On my eleventh call to the customer care center I was assigned a personal representative and given his direct extension number. Of course, when I called that number, it just rang and rang. No voicemail or transfers, nothing. Four calls later, I finally reached the representative, Carlos, who asked for my non existent customer service id number, listened to my story again, and promised to look into it. He put me on hold and I was disconnected shortly afterwards.
“You are a very stubborn boy,” my Grandma used to tell me. “If you don’t change, you will be a very hard person to live with.” I thought about this prediction as I stared at the dead gray screen of my computer monitor. My girlfriend, Jen, should have been asleep in the next room. We had taken to sleeping in different rooms – she in our warm bedroom and me on a futon mattress I had propped up next to my desk. I had taken to calling Customer Care at three in the morning as that was the only time I seemed to be able to get a hold of Carlos. I didn’t sleep so much as doze while I was on hold. I would wake up with a sore, kinked neck - the result of sleeping with the phone cradled to my ear. I just wanted my computer fixed and I somehow had become engaged in a battle of wits with Carlos, who clearly did not want to have my computer fixed. I wasn’t sure how I had gotten to this point. I had tried other options but all the parts in my computer were proprietary to the Computer Company and could not be fixed locally.
At first, I would wake up mid morning and find a note from Jen saying that she had missed me the night before. A week ago, she stopped leaving notes and I suspect that she hasn’t been sleeping at the apartment for the last few days.
Still, I thought I was making progress with Carlos. On the 31st call to him, I had a breakthrough. In a fit of caffeine fueled anger, I threatened to post his direct extension number to every computer forum and blog that I could find. He asked me not to, then begged me not to, and then put me on hold. After four hours, I hung up and posted the extension to one blog. I called back the next night.
“Okay, okay, okay,” said Carlos, in his accented English. “You win. I am beaten. Please take my extension off that website, yes? You don’t know the whole story. I can not deal with the calls that will result from having that number available on the Internet.”
He paused and then let out a big sigh.
“Listen, my friend, I will tell you the truth. The entire Customer Care Department of the Computer Company is run out my cousin’s apartment in Bielsa. This is a small town in the Spanish province of Valencia. My cousins Icar and Miguel and my brother Jorge make up the entire Department. We share two phone lines and three computers.” He paused and then added sadly, “the computers run on Windows ME.”
I was quiet – I didn’t believe him, of course, but the raw emotion in his voice transcended the normal way he talked, which usually had all of the warmth of a concrete parking garage.
“But Carlos,” I said, “What about the woman I sometimes get? The one who transfers me from Sales to Customer Care back to Sales back to Customer Care. The one who said I sounded like a nice boy and gave me your extension."
There was a pause.
“Ah, yes. That is my Aunt Nuria. She works here too, when she has good days. She hasn’t been the same since my uncle disappeared in the 70’s.” He lowered his voice. “Franco, you know.”
“Carlos, are you telling me that the entire Computer Company’s customer service is run by three guys and a semi crazy aunt in Spain? The Company is one of the biggest sellers of computers in the world – I don't believe this. How could you handle all of the calls?” I asked.
“I know, I know,” He said miserably. “Listen, my friend, 95% of the people who call here hang up after the first two hours of being on hold. You, my friend, are the first to call back and back and back. You are very stubborn.”
“But how could the Computer Company do this?” I asked, “Why don’t they hire more people?”
“More people? It sounds like a dream, yes? I have not been outside since 1991 and you just say hire more people. That would be very nice. My brother Jorge could spend time with his son if we had more people. It is my fault, though. Que pena, no? You see we have the exclusive contract with the Company and it does not pay enough to hire more people. "
“You see, my friend,” Carlos said, “as a young boy, my father took my brother Jorge and I on a holiday to the South of Spain. Have you been to the South of Spain? No? Well at the very most southern tip, is a small mountain – it is more of a large rock. In fact, they call it a rock, the Rock of Gibraltar. This rock, despite being in Spain, does not belong to the Spanish. It belongs to the British who keep a small army and a tourist village there. They drive their cars on the wrong side of the streets and drink tea with their pinkies out and laugh at us Spaniards. It doesn’t sound very fair, does it? The southern tip of Spain owned by the English? But such is life.”
“Well, as a young boy,” Carlos continued, “my father, brother and I went to climb this small mountain. They say from the top you can see all the way to Africa. There is a - how do you say it – a funicular, a tram, that runs to the top but that is for the lazy English tourists. We decided to climb it. My father had a surprise for Jorge and I. You know what is the most amazing thing about Gibraltar? On the rock are monkeys. No, no, my friend, it is true.” Carlos paused and let out a chuckle, “I did not believe my father when he told me, either.”
“They call them apes but really they are just monkeys,” Carlos said. “The British try to make everything they own sound better than what it really is. But the apes of Gibraltar are really just small brown monkeys who live in caves on the rock. They have always been there and it is said that the British will not leave the Rock before the monkeys do. Trust the British to try to out stubborn monkeys. You are sort of like that, only you are American, no?”
“Well,” Carlos continued, “the day was very hot as it often is in Spain. We were about half way up the mountain when we decided to take a break in the shade. That is when we saw the first monkey. It ignored us until Jorge took out some tortilla to eat. Have you tried Spanish tortilla, my friend? It is very good, no?”
“Well the monkey came over and it was very obvious that he wanted some tortilla. He would put his paw to his mouth every time Jorge put a piece of tortilla to his own mouth. When Jorge touched the top of his head, the monkey would touch the top of its own head. It mimicked everything Jorge did until Jorge gave it a piece of tortilla."
“I had never seen anything like that," Carlos said. “Of course I was only a small boy and had not seen much in the world. Still, the Gibraltar monkeys are supposed to be the smartest monkeys in the world, and that is not just British bragging. De verdad, they are very smart."
“Well, ten years ago, I started my own computer repair shop in Bielsa. The only problem is that not many people had computers in my small town. Then, I read an article on how the Computer Company was looking to outsource its customer service department and it was looking for low bids. I said to myself, ‘Carlos, my friend, if you can get that contract, you will be very rich.' But how could I get the contract?”
“I thought and thought and thought about how I could make the lowest bid. I would need an army of people to take calls and Bielsa is very small. Well, I was thinking about this problem one night, eating some of my Auntie’s tortilla, when it hit me – monkeys. Not just any monkeys, no, but the apes of Gibraltar. I had ready seen that they could be easily trained, yes? And the best part was that since the British owned Gibraltar, the monkeys already knew English. It was perfect, no?” Carlos asked.
At this point, I interrupted him. “You wanted the Computer Company’s Customer Care Department to be run by trained monkeys?” I blurted.
He paused and I could hear the sound of a cigarette lighter striking. “You don’t mind if I smoke do you – you Americans are so funny about these things.” He inhaled deeply.
“Oh yes, my friend,” he continued. “In fact, I was able to make the bid so low, I won the contract. But it was my mistake, que lastima, to sign an agreement to provide services for 50 years. After winning the contract, my father, brother, and I went to go get the monkeys.”
He paused again to inhale from his cigarette.
“Well, we got the monkeys, my friend. We put a whole bunch of them in bags but when we tried to leave Gibraltar, the pendajo British shot my father and killed him. My brother and I dropped our bags of monkeys and ran back to Spain like cowards.”
He paused and took another drag.
“Do not be sad, my friend. He was very old at that point. My auntie tried to get the body back but the British had – what is the word - shellacked him and put him in one of those jodido wax museums that they so love."
There was a long silence. I wasn’t sure what to say.
Carlos sighed.
“I have not gone outside in ten years, I have not taken siesta, drank wine, swam in the ocean for a very long time. I cannot even remember what it is like to make love to a woman. All I do is answer these puto madre telephones.”
He sighed again.
“I tell you what my friend,” he said wearily, “Even though it means I have to work six months longer, I send you the part to fix your computer for free. You get an email soon with a tracking number.”
There was a pause, then Carlos shouted somewhat angrily, “Do not call back.”
The line went dead.
Ten days later, I still hadn’t received the part. Last night at a public library terminal and with the help of a friend who is very good at illicit computer stuff, I hacked into the Computer Company’s shipping and tracking website.
Carlos did not lie – my free part is on its way. Only, it is coming by camel caravan over the High Atlas Mountains. The Company’s spare part division was relocated to the Western Sahara last year for, apparently, tax reasons.
That’s my story and the reason I haven’t updated this site recently. My computer is dead – it’s a large plastic paperweight sitting on my desk and it looks like it might be a while before I can get it fixed.
