A scrub jay hangs around my house begging for food.  My neighbors and I have seen the same bird — we all swear — for five years.  Someone named him “Mr. Noisy” and I concur.

I heard Mr. Noisy outside my door this morning.  I didn’t feel like hunting for my robe, putting on shoes, and going outside to fill the feeder.  He will have to wait.  I’m fiddling with a failed Verizon service.  The chatbot wants me to troubleshoot but I refuse; it’s clearly a system outage as it’s on both my devices.  I tell them, I have to get work done now, just fix the outage.  Thank you.

The challenge of life sometimes warrants such statements.  We shouldn’t have to submit to the systemic refusal to address our concerns by a major corporation, but time after time, we do.  People should do their jobs without resistance, but occasionally they fall into the corporate tendency to avoid responsibility.  The frustrating truth slams us:  Big companies want your money but don’t really want to provide quality service. 

I try to put things in perspective.  The customer service agent has to follow a script.  But that script does not serve me.  The last time my phones did not work, I spent two hours factory-resetting my phone because the agent swore that no area outage plagued my zip code.  I lost data and hours of effort, only to learn that Verizon service had been down since early morning in my region.  I don’t play that game any more, yet the agent today kept saying he would not report an outage unless I troubleshooted both devices including re-setting.  I’m not doing that, but neither will I text-yell at him. My composure means a lot to me these days.

So Mr. Noisy squawks outside my door, while in my tiny house, I firmly type into my phone, I’m not playing this game, just report the outage.  I can’t say which one of us will prevail. I remain resolved not to yell at this chatperson.  Of course, yelling via text message doesn’t have quite the same effect as the racket Mr. Noisy makes outside my door.  Maybe I should record him and send the .WAV file to Verizon.

It’s the tenth day of the one-hundred and fourteenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

My friend and neighbor Robin Pack ought to appreciate these vertical snaps of Mr. Noisy.

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