Good phone

It’s 9 AM and Dennis is on the phone.  Or rather, the phone is on Dennis---he uses lightweight, professional headphones and looks like a telemarketer.  He walks around the house with the headphones on, opens the windows, feeds the cat. The headphones fold up and can go into his pocket when not in use. A collapsible black plastic halo. 

Dennis is not telephone-phobic. Unlike me, he does not clench his teeth when the phone rings.  The phone rarely ruins his concentration.  As a rule, he picks up the receiver happily---he’s a marketing rep, a salesman.  He can talk to anyone.  

His talent emerged early.  He sold walnuts door to door when he was about eight years old. He pulled along his stock of unshelled walnuts (packaged in 1 pound bags) in his Radio Flyer wagon.  Regular customers developed; he had a route. The family dog, a wire hair mix named Dusty, learned to eat walnuts---she cracked them open with her teeth.

Until, that is, she discovered a hammer. But that’s another story. 

For Dennis, the phone means money.  The damn thing rings all day long; unfathomable strings of numbers fill the entire caller ID screen.  A pause and then---crunch, crunch, crunch.  Sales orders inch their way through his printer cum-fax machine.  Orders pile up in the paper tray, interspersed with the daily Sudoku puzzle. Money plus entertainment. 

What makes all of this possible, aside from Dennis’s skills and energy, is that marvel of contemporary life, the computer printer.  It’s an HP Pro, model number 8600.  It prints in colors and on both sides of the page.  It copies, scans and faxes.  It has an embedded web server. 

But this morning all is not well. The HP marvel is silent.  No chug-chug-chug. No orders and no Sudoku. Today it will not fax or print. It will not scan or copy. You know what that means; time to call tech support.  

For me, a calling tech support means personal drama.  Stomach-churning equivocation. Kishka-twisting indecision. To pick up the phone and call my trusted campus IT guy, I struggle for an hour. And this is a guy I know---whose voice exudes confidence and sympathy.  Who makes house calls and once arrived on a motorcycle during his lunch hour. For whose expertise I have gladly shelled out the bucks for many years.  

But toll-free help on the phone? I am more than averse; I am a petulant child who refuses reason.  A highly educated professional with decades of work experience, I revert to infantilism.

Dennis belongs to another species.  He embraces phones and automated phone systems. He knows their tricks.  And he is fast. When the automated system asks questions about his printer model, he has all the numbers ready. Then he energetically presses zero for a human voice.  On occasion, he just says “wah, wah, wah”---with much rising and falling intonation---into the receiver.  Any sound pushes the system forward to the next option.  

(“Wah, wah, wah” also works when calling Delta airlines, by the way).

Once contact has been made, Dennis remembers precisely what he did on his first attempt to get the printer to work; he also remembers everything he tried afterward, up to the point when he dialed to tech support.  He recounts his sad story efficiently---without fury, indignation, pathos (that’s my specialty).

This particular morning, tech support seems to think that the shift to Windows 8 is the root of the current fax and printer problem.  Various fixes deep inside the system are tried.  The correct driver has been found online.  The printer has been uninstalled and re-installed. Two test pages have been run. All signs are positive and I am on my second cup of coffee. Some ten minutes have passed.

But Dennis is still talking on headset. The good part has arrived at last:  the chit chat and laughter of what Dennis calls “good phone.”   “Where are you?” Dennis asks.  “Ah, Manila,” he repeats with satisfaction. “How’s the weather?” I’ve learned that location and weather are first two conversational gambits of professional phone people.  

The weather topic is rich for exploration, since anywhere on the globe there’s more variety than in temperate Los Angeles, especially near LAX where Dennis lives.  Tech support is saying something about rain (in the Philippines, about 86 inches annually) and heat (average temperature of 88 degrees).  Dennis is laughing---LA has 15 inches of rain in a good year and the temperature at the airport ranges between 65 and 70 degrees. Earthquakes?  It seems the Philippines has them too.  

Location and weather covered, the conversation’s moves on.  Dennis is telling about his time on a Navy carrier, the USS Coral Sea, during the Vietnam War.  About being stationed at Olongapo where the US Naval base had an “R and R” center.  About shore leave and water skiing off the base in Subic Bay.  The Navy had great speed boats.

The tech guy wasn’t even born then.  His parents weren’t even born then.  

But enough of the past.  Dennis has progressed to health care.  He once had a great experience with national health care in New Zealand.  “What’s it like in the Philippines?” he asks.  From Dennis’s end of the conversation, I learn that the Philippines have universal health care and national insurance; no tech guy opinion about its quality, however. 

Dennis explains that the United States is way behind; somehow the name Franklin Roosevelt has entered.  Does the tech guy know what the Tea Party is?  New friend across the sea breaks in to ask if Dennis will fill out a customer service report.  “Sure, happy to do it,” says Dennis.  Everybody’s happy now.  That’s what Dennis calls giving “good phone.”

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