I recently bought a soundbar specifically designed to compensate for the rotten audio of most televisions in which human voices tend to get swamped by soundtrack noises that are supposed to be background but have become foreground. The instructions were simple. Plug the soundbar in. Connect it to the TV. Turn it on. But all that emerged was the sound of silence from the soundbar and the same old mush from the TV.
After considerable fooling around with remote controls, incomprehensible manuals, and a Ouija Board, I finally discovered how to choose an auxiliary speaker in preference to the TV’s. Voila! Except watching TV now required me to constantly alternate between the cable remote and the soundbar remote. Surely there was a solution.
The manual for the cable remote had five different ways to persuade it to recognize the new audio component. Many required a dozen or more steps, and none of them worked. After spending several hours accomplishing nothing other than raising my blood pressure, I was forced to embrace the last resort of the technically illiterate. I called customer service for the soundbar manufacturer.
To my surprise, I was not put on hold for 20 minutes listening to vile Musak, in this case a marimba solo. The phone was answered quickly, but things went even more quickly downhill. I explained my problem to Eric who seemed impatient with my clumsy description of my situation.
No doubt he yearned for more challenging, even cataclysmic malfunctions to cure rather than my run of the mill befuddlement over how to pair a remote control with the soundbar. Curtly he told me to give him my email, said he would send me instructions, and hung up.
Guess what? My problem was not solved. The email contained a long list of steps — beginning with turn on the device, press ‘other settings,’ press ‘volume up’ until PS1 appears — followed by a dozen or more additional steps. Some required holding down several buttons at once. Others required me to work through a lot of three-digit combinations in under 30 seconds. Take too long and you’d be sent back to Go.
Terrified of failing this literacy test and being forced to start all over in kindergarten, I hastily applied my arthritic fingers to entering strings of numbers, one of which was supposed to awaken the Sleeping Beauty in the machine from her slumber —001, 018, 166, 184, 218, 243, 380, 560, 612. But no reaction was forthcoming. The machine remained comatose.
I began to feel that I might be the victim of an elaborate practical joke of the sort “Candid Camera” used to inflict on the unwary. Who knew, perhaps I had actually programmed the TV to transmit to the world, via Wifi, my mounting fury at being toyed with by an inanimate object.
After a lapse of a weekend, I called customer service again, and by, chance, got Eric one more time. I told him his instructions didn’t work, which he took personally. He implied I had done something moronic and would now have to reset my device and start all over He told me to push input and wait for a letter code to appear on the soundbar. I did, but it didn’t.
”Did you push input?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hold it down or 30 seconds?”
“No.”
“Hold it down for 30 seconds.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Stop talking and listen to the instructions.”
“Okay. I’m holding it down. (pause) It still isn’t working.”
“Are you pushing the button marked I?”
“It’s not marked I on the my remote. It just says input.”
“Not the button on the remote. The button on the side of the soundbar.”
“I didn’t even know there were buttons on the soundbar.”
“Stop interrupting. Push the button. Tell me when ‘reset’ appears.”
“Okay, it’s appeared now.”
“Then follow the instructions I sent you the last time,” said Eric, and hung up.
So once again — Step One, Step Two, 001, 018, etc. etc. etc. Still no dice. I decided to give up since it was hopeless and I have a finite number of days left on earth, but my far more optimistic and unforgiving wife decided to call customer service and give them a dose of the verbal flamethrower.
But lo and behold, this time we got Brian who was perfectly pleasant and patient with the technically feeble. He listened to our tale of woe, paused to look up the email instructions Eric had sent, and told me they were obsolete and didn’t work with my brand of television. He then walked me through three simple pushes of a button or two and solved the problem.
If Brian had been physically present, I would have kissed him. I felt like one of those Chilean miners rescued from perpetual entombment after 69 days. What lessons might one draw from this miserable, but frequently recurring, experience?
The first is contained in the old joke about the handyman who fixes the giant turbine of a hydroelectric dam by giving it a whack with a hammer. He presents a bill for $10,000. Management protests that all he did was hit the thing with a hammer. He offers to provide an itemized bill. 1: Hitting with a hammer, one dollar. 2: Knowing where to hit, $9,999.
The second lesson is from the 1959 essay, “The Two Cultures,” by C. P. Snow. He was both a physical chemist and a novelist who argued that educated people were once at home in both the sciences and the humanities, but the increasing specialization of the sciences left humans divided into two tribes who were unable to speak each other’s language.
Sixty years later, the accelerating changes in electronics, computer science, biotech, genetics, AI and a dozen other specialties has made the divide into a chasm. The technical cognoscenti tend to regard the majority without such expertise as clueless barbarians unable to write in code or speak the language of the new mandarins. Those on my side of the divide can’t help noticing that in our lifetime’s we have gone from adequately-educated fellow citizens to embarrassing Neanderthals.
Lesson Three: The customers may be illiterate apes, but there are a lot of them and they buy the products the wizards produce. It would be both prudent and polite to design products even the chimps can understand and operate. Failing that, perhaps customer service should actually serve customers rather than treating them with contempt.
Lesson Four: Fire the Eric’s of the world. Reward the Brians.