I've just spent almost two hours chatting either online or on the phone with various reps from HP.
I suppose that I need to backtrack. I contacted HP support on behalf of someone named Chris. Chris began showing up Tuesday nights a few months ago. He's disabled and confined to a motorized wheelchair due to his being afflicted with palsy. His speech is difficult to understand at times. The problem is that the people who raised him equated his inability to speak clearly with a lack of intelligence and apparently Chris was never given a chance to learn how to read, I discovered this one night after dinner when Chris approached me and asked me for a favor. He told me that he wanted to be able to start reading the bible he'd received recently. I've spent the last few weeks contacting various literacy programs and not gotten a response from any of them. So I'm going to take a crack at getting him able to reach a functioning level of literacy. But i digress.
Chris can read numbers and tell time, stuff like that. Last night he showed me some bank transactions off his phone app and apparently he was charged 3 times for the same item that he ordered online from HP.
The bank entry had an 800 number as a reference so I called it. I provided a laptop model number and the serial number and the rep was able to find the transaction and from that asked me to confirm Chris' full name and the amount, which I did. Apparently the transaction was associated with tech support so I got transferred there, only to be told that their phone lines were available only during certain business hours. I went home and tried their online chat, only to be kept waiting for a rep for 15 minutes before giving up until I tried again this afternoon.
No one on the tech support side could identify the transaction just by model number and serial number and three different reps kept asking me for an order number despite my repeatedly telling them that all I had was the model number and serial number. After almost an hour and a half with tech support, I tried online chat on the sales side where someone helpfully suggested that I call the 800 number again but this time specify that I wanted to speak with a case manager which I did. The end result - HP maintains that they only charged Chris once, but it's possible multiple authorization attempts were made. and to check with the bank.
It took me two hours to get to this point, and I can read, write and talk (sort of).
I try to imagine what it's like for Chris on a daily basis. And I realize how much about life I still take for granted.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
A minority experience - bowl haircuts
Asian american males typically joke about the bowl haircuts they received as kids. The running gag is that asian parents simply place a rice bowl on top of their kid's head and then trim off any exposed hair. And of course, they did it themselves to avoid the expense of paying a barber. I hated those bowl haircuts, but knowing that the look served to emphasize how different I was from mainstream America actually isn't the most unpleasant memory I have associated with those haircuts.
My folks didn't actually use a bowl when they cut my hair, but they did use a set of electric clippers; haircuts were much quicker that way. One day, my father was giving me my haircut when he accidentally clipped the top of my right ear. This started an exchange that went kinda like this (translated into English at some points):
"OW!"
"What's the matter?"
"You cut my ear!"
"No I didn't"
I'm not sure when I started crying. It may have been before or after I showed him where my ear was bleeding, to which he responded:
"Well, it's not that bad."
I didn't develop a pathological fear of clippers. My ear healed completely.
What makes it memorable is that it went pretty much the same way conversations go when the topic is a grievance and the participants in the conversation include a minority and a non minority.
The issue is typically not the initial injury. The issue is the frustration that results when the initial injury is made to seem to be trivial - or even worse, there is no avenue to even air the grievance.
And that kind of frustration doesn't just fester. It corrodes the soul.
And this is something non-minorities just don't seem to understand.
More often than not, we're not seeking to redress grievances. We're just looking for empathy. We're not talking about sympathy. You may feel badly about someone else's situation, but that's not empathy. Empathy is about being able to understand and share someone else's feelings. It often takes a vindictive direction because it seems to be the only way for the aggrieved to get any sort of sense that the transgressor understands the impact of the transgression which usually goes beyond the actual injury.
While I'm a minority, I can't claim to understand what it feels to be black, or maybe even worse, native american. But I think that I do understand what it feels like to have no voice, to feel marginalized. When you try to state your case reasonably, you get ignored, which often results in feeling like you have to do something extreme to make your voice be heard. When you resort to something at that level, you get their attention, but now they're in a defensive state of mind because your actions are perceived as being threatening in some way.
And it sucks.
My folks didn't actually use a bowl when they cut my hair, but they did use a set of electric clippers; haircuts were much quicker that way. One day, my father was giving me my haircut when he accidentally clipped the top of my right ear. This started an exchange that went kinda like this (translated into English at some points):
"OW!"
"What's the matter?"
"You cut my ear!"
"No I didn't"
I'm not sure when I started crying. It may have been before or after I showed him where my ear was bleeding, to which he responded:
"Well, it's not that bad."
I didn't develop a pathological fear of clippers. My ear healed completely.
What makes it memorable is that it went pretty much the same way conversations go when the topic is a grievance and the participants in the conversation include a minority and a non minority.
The issue is typically not the initial injury. The issue is the frustration that results when the initial injury is made to seem to be trivial - or even worse, there is no avenue to even air the grievance.
And that kind of frustration doesn't just fester. It corrodes the soul.
And this is something non-minorities just don't seem to understand.
More often than not, we're not seeking to redress grievances. We're just looking for empathy. We're not talking about sympathy. You may feel badly about someone else's situation, but that's not empathy. Empathy is about being able to understand and share someone else's feelings. It often takes a vindictive direction because it seems to be the only way for the aggrieved to get any sort of sense that the transgressor understands the impact of the transgression which usually goes beyond the actual injury.
While I'm a minority, I can't claim to understand what it feels to be black, or maybe even worse, native american. But I think that I do understand what it feels like to have no voice, to feel marginalized. When you try to state your case reasonably, you get ignored, which often results in feeling like you have to do something extreme to make your voice be heard. When you resort to something at that level, you get their attention, but now they're in a defensive state of mind because your actions are perceived as being threatening in some way.
And it sucks.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)