The Caps Lock Incident

On Thursday of the first week I met the Caps Lock customer, and I have thought about her every day since, the way you think about a comet you were lucky to see. Her ticket came in as text rather than a call, which I had learned to treat as a small blessing, the way a soldier treats a quiet morning. The ticket was titled — and I am copying it exactly — "NOTHING WORKS AND I HAVE BEEN ON HOLD FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE." She had not been on hold. I checked. She had submitted the ticket ninety seconds before I opened it. But I have come to understand that in the emotional reality of the customer, time on hold is not measured in minutes. It is measured in grievance, and by that measure she had, perhaps, been on hold since childhood. The body of the ticket was four hundred words and every single letter was capitalized. Now, I want to be fair to her, because this journal is a field study and not a comedy roast, although I accept the line is thin. The all-caps was not, I think, anger, or not only anger. I read it three times and I came to believe it was a kind of flare fired into the night sky. It was a person who had been made to feel small by a machine, and who had reached, instinctively, for the only volume control the machine offered her. She could not make us listen. But she could, by God, make us SEE. Her actual problem, once I excavated it from beneath the capitals, took me four minutes to solve. She had two accounts. She had been logging into the empty one and was, understandably, finding it empty. I merged the accounts. I sent her a reply — in normal sentence case, gently, the way you'd return a frightened cat to its owner — explaining what had happened and where her work had been all along. She wrote back within a minute. The reply was two words, and they were also in all caps, and they were: "OH. THANKYOU." That is the whole ticket. That is the whole story. But I sat at desk fourteen for a long moment after I closed it, and Toby asked what was wrong, and I found I had to think about how to say it. "She was furious," I said, "and then she wasn't. And it took four minutes. And nothing was actually broken — she just couldn't see her own stuff." "Welcome to the helpline," Toby said. "Eighty percent of all rage is people who can't find their own stuff." I wrote that down too. I am beginning to suspect that this journal will not, in the end, be a journal about software. I am beginning to suspect it is going to be a journal about people who cannot find their own stuff, which is to say, a journal about everyone, which is to say, about me.