Looking at the other side of self-service culture

Mary McNamara, Tribune News Service

The sun is shining, the fire threat is low and for the first time in 25 years, no part of California is experiencing drought. Except of course in the hope and joy department. It’s the middle of January, which means the holidays are well and truly over and whatever fanciful shine the prospect of a “new” year held as it approached has already dimmed into grim reality. Of course I want to face this year determined to be a happier, kinder, more empathetic and more just person. But just as it’s tough to honourably pay one’s taxes knowing millionaires and billionaires are weaselling out of theirs, it’s hard to gin up personal-improvement energy when every news cycle brings proof that an alarming number of people are perfectly willing to believe that black is white, science is fake, we should all be cooking with beef tallow and failure to stop when an unidentified ICE agent tells you to is, apparently, punishable by death. Also all that water everyone has been telling us to drink may be full of microplastics.

See, now I’m just getting upset again. Which is just too 2025 to bear. Mercifully, I have just discovered a cache of surviving holiday mint M&M’s (which may or may not contain beef tallow) and, equally important, I have a plan to make life better for everyone. (At least until the midterms, when we will discover once and for all if this democratic experiment has any hope of lasting another year.) It’s very simple, really: We need to demand the resurrection of customer service and put large numbers of well-paid and trained employees back in charge. Seriously. I know it’s fun, and purportedly “convenient,” to be able to accomplish our banking/shopping/travel/bill paying/ticket buying/food ordering/health monitoring/everything else through a series of apps, websites and self-checkout kiosks. But the lack of trained and helpful humans is getting out of control.

How many of us have stood, casting wild-eyed glances for help, when the grocery checkout sensors failed to register a carton of eggs that is clearly in the bagging area and there is only one store attendant tasked with aiding 20 or more finicky machines? Or searched, panic-stricken, for the payment confirmation email that we may or may not have received because we forgot to screenshot an online transaction that is now being called into question via some upsetting email with a DO NOT RESPOND return address?

A friend of mine recently went to her doctor for ongoing treatment of her arthritic hands only to be told that she needed to fill out all her personal information, including her medical history, again because the office had switched systems. Apparently, the job of transferring file information was too difficult (read: expensive) to be accomplished by software, so it was being handed to ... the patients. “Don’t worry,” said the guy sitting directly in front of the office computer. “You can just do it now on your phone.” Yeah, that won’t take time and effort, and did I mention she was there for treatment of her arthritic hands? The abandonment of any notion of customer service — now often called “customer assistance” or, even better, “customer support” (as in we will supportively assist you by directing you to our website or app, which may or may not be helpful/functioning) — is never clearer than when one travels.

Hideous delays and last-minute cancellations of flights have become so commonplace that airlines now advise building in a cushion of an extra day or two on each end of one’s journey. In other words, in addition to the cost of your actual flight, you should be prepared to pay even more in time or money because the airlines certainly are not.

On a long-planned holiday trip to London and Antwerp, Belgium, in December, our flight from LAX was abruptly moved to the next day — no warning, no explanation, no American Airlines personnel at the gate. Just a series of alerts that those who had the AA app received, along with the reassurance that those who qualified would be issued vouchers via email for lodging and food.

Since we lived in the LA area (albeit a 90-minute drive from LAX at that time of day), we were out of luck — we could either pay hundreds of dollars for back and forth cab fare or book our own hotel near the airport. (Other family members, leaving via Charlotte, NC, had it even worse — a malfunction trapped a plane full of people, including my son and his girlfriend, on the runway for five hours before they were released, after midnight. When they finally tracked down an actual staff member, they were given vouchers to a motel that appeared, as Melissa McCarthy’s character says in “Spy,” “so murdery” that they decided to book their own.)

As if that were not enough to prevent us from ever travelling again, we were victims of the great Dec.30 Eurostar shutdown, during which all trains into, and out of, the UK were abruptly cancelled for more than 24 hours due to a power-grid failure in the English Channel Tunnel. We had just been assured that we would soon be boarding our train from Brussels when the news came down over a loudspeaker, in four languages.

Picture, if you will, hundreds of now-stranded travelers, clamouring in panic-stricken English, French, Dutch and German as they streamed into the Brussels-Midi station where one Eurostar agent, one, stood, not suggesting alternate means of reaching our destination but handing out Xeroxed pages directing everyone to the Eurostar app and website.

Where no tickets were available for days and the process of claiming a refund or compensation for lodging and other expenses was an endless maze of questions that needed to be answered when all anyone wanted to know was how in the hell do we get to London now.

With no flights available until Jan.3, days after we were scheduled to fly out of Heathrow Airport, we finally rented a car, at hideous cost, and fled Europe, with some historical poignancy, via midnight-landing ferry from Dunkirk. (If it sounds fun, I am not telling it right.)

My point is not that travel should always go smoothly — things break, weather turns, accidents happen. My point is that if you are a company that is paid to get people from one place to another, you should have enough personnel to help those people reach their destinations as quickly and seamlessly as possible should things go wrong. Instead of, you know, casting them literally onto the street and forcing them to conjure up their own imperfect, and very expensive, DIY solutions.

Because that’s what the digital age has made us — a DIY economy in which millions of jobs no longer exist not because computers do the work, but because the work has been shifted, via computers, directly onto the consumer.

Who increasingly has little or no choice in the matter.

Try to get a car at an auto rental agency without booking it online first; you might as well attempt to barter your watch and three chickens as payment. It would be one thing if, by scheduling your own appointments, keeping track of your own medical tests, bagging your own groceries and filling out all the information needed to book your own reservations for planes, trains and automobiles, you got a discount.