How to talk to people: training wheels

Random philosophical post #1

I promised to publish the post about over-processed skin this week, but I’ve been chewing on something that I felt compelled to write about first.

For those of you who might have wondered, “Where’s the ‘side of philosophy’ she mentions?” and those of you who kindly indicated that you’d be open to reading “random thoughts from Dara” in my reader survey, this is for you.

For those of you who may now feel the urge to locate the reader survey and very clearly indicate that you are NOT interested in my random thoughts, I’ll get back to the skincare programming soon. Thanks for humoring me. (And if you skip the rest, I’ll never know.)

Talking is never difficult with our seaweed forager, Ian — but I couldn’t find a relevant photo, felt weird about using stock imagery, and thought, “Well, this is a photo of people talking.”

I just got back from a wedding weekend in North Carolina, where — per usual — my family was a bit of a disaster getting on the plane. I played my normal role: wreaking mild havoc by scampering around, unzipping pieces of luggage, and stuffing various items that did not fit in my own sit-on-it-to-close-it suitcase and bursting-at-the-seams backpack into everyone else’s bags while whispering, “Shh, it’s fine, don’t worry about it! See, it’s so little!”

But while I did that, since my daughter had just realized that she’d left her phone in our rental car, and since we were (obviously) arriving at the airport barely in time to board, I was also trying to track it down.

“Easy! I’ll just call the car rental place here, and since we turned the car in just fifteen minutes ago, hopefully some kind soul can find it right away and we can figure out how to get it back.”

I generally pride myself on my resourcefulness and tenacity, but all my efforts to get an actual phone number for that specific rental car office hit a definitely-non-budge-able brick wall. I dug deep in Reddit threads, I attempted to route myself to ancillary service providers in the hopes that they’d then route me to the correct secret number…I tried the whole menu. Nothing. All we could do was fill out a form and hope that someone would, eventually, get back to us.

It seems like a lot of customer service has gone this way: with increasing frequency, if there’s a phone number at all, there’s no longer a “press zero to speak to a team member.” And those friendly chatbots with cute names rarely respond anymore to my pleas to let me chat with a human. I find it truly maddening. And when I find things to be maddening, I try to pull the string and figure out why I’m so damned mad.