Dr. Fish vs. Ma Bell

I have no idea where to begin, so let's start here.



I'll try to keep this brief because it is a matter of no consequence, but Stanley Fish's piece on AT&T, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Voice Mail," or whatever, wherein he tells us of trying to change his service via telephone, having a mild stroke over corporate language, and taking his revenge by writing a column (well play'd, sirra), so, see, we all fold back on ourselves with contented pop-pomo "glee" and "satisfaction," is a major thorn in my ass.

My problems are various. First, Dr. Fish asks us to forgive him in advance for having two homes and the problems that come with them. Imagine for a second if John McCain had done that. How well do you think the populace would have taken, "Look, folks. It's hard to deal with five mansions and two condos, but I can handle that challenge," etc.? Questions of class cannot be "bracketed," and the context of our Story of Frustration Rewarded, Fish's Pilgrim's Progress through the teleworld, determines our understanding. We can't forget about who Stanley Fish is and then react to his "ordeal" from behind the veil of ignorance.

How many times can I say the same thing? One more: if Fish had written a story about how he had returned to Home #2 after a long time to find it occupied by stoats and weasels, perhaps our sympathy readings would have ticked up. It's a bitch to get weasels out of your mansion, even if you do have three stout friends with cudgels. (What I'm doing here is a little text-blend on Mr. Fish, you see, so that he, with his animal name, joins Mr. Toad, Badger, Ratty and Moley in The Wind in the Willows, which, full disclosure, was my favorite thing to listen to when I was small. Cross-disciplinarity, self-referentiality, intertextual references and light caricature, let us remember, are all hallmarks of the bargain basement postmodernism seminar that Fish runs.)

Point: the quality of the pain experienced has a lot to do with whether the reader will allow Fish to bracket his class issues. Also, bracketing anticipates a return to the bracketed matter. Our sympathy for Fish presumably escalates when he publishes his piece on Class and the Telephone. Hint.

All other problems with the piece flow from this first bracketing. Stanley is not a person who gets the bureaucratic run-around so often as to be inured to it, so AT&T makes him crazy with a Network kind of amokness. People who spend their days-off standing in line at the gas company, then at Department of Human Services, constantly being unserved, approach bureaucracy with frustration, not satisfaction, as the expected end product. Thus, what Stanley brackets away is an understanding of why he has such a hard time with AT&T: he has irrational expectations of service. Note the arrogance of his demanding that AT&T be running fully staffed on Sunday. Okay, noted? Let's move on.

Again, from his cocoon, Stanley can't tell that the grammatical boner that sends him into apoplexy might actually be intentional. Operators cut in and out of multiple phone calls rapidly. Sometimes they'll lose the first syllables, sometimes the last. "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" could lose its front or back, and remain nominally intelligible and polite. The greeting has the advantage, from a corporate viewpoint, of inducing hypnosis, or from a consumer's advocate's viewpoint, of assuaging concern. (Also, I've gone seven rounds with Ma Bell, and seventeen with Verizon, and never have I heard this Yeti-phrase. Is it possible, not to be meta-anything, that Stan has made this story up as bait? Is he just stirring up the pond?)

Other things Stanley loses with his class in brackets: the realization that the operator who laughs is laughing at him, not with; the understanding that AT&T has no idea who he is, or what conference Florida International plays football in; the sure knowledge that the troubles of one little person, etc.; the possibility that there are other things outside his immediate experience worth writing about, as Israel continues to bomb Gaza, and possibly even there are some experiences near to his own worth writing about, like winter, or Christmas, because who clears up bureaucratic slop between Christmas and New Year's?

But the kicker is this: Fish, by excluding his story from solidarity with a community, clearly even while he is enacting it, forgets the double bind he's put the customer service people into. Refer the crazy man to your boss, and you seriously could be fired. Deny good customer service to the crazy man, e.g. by refusing to refer him up the chain of command, and you could also be fired.

Operators hem and haw, not because they're corporate peons (which assessment is the unspoken message of Fish's diatribe, that people lose their humanity by internalizing corporate imperatives or some such bull's shit) but because they're in an untenable position.

Seriously, a Christmas message for everybody, you, me, Fish, Israel, Hamas: try a little tenderness...

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