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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Talk to
the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons
to Stay Home and Bolt the Door by Lynne Truss |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Rudeness The pundit of punctuation, Lynne Truss, (see Eats,
Shoots and Leaves) has turned her peeved attention to the paucity of
manners, especially in the form of rudeness, in her new book, Talk to
the Hand. Readers will laugh aloud at her observations, and may follow
the advice in her subtitle. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of the
Second Good Reason, “Why am I the One Doing This?” pp. 69-76: I used to write a weekly
newspaper column about the internet. This was in the mid-1990s, when
newspapers were still in love with the newness of the information
super-highway, and had launched special supplements, touchingly unaware that
they were playing host to the mortal enemy of print culture, which would
ultimately displace newspapers altogether. What an irony. Anyway, my column
had no time for this over-excited supping-with-the-devil stuff: it was called
“Logged Off” and was mainly a true record of my agonising
difficulties just loading the software, dragging icons to the Stuffit Expander (“What the hell is a Stuffit
Expander?”), and manfully trying to enjoy the impenetrable humour of computer jokes with punch-lines such as,
“Excuse my friend, he’s null-terminated.” My column included, in its second
week, the useful advice: “Things to do while awaiting connection to the
internet: (1) Lick finger and clean keys of keyboard; (2) Lick finger and
clean mouse; (3) Adjust earwax and stare at wall; (4) Lick finger and clean space bar; (5)
Run out of fingers.” From this you can deduce what species of fun I was
having. Looking
back, it is now clear that my computer’s memory was far too small for the
stuff I was trying to do, and that the internet was
pretty primitive, too. Thus I often waited twenty-five minutes for a website
that was crushingly disappointing, mysteriously defunct, or had absolutely
nothing on it. Entertainingly, on many occasions the search would reach its
eighteenth minute and then just disconnect without explanation. Writing in
the column about this disconnection problem, I received many helpful letters
from readers, one of which suggested that, if my computer was located at some
distance from the telephone socket (it was), I should wrap the phone cable
around an item of furniture, ideally a tall bookcase. In my desperation, I
tried it. Astonishingly, it worked. Anyway, the final blow to the column
came when, one week, I had been examining a recommended website about the
Titanic and found a rare clickable option, “About the creators”. I clicked
it, chewed the edge of the desk for the next twenty-five minutes, and then
discovered the full, bathetic truth. The creator of this website was a
schoolboy in When
I wrote in the introduction to this book about the unacceptable transfer of
effort in modern life, this was the sort of thing I was talking about. In
common with many people today, I seem to spend my whole life wrestling
resentfully with automated switchboards, waiting resentfully at home all day
for deliveries that don’t arrive, resentfully joining immense queues in the
post office, and generally wondering, resentfully, “Isn’t this transaction of
mutual benefit to both sides? So why am I not being met half-way here? Why do
these people never put themselves in my shoes? Why do I always have to put
myself in theirs? Why am I the only one doing this?” And
I lump the internet into this subject because it is the supreme example of an
impersonal and inflexible system which will provide information if you do all
the hard work of searching for it, but crucially (a) doesn’t promise anything
as a reward for all the effort, (b) will never engage in dialogue, (c) is
much, much bigger than you are, and (d) only exists in a virtual kind of way,
so never has to apologise. It seems to me that
most big businesses and customer service systems these days are either modelling themselves on the internet or have learned far
too much from a deep reading of Franz Kafka. Either way, they certainly
benefit from the fact that our brains have been pre-softened by our exposure
to cyber-space. Our spirits are already half-broken. We have even started to
believe that clicking “OK” is an act of free will, while “Quit” and “Retry” represent
true philosophical alternatives. Fuming
resentment is the result. You might remember the old Goon Show catchphrase,
“Foiled again!” Well, we are being foiled again from morning till night, in
my opinion; foiled and thwarted and frustrated; and they wonder why so many
people are on repeat prescriptions. Everywhere we turn for a bit of help, we
are politely instructed in ways we can navigate a system to find the solution
for ourselves — and I think this
is driving us mad. “Do it yourself” was a refreshing and liberating concept
in its day, but it has now got completely out of hand. In his book Grumpy Old
Men (2004), which
accompanied the BBC series, Stuart Prebble
memorably refers to the culture of DIYFS (Do it your Effing
self) and I think he is on to something that extends well beyond the trials
of flat-pack self-assembly furniture. I am now so sensitive on this DIYFS
issue that when I see innocent signs for “Pick Your Own Strawberries” I
shout, as I drive past, “No, I won’t bloody pick my own bloody strawberries!
You bloody pick them for me!” Say
a replacement credit card arrives in the post. “Oh, that’s nice,” you say,
innocently. “I’ll just sign it on the back, scissor the old one, and away I
go!” But close inspection reveals that you must phone up first to get it authorised. “Okey-dokey!” you
cry. You dial a long number and follow instructions to reach the card-authorisation department (press one, press one, press
two), then are asked to input the card number (sixteen digits) then the card
expiry date (four digits) then your date of birth (six digits), then your
phone number (eleven digits), then told to wait. Naturally, your initial okey-dokeyness has started to wane a bit by this time.
You start to wonder whether the card will actually expire before this process
is complete. “Please enter card number,” comes the
instruction. “What? Again?” you ask. But, listening to the menu, there is no
button assigned to this reaction (“For What? Again? press
four”), so off you go again with the sixteen digits and the four digits and
then the six digits and the eleven digits, and then you hear the clipped,
recorded message, “Sorry. We are unable to process your inquiry. Please call
back at another time,” and the line goes dead. Unable to believe your ears,
you stare at the receiver in your shaking hand. It is at this point, in my
experience, that a small cat always comes up behind you and emits a quiet “Miaow” and makes you actually scream and jump up and down
with agitation and rage. But
such is modern life. Armies of underpaid call-centre workers have now been
recruited and trained, not to help us, but to assure us, ever so politely,
that the system simply does not allow us to have what we want, and no, you
cannot speak to a supervisor because the system isn’t organised
that way. We are all slaves to the system, madam; that’s just the way it is. An
error of type 3265 has occurred; you’re stuffed before you start, basically;
click OK to exit; quit or retry, it’s your funeral; anything else I can help
you with?; thank you for calling, goodbye. Sometimes I think wistfully of
that old TV series The Prisoner and how Patrick McGoohan
finally blew up the computer by asking it the question “Why?” At the time, I
thought it was a bit of a bizarre cop-out, what with the chimp and the space
rocket and everything. Now, however, I think the notion of blowing up such an
instrument of tyranny by asking it, “Why?” was quite profound. I am always wanting to ask, “Why?” — but stopping myself just in time, because
I know the effect would be fatally weakening to my cause. When you ask,
“Why?” these days, you instantly lose status. Asking, “Why?” usually signals
the end of all meaningful exchange. So
they get away with it, the bastards. Steadily, the companies are shifting
more and more effort onto their customers, and even using guilt-trip lines
such as “Please have your account details ready, as this will help speed up
the process, so that we can deal with more inquiries.” The message here is
that, yes, you may be waiting for twenty minutes while we make money from
your call, but don’t waste our time when you eventually get through because
this would be rude and inconsiderate to others. “We are busy taking other
calls,” they say, sometimes. Does this placate you? No, it makes you hop up and
down, especially when they suggest you call back later. “We are busy taking
other calls. Perhaps you would like to call back later at a time more
convenient to us? Half-past two in the morning tends to be quiet. It is a
very small matter to set your alarm. Another option is to bugger off and give
up; we find that a lot of our clients are choosing this option these days.” Truss’ British
humor will have broad appeal, especially to those who share her frustrations
about rampant rudeness. Talk to
the Hand is lively and enjoyable reading. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Talk
to the Hand.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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