UPS MAIL RAGE

Two boxes of class notes, photos, correspondence, and so on that I saved from the early Sixties are now in my pickup.  They are destined for the faculty archives at Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of Chicago.  They’ve been boxed up since fall, are now addressed and sealed, one box is even prepaid by the archives people, and getting them into the hands of UPS has taken up half of today.  

The day started early since the phone rang at 7AM.  But it only rang once and no one was there.  It may have been a wrong number.  Mine is close to two other numbers, an older woman at the Hutterite colony who likes to check her friends when she gets up, and the station where truck drivers get permits for crossing into Canada.  

Anyway, I used the extra time of being “up” to look in the phone book for UPS.  The closest one is in Cut Bank (30 miles) and brings me my cat food.  They were not in the phone book.  I called information and got a number.  It announced it was disconnected.  I went to the UPS website and called THAT number which announced it was disconnected.  I used the email contact but it wasn’t answered.

Finally I got desperate and simply loaded up my boxes and went to UPS in Cut Bank.  It was locked — only open between 4PM and 6PM.  The time was 10AM.  I went around the back and discovered a few people, one of them a big pleasant fellow named Joel, who was management.  Taking hold of the situation, he led me to the check-in desk and started up the computer.  Alas, it was Gayle’s “station” and she had recently changed her password but didn’t tell anyone what was the new one was.  If she were hit by a truck or eloped, UPS would be stymied.  Joel couldn’t help me.  I promised I would make him look good on this blog, because he was so cheerful and wiling to try.

But there was no choice but to go back to Valier (30 miles) and wait for 4PM when Gayle would come.  Joel gave me a number that would work.  Gayle answered — she wanted me to drive back to Cut Bank (30 miles).  I said I'd been told the regular truck could make a pickup.  So she called the supposedly unavailable number, and it worked.  So I called it and began a sequence of electronic questions that went on and on and on, asking for numbers I didn’t have.  I ended up shouting.  

Suddenly an operator came on.  He spoke quickly, running his words together, but we completed the operation, mostly because I could predict what he would ask.  (It was just for my credit card info.)  Now I must wait for the driver to show up tomorrow sometime between 7AM and 7PM.  Actually he always comes around lunchtime.  He’s a nice guy and I’m always delighted to see him plowing through two feet of snow packing fifty pounds of cat food. 

This is a situation -- this mismatch between what’s expected of a customer and the operator of the service -- that happens over and over.  Mostly it’s because this is Country with long distances and harsh weather.  It’s made worse by phone “helpers” that are not exactly English speakers, not because they are from a foreign country, but because they are Americans who speak a dialect of their own inscrutable kind because they don’t want to move their mouths.

Once I applied for one of these phone answering jobs in Great Falls where they had assured the government that if they got a hefty subsidy, they would be there supplying needed jobs forever.  (They left in about ten years.)  At one point I was asked to listen in on what happened.  The answerers were maybe in the hundreds, each in a little booth.  The people who called in were upset, baffled, scared because they had just discovered that they were required to pay insurance for sudden death, mutilation like losing a limb, and other devastations they had never imagined.  The policy been slipped to them without them knowing when they bought an appliance and phone answerer was expected to keep them from canceling.  They were from Alabama, etc.  I don’t speak Alabama.  The manager said she wanted me to take those calls because I had been a minister so was used to soothing people.  (She wasn't very soothed.)

With the UPS enigma hopefully solved, I took on the NY Times.  I had paid for a subscription but still get paywalls that prevent me from reading stories.  I tried “CHAT” and went in a little circle via print, which is not quite "chatting."  The problem is that I have two emails and the one I look in is not the one I subscribed from, but the one I subscribed from thinks I’m reading on the other one.  There was a sequence of predetermined questions written by someone using thought as a second language.  I finally managed a slightly bigger circle, but still can’t read the stories.

This sort of thing is very common.  Then Twitter announced that it was going to start censoring any materials they thought would upset me.  Suddenly my incoming tweets began to skew right wing and advertising.  At least they weren’t promising to stiffen my penis anymore.  (I’m female.  CIS female.)

Now Rachel Maddow, after two nights of using stand-ins, has fielded a mozaic of old shows — interesting but outdated — and the content of Twitter has gone wild and woolly.  Pots and kettles flying blackened and hard in every direction.  It’s even more impossible to keep track than usual.

The telephone company says I have to pay extra to keep my old copper landline, because they are touting something new and electronic.  The problem for me is that the landline works even when the electricity is off and the electricity is often off.  I only need the phone to call for help, which I’m more likely to need when the electricity is off because the sheriff is in Conrad (thirty miles away).  The ambulance and fire engine are only a couple of blocks away, but without the landline, I’d have to crawl to get to them.  If there were no snow.

There are no pay phones anymore, the laundromats are closing down, and the grocery stores are restocking with prepared foods I don’t recognize.  (They have fancy names, but when you open up the package, they are skimpy.)   So this is the future.  At least the county says that since I’m so poor they will reduce my taxes.  At least I could afford to drive to Cut Bank before the gas prices skyrocket because of war in the Middle East.

At least the meadow larks were going crazy with song because it was a gorgeous day.  A sixty mile drive with my elbow out the window wasn't such a hardship.