him was the human equivalent of his internet connection going down. Taking it a step further, the customers in the store, other human beings, were merely static preventing his needs from being met.

I completely understand using the telephone to call a store to find out if it’s open or if it has the item you want. I can even understand using it to get information about the products the store carries – to a degree. Where I draw the line is when the person on the phone feels the store has an obligation to deal with them rather than the people who have actually made the trip to the store. The live human being in front of me takes precedent over the ethereal voice on the telephone, all the time, every time.

A definition of insane is you listen to the voices in your head instead of the people who are standing in front of you. Despite what my wife (Cruella) says, I’m not insane.

I’ve come to realize that a lot of people would rather shop over the telephone (or the internet) because they want to hide behind the technology rather than come face to face with another human being. Yes, yes, “quicker”, “more convenient”, “I’m not going to get hustled”, I understand all those rationales, but guess what, they are just rationales. Shopping is supposed to be an interaction. I have a product, you want that product; we come face to face and make an exchange. Perhaps because of that interaction you find out there is a better product for you. Maybe you realize you don’t need that product. A thousand things can happen but more important than that product is that two human beings made contact.

More and more we hide behind our technology rather than experience life. Let’s face it; we see it all the time. There’s the father who records every second of his child’s soccer game, his eye glued to the camcorder rather than watching the actual game and cheering. How about the woman who is on her cell phone talking to a friend thousands of miles away rather than the other three women sitting on the bench at the park. There is even a television ad that shows a harried mother demanding her family give her an hour to herself. She high tails it to a beautiful outdoor setting so she can…watch television!

I was once on a vacation trip to Costa Rica and Panama. Part of the trip was a trek into the jungle where we spent time with a semi-primitive tribe of indigenous people. Of course all of us had our digital cameras and camcorders to preserve memories of the encounter. There was one guy in our group who took some absolutely stunning photos. Looking at them later I was amazed at the composition and the lighting and the use of color. In particular he had taken a portrait of one of the members of the tribe, a man I had also taken a photo of. Of course his photo was far superior to mine, but when we started talking about the person in the photos it became quite evident that he had not spoken to this person at all, whereas I had found out that he was a high up in the tribe and that his son had one day decided to trek back through the jungle with our guide and now he worked in the big city and how that had made the father proud. This man in a loin cloth had invited me back to his hut and proudly showed off his “modern conveniences”: a camp stove and an aluminum pot and together we laughed when I showed him the photo I had just taken of him.

My fellow traveler was stunned to hear my story. He had a memory that will last as long as the pixels stay in order and the website he posts it to stays in business.

I on the other hand had an experience.