Skip to main content

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”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Event (Fiction)

  Rob got up to check the status of the suction port. Jeff was watching a last century 2D movie on his tablet, something about intergalactic wars with funny looking aliens. He was amused by the primitive, and completely off-the-mark, vision of how the twenty-firsters imagined beings from other star systems looked. The cabin was almost silent, except for the muted whirrs, dings and vibrations from the command and control system of the mining ship - Theseus XIV. Rob and Jeff worked for the MittAdan Corporation, mining delirium from asteroids. Delirium was an essential ingredient of the neural implants, everyone used to connect to Oasis Mk243. Oasis was the hyper real, virtual space for all kinds of human activities - trade, services, retail, research, education, leisure, love and hate. Delirium was named after Philippe DeLeri who discovered the element, and not out of a sense of irony. Rob came back to his seat and sighed. "1 down, bloody 11 more to go" he said, referring to hi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leo and Joy (fiction)

  Leo was lying on a gurney in the Government Veterinarian Hospital. He was too weak to stand up, and could barely move his tail. He hated the cold, metal feel of the gurney. He wanted to be home, playing fetch with Joy, his best friend. Leo was adopted by Sam, Joy's father, when he found a tiny pup shivering in the rain. Sam, then 17, swaddled the pup in an old blanket, fed him milk with a dropper, and held him close when he wouldn’t stop whimpering. Now Leo was 14 years old and had a weak heart. He fainted last evening in the middle of running around with Joy. Sam brought him to the hospital. The vet gave the bad news to Sam - Leo was dying. He might be dead in a day, most probably will not survive the next week. Sam came to see Leo, trying hard to brave. Leo tried to wave his tail, and managed a very slow, little movement.  Leo just wanted to run around with Joy, getting the old tennis ball back to Joy and see his face light up with a smile. In the haze of his s...
Post a Comment
Read more