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Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Socialized Tech Support

Neck-deep in this interminable election cycle, I have come to recognize the unifying aspect of the Great American Experience.  We all feel the pain of high gasoline prices and even the nouvest of the nouveaux fascists feels the pinch of jingoistic embarrassment over the war in Iraq.

As the presidential pageant contestants bang on about their insufficient ideas to address our concerns, I would like to see somebody champion my dazzling new idea.

Socialized tech support.

Proponents of socialized health care are rightly concerned about the exponentially increasing health care costs as well as the degradation of actual care wrought by the free-market economy.

Replace a couple of nouns, and that’s tech support, ain’t it?

Dish Network is my television provider and Qwest is my internet provider.  These are Colorado companies.  This may sound like a shameless plug for my people, my place, and while I am not above such things, you must have patience while I get to my point.

I do not have a lot of need for tech support.  I can tell if a bauble is plugged in or turned on, and I know enough to turn it off and turn it on before I call.  This places me in the top decile of the tech supported.  If I call, something is actually wrong, and something is not actually wrong all that often.

Back in the day, which was not very long ago, I could call Dish Network or Qwest and get help.  Actual help.  I would say what I had to say and sometimes even have a person on the other end with enough wherewithal to laugh at me.  They had actually seen the equipment, understood basically what their company did, and spoke the same language that I do.

Ah, clumsy foreshadowing.  I hope you will stick with me even though you know how it turns out.

In the past couple of weeks, I had occasion to call both companies.  I called Colorado-based companies and got India.  On all previous occasions, I did not get India.  I got Littleton or Wheat Ridge (Denver suburbs, if ya don’ know) or someplace incredibly exotic like Tacoma.  Now I get India.

Now, if everybody in the United States was fantastically stupid, or if they were all employed, or if there were some compelling cultural reason that Indians were far more clever, intuitive, patient and supportive than Americans, I could live with this.  I hate to go libertarian free market pragmatist on you, but if India was better, it would simply be up to America to improve.

But the fact is that Indian tech support is horrible.  Horrible.  Horrible without a pause.  Often the service rep has an accent impenetrable to the average American, and they rarely know anything.  They do not listen to you because they do not have any idea why you are calling.  I have seen no evidence that they understand the general business of the company they are representing.  They simply try to match what you are saying to the something on the screen in front of them.  I can follow a dichotomous key myself – why the hell do I have to sit on hold for half an hour to have somebody interpret one for me?

We have a couple of options.  We could learn Spanish, which probably all responsible citizens of at least the American West should do at this point.  I would bet that if you “marke ocho,” you get routed somewhere in the United States and that the rep speaks Spanish with a Mexican accent, likely the accent in which you learned the language.  No problem.

The other option is for the government to step in.

I am rarely in favor of nationalizing anything.  With the exception of the United States Postal Service, which to me is an ongoing miracle, I challenge you to name something the federal government is not presently butchering.  When considering nationalizing any industry, the first, largest and simplest hurdle is the question, “Can it be worse?”  If the answer is yes, then it will be.  The airline industry has been in danger of nationalization several times for no better reason than the answer was, “Probably not.”

Tech support cannot get worse.  Although we run the risk of that awful Eastern Bloc paradigm of state-supported dronery (still painfully in evidence in places like Budapest), we could essentially reach full employment by bringing those jobs back from overseas.  These are not terrible jobs, not Wal-Mart jobs.  They pay reasonably and would come with government benefits, the sort of benefits that provide health care and a path to retirement, solving the Great American Panic for tens of thousands of people.

Obviously, my intent is for the companies to carry some of this expense as a tax.  There are macroeconomic benefits as I have suggested above that carry another chunk of the expense, and it would naive of me to act as though the consumer will not also carry their share.  I think that consumers would, in finality, realize economic benefit from decent tech support simply by not discarding equipment that still works fine if only somebody could tell us how.

Part of the Great American Experience is egregious tech support.  It need not be this way.

What better time than now?  This is like a New Deal for the 21st century, a great Rooseveltian stroke to encourage the economy and develop job skills in the underclass while providing a necessary service and restoring some national pride.  WPA for the here and now.

Then perhaps India would like to outsource their tech support to us.

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