Solitary: 6

For example, sometime that morning Josh wrote/cut and pasted the following:

Dear Mr. Albutoni,

You recently contacted one of our customer service representatives in regards to an issue you had with your Speed Stick™ deodorant. You explained to us you experienced intense nausea after ingesting Speed Stick™ deodorant. We were sorry to hear about your sickness. We thoroughly investigated your claim and what, if any, recourse we had. After speaking with a supervisor and consulting relevant texts, we explained to you we were unable to defray any costs secondary to your issue, including, but not limited to, your medical expenses. Unfortunately, the label clearly states “Harmful if ingested.” We believe the harm you experienced was caused by your using Speed Stick™ deodorant in an unauthorized way. Specifically, you ingested the item. We, therefore, recommend you refrain from ingesting your Speed Stick™ deodorant in the future.

Please continue to use Speed Stick™ deodorant as directed. Attached please find a coupon for Tums™ antacids, which may be able to alleviate nausea caused by other permitted sources. We hope this helps. We hope you get well soon.

We thank you for contacting us. We, like you, believe that products and services ought to be perfect because it’s what you deserve. That’s why we are the People people™.

Sincerely,
Joshua Stevenson, Clerical Technician
Customers F1rst, LLC
“The People people.”™

Letters like these pulled Josh in different directions. For starters, there was the issue of the way he was supposed to communicate. It was atrocious writing. He disdained bloating the English language with gobbledygook. He did not like appending his name to them. Unfortunately, he had no choice in the matter short of resigning his post. It was a slight consolation that the recipients were strangers and, even though he was identified by name, he retained the anonymity of physical distance. It’s not like we’ll ever meet. For a brief span, he tried being more straightforward and less verbose. His campaign lasted eight business days, at which time Josh discovered all correspondences were CCed to supervisors for review at random. A three-page reprimand from Calloway for his use of contractions, which were clearly forbidden in the Clerical Technician Protocol Manual as ‘unprofessional language’, brought the mission to a close.

Behind the style was the bothersome substance, the issues he was addressing. It was impossible that all the customers who had been denied refunds or repairs were to blame for malfunctions. Given the iniquities in the power distribution between a corporation and a given consumer, it stood to reason the consumer lost these battles. He was, then, an agent of injustice. He didn’t make the decisions, he only carried them out. Josh was merely doing as he was told and if he ever contested a decision, he would be punished or First would get someone else. He was in an ethical bind. The only choice was whether or not to continue employment, which was not viable given the various legally binding obligations he had, money-wise. Continuing meant pleading the Nuremburg defense, which made him feel slimy. This interior discussion, which he had carried out many times in the past, usually ceased with Josh concluding it was not a Big Deal. At least in the PCD, people were never out more than $10 because of poor design, shoddy craftsmanship, or lousy materials on the manufacturer’s part. Live and learn.

Wrongful dismissals were the exception to the customer service rule. Most of the time, the customers had erred. It took less than a month to notice the culprit responsible for most of these communiqués. The common thread of the incidents, the origin of the problems, seemed not to be thoughtlessness per se. As any earnest practitioner of meditation can attest, the faculty of thought rarely shuts down completely shy of death, coma, or deep sleep. At a bare minimum, consciousness idled on sensuous fuel. The matter was in quality, not quantity of thoughts. The root was the horrendous, ubiquitous proclivity to accept thoughts as soon as they arose without a moment’s review. A person wonders whether something that smells so sweet will taste so sweet and does not pause to consider what exactly he might soon nibble. Warnings of ‘external use only’ were spelled out on cotton swab boiler plate because of documented hospital admissions secondary to attempted internal usage. The spectrum of human unintelligence, incontinence (mentally speaking), and brutishness—all of which were on display in the CIRs—was nothing short of astounding.

Most of these accidents/injuries were funny at first blush like a home-video of a whiffle-ball bat to daddy’s groin. The varieties of buffoonery were the sujet-du-jour on the fourteenth floor. The replaying of daily customer blooper reels made up the lion’s share of First’s water-cooler talk. (“A guy told me today his hemorrhoid cream wasn’t working. Turns out he didn’t know the difference between hemorrhoids and bunions.”) One-upsmanship led to a string of recollections, after which people would laugh and be glad they weren’t That Guy. More than once Josh, the resident English major, was exhorted to write a book chronicling these stories. The concept reminded him of a publication he’d already come across.

As a junior in high school, Josh spent hours snickering at a website devoted to chronicling the true stories of unbelievably dumb and hilarious deaths. Suffocating in a pile of pachyderm manure, kicking loose a clog within the chute of an industrial wood grinder, or the consequences of attaching a commandeered jet-fuel assisted take-off rocket to the roof of an old Chevy Impala were all rehashed in titillating detail. One such death stayed with Josh. A young man took a young woman he was smitten with to a local carnival somewhere in the American boonies. At the carnival, the young woman was amused (presumably beyond “all get out”) by the troupe of jugglers. The following weekend, the young man called out to his girl in her second floor window in the front yard of her parents’ house. Like a fairy tale, the fair maiden opened her window and beheld him, arms at his sides, holding heavy things. In a daze of love, this modern day troubadour fired up a pair of gas-powered Stihl chainsaws to win her affections with a show of manliness and daring. He could not hear her prohibitive pleas over the sound of the two-stroke engines. Suffice it to say, he was ill-prepared. He caught the first airborne device less with his hands than with his clavicle. Josh often pictured this gruesome scene and its aftermath. Who was tasked with cleaning the lawn? Where was that young woman now? How could she go on after seeing that macabre scene? A pie in the face was funny. It didn’t even leave a mark. It could be remedied. But the sources of these injuries (i.e., the mind), if not the injuries themselves, were in some fashion fatal. Now, people read this over and laughed like it was a pratfall.

The sentiment aroused in Josh after transcribing a few thousand such correspondences changed. He usually left the break room venting sessions laden with guilt. What began as comic ripened into tragic. Someone was always hurt. Truth be told, daddy was in serious need of ice. What difference did it make if, as in cases like these, a wound was self-inflicted? Did that not make it worse and more pitiable? People acted this way—harmed themselves—without compulsion. They were at once victims and aggressors.

Stupidity accounted for roughly 55% of CIRs. Apart from the people who were damaged from their interactions with products was the smaller class of people (approximately 24%) who were offended by them. These crotchety-types wrote in or called up brimming with pseudo-parental disappointment, moral derision, stern threats of legal action, and promises of at least personal, if not community-wide, boycotts. Imagining these people with nothing better to do than to take time out of their days to carp about how a certain toothpaste tasted more like spearmint than peppermint (unfortunately for that customer, the product’s label described itself as ‘wintermint’) made you want to laugh the first time you read it over. It was pathetic. Then Josh thought about how old these people with names like Mortimer and Justine were (dates of birth were one of the eight informational categories CRs investigated) and how desperate for purpose they must be. He imagined them buying can after can of off-brand chicken and noodle soup with their Social Security checks, slurping them alone, hunched atop wicker furniture in canary yellow rooms with dusty millwork and pilling burnt orange cushions, reading every line of the daily paper with a craggy frown, and biding their time with acidic letters until they see their spouses again in the hereafter. Happiness had expired; nostalgia remained. They had lived the dream. Indignation was their life-support. It was sad.

Now, in an age approximating maturity, Josh thought all of this was no laughing matter. There seemed to be a sinister germ here. To chuckle about topics like this was doubtless a stepping-stone on the trail of apathy that dead-ended in socio/psychopathology. Laughter had an anesthetic quality. The ante needed to be upped the more central it became in a person’s life until a person was functionally nihilistic, making light of everything construed as valuable. Josh had more than once observed how particularly demented comic books were given humor-related appellations (e.g. the Comedian, the Joker, the Riddler, etc.). Was there any greater cruelty than the open-throated guffaws of criminals at the pain of their victims? That was nightmarish. Thomas Hobbes, a paragon of pessimism and hero of hedonism, argued what made funny funny, was a semi-conscious awareness of superiority of the laugher over the laughee. Was that what this kidding around was about, at bottom? Revelry in power? A sixth-sense for evolutionary virility? The smug grin, condescension, sarcasm, and irony distinguished the head from the butt of the joke, as it were. When laughing, people tilt their heads back. The nose goes up.

Josh played back the last thought in his head. It sounded preposterous for all its outrage. Having thought about it, it occurred to Josh he was uptight. Must he look at everything through a moral lens? What a killjoy he was! He was probably indignant about his ungraceful childhood. Maybe I should write a letter to someone, too. An image could be simultaneously funny and sad. What was it Nietzsche said about laughter? Something about its link to suffering. Seriousness was ambivalent. It was enlightenment’s and hypertension’s antecedent. Taken in the abstract, there was nothing wrong with giggling at ourselves. Our ridiculousness is compounded by our refusal to recognize it. A person needs to be able to make fun of himself. Still, he concluded he would reserve ridicule for himself alone.