Distribute This!

Your call is not very important to us.

By Zach Hively

I recently had one of those customer service experiences that leaves one wondering if, possibly, the key to cracking all the world’s unsolved murder mysteries is lurking in those calls that may be recorded for training purposes.

It all started because I decided to become a book publisher. I based this decision on the potential career earnings. Ha ha! I kid. I based this decision on the pleasure I derive from saying the words “book publisher.” Try it--book publisher. It’s a very pleasant phrase.

But no book publisher is an island. It doesn’t matter how introverted I am; I have to rely on Other People unless I want to write all the books, and design all the covers, and harvest the timber to be pulped into paper all by myself.

Actually, I do want to do all these things. But someone has to buy all the books to fund my book forest and my writing snacks. Which means customers. Which means … customer support.

Now I don’t want to use names, so that if any customer support agents should go missing, I won’t be immediately linked to them. But the issue at hand, the reason I wrote to customer support in the first place, was that I needed to sort out a book problem with my distributor.

A distributor, for those not in the industry, is a company that uses an ineffective, user-unfriendly, poorly designed, and ugly web interface to ruin all the metadata associated with a forthcoming book. And then—and then!—a distributor makes that ruined data impossible to fix because of reasons that do not apply. This corruption of data means the distributor cannot distribute this book to bookstores, which is a relief (for the distributor) because distributing books is outside their terms of service.

That’s more or less what I wrote to the distributor’s customer support team three weeks ago, only I used Fake American Sincerity voice because at that point I had not yet waited three weeks for a response. I even tried to fix the problem myself first! More than one time! And then I opted to let professionals handle it so I didn’t wreck the rest of my week on a Tuesday.

That was my first big mistake, assuming the professionals would handle anything professionally, or at all.

I got my response two days later. The customer support agent also utilized Fake American Sincerity voice. The agent assured me, with text copied straight from some manual or other, of all the ways they had not read any portion of my plea for help.

Because many of you are not book publishers and should not have to suffer through learning distributor lingo, I’ll translate the ensuing exchange into a more familiar context:

Me: I would like some apples, please, because this is a supermarket.

Customer Support Agent: According to this manual, we do not have broccoli.

Me: But I just need apples.

Customer Support Agent: You have allowed your carrots to expire. You may still eat them, but they will have a floppy mouthfeel.

Me: Apples?

Customer Support Agent: Potatoes are indeed delicious. I apologize for the dragonfruit’s inability to banana.

Me: Will you understand “apples” better:

• if I use bullet points?
  

and selectively bolded text?

​
Customer Support Agent: No, but we will elevate your frustration to our advanced grocer team.
​
I wish I were exaggerating. I am not.

I wonder how actual grocers feel about throwing tomatoes at customer support agents.

Yet the distributor had me bent over a promotional book display. I cannot distribute myself; this is one of those times I’m stuck relying on Other People. Maybe even Other AI Chatbots.

So I figured I’d try being patient for the book distributor’s advanced grocers to get to my support ticket. And I was patient, alright. I was patient for TWO. ENTIRE. WORK. WEEKS

This put me nearly three weeks in, all told. At this juncture, I funneled anything else causing negative emotions in my life into a brand-new second support ticket. I asked the distributor (in transparently thin Fake American Sincerity voice) to give itself a suppository with an Encyclopædia Britannica.

The response I got to that ticket kindly informed me that emails are answered in the order received, except for mine, which would be bumped to the back of the queue each subsequent time I wrote in asking for updates.

Fortunately for the life and longevity of everyone involved, this response was a lie.

(I might lie too, if my job were to answer last week’s support tickets on a Sunday night.)

An advanced support team member informed me that the wrong and unfixable data could be fixed all along, just not by me. The team has also revoked all my data-editing privileges, including changing my own password.

​But this is okay! Because I have found a new career even more pleasing to say than “book publisher.” And I’m certain that grocers never have to deal with food distributors.