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The phone call (fiction)

Priya has been working from home for the last 4 months, and now her laptop’s battery was dead.. on a Monday...with the big client presentation coming up on Friday. She was determined to navigate the serpentine channels of the laptop company’s customer care and order a battery for her laptop. It is a simple spare for her appliance...how hard can it be. She did not count on the effort that companies put in to make the lives of their customers increasingly difficult. 

She started by calling the customer care number, and fought on. She felt like she was fighting through rings of trolls in a scene from the Lord of the Rings. She tried every trick, dangling the carrot of good reviews on Facebook, threats, pretending to be from the IT department of a big customer of the company, and begging, and groveling and appealing to the conscience of the customer care guys. Nothing worked... She had already spent a couple of hours on the phone; her hands and the phone sticky with sweat. She felt the signs of a monster headache coming. She was on the verge of exploding on the present representative of the stupid laptop company, with the filthiest abuses she could remember (to be honest, her limit of filth was “shitface”). 

The guy who had the misfortune to be on the phone - Rony, may have read the signs of the incoming “shitface”; he decided to help Priya...really, actually help. Priya suddenly felt like she was in one of those nightmares where she is running to catch a bus; desperate, as if her life depended on catching the bus, and suddenly an arm pulls her aboard. She suddenly felt like, maybe she will finally get the battery. And then Rony said “ I am sorry ma’am, but I am not authorized to order a battery for you as your laptop is out of warranty, I will transfer the call to the correct department”.

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