Due to unusually high
call demand our wait time is currently approaching fifteen minutes.
I’ve heard the same recorded announcement every time I’ve
called them for the past five years, and you know what that means. It means
that the call demand they’re experiencing at the moment isn’t unusually high at all,
it’s normal. The truth of the matter is that they have insufficient staff to
answer the normal call demand any quicker than fifteen minutes.
Which means that the company is lying to me, and I don’t
like that. And I’ve told them so, only the problem is that the person to whom I’m
expressing my disquiet is not the person who’s telling me the lie. He’s some
poor, hard working technician who’s doing his level best to be polite, friendly
and helpful, and give every customer the time it takes to handle their problem
effectively. The fault lies with the post-truth era in which we are living,
which might be summarised as:
It’s perfectly
acceptable in business, politics, the media, and pretty much all other areas
involving public communication, to tell whatever lies best suit your nefarious purposes
as long as you can be reasonably sure of getting away with it.
They get away with it.
* * *
I didn’t make a post last night – in fact I did hardly
anything at all last night – because I was experiencing an unusually deep level
of depression. I’m no stranger to depression, but that one perplexed even me. How
on earth do you get to a state where you can’t face any sort of creative or
practical activity, you can’t face listening to music, you can’t face the
prospect of taking a shower, you can’t even face knowing anybody? You even have
to force yourself to summon sufficient energy to go to bed. All you feel is a
sense of mental suffocation from the weight of near-palpable darkness pushing
in on you from all sides.
Interesting, isn’t it? I suppose there’s probably a pill for
it, but I don’t do pills.
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