I recently became a grandmother for the fourth time. My husband and I were driving to the movies when we got the news. Since we weren’t scheduled to visit our newest granddaughter for two weeks, we decided to send flowers.
Out came the cellphone as we tooled down the highway. The transaction took 10 minutes and the agent assured me that if my daughter was discharged before the flowers arrived, an agent would call me back, secure her home address and reroute said bouquet.
Ah, modern life, I thought. And I had talked to a real person. No worries. Off to the movies.
My daughter left UCLA hospital the next day, flowerless. I awaited the call from the flower purveyors. It never came.
I’m notorious for throwing money away. Normally I’d just order another bouquet. But bad service — that bugs me. So I called the central office for the flower delivery company. I was told by an extremely empathetic young man named Jonathan that he’d look into it. Phone numbers duly recorded, I hung up glowing with my success in once again contacting a real person.
One week later, Jonathan sadly hadn’t come through. I called again. I reached Ion. Another real person. Also very empathetic, and also a whiz at transcribing all kinds of numbers, confirmations, phones, addresses, you name it.
But a wee bit lax in the “getting back” department.
So when no call was forthcoming from Ion after 24 hours, I noted in myself a rare tenacity hitherto deployed in studying for medical school exams or learning new jazz charts. I am not a polished consumer. I don’t read product reviews. If I don’t like things, I throw them out and start over and I’ve always considered my time more valuable than my money.
Was it disappointment, betrayed trust? I don’t know what possessed me.
I warned Ion, I really did. I disputed the purchase with American Express. I wrote a scathing review on Yelp and Angie’s List. And I didn’t have to talk to one single person in order to accomplish all of that.
But first I decided to send my daughter a fresh floral bouquet. I reached Everett at a competing flower company’s toll-free number.
Everett is, although a real person, also likely a community college dropout. Despite my laborious and glacially slow spellings complete with phonetic cues (“F as in Frank”) he misspelled my name and got my message wrong. When I asked for bouquet suggestions, he referred me to the website. When I said, “Gee, I guess I could have done this whole thing on the website,” he agreed.
Even he knows he’s been replaced. A dead man walking.
I pretended there was someone at the door and said goodbye to Everett. And all real persons.
I went online and speedily ordered the flowers to be sent the next day — which is exactly when they arrived.
We’ve all lamented the loss of the traditional shopping experience. I love to shop. I love talking to people, touching things, trying things on, smelling the flowers. And I’ve always been comforted by the sound of a human voice on the phone.
However, it isn’t just that online ordering is speedier and can be done at midnight in your bathrobe. It’s that the computer is smarter than the average person who works in those jobs. And it does what it says it’s going to do.
Jean Milofsky is a practicing psychiatrist and pianist living in Denver.
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