One Man Stands Alone

Surviving the Scourge of Self-Service

Traffic circles, or roundabouts as we call them around here, seem to be popping up everywhere in rural North Carolina. It’s like the NC DOT ran out of stoplights and stop signs, so they’ve just decided to build some circles for drivers to navigate at their own leisure. Last week, I may have set the record for most consecutive circumnavigations of a single circle. Ambush would be too strong a word, but I was definitely surprised to find a brand new traffic circle out in the the middle of nowhere, and once it in, I had to go around three or four times to make heads or tales out of the signage, which became more difficult with each subsequent pass because I started to become a little dizzy.

Thankfully, no one else was around or going around while I was circling, so I was just a lone man driving in circles, trying to find my way in this brave new world of self-serve traffic patterns, self-serve everything.

When Thomas fractured his arm last year, I got stuck in self-serve purgatory. I needed to get a copy of all his bills for my insurance, but his doctor’s office here no longer deals with billing, and so they gave me the number for the regional billing office. I called them and they told me I could access all his records in the client self-serve portal. Only, I couldn’t. I had already tried on my computer and on my phone and on my wife’s computer, but my entry into the portal was barred for reasons beyond anybody’s understanding—the IT department couldn’t figure it out, the billing department couldn’t figure it out. They kept ping-ponging me back and forth.

So I went back to Thomas’s doctor’s office, prepared to begin a hunger strike if they didn’t give me a copy of his records. Do you know who figured it out? The pleasant receptionist at the front desk. Somebody in billing had entered my birthday wrong. That’s why I couldn’t get into the portal. Still, she didn’t have the power to fix it. Eventually, her boss came over and, upon hearing my tale of woe, took pity on me and broke protocol. I had literally spent hours on the phone attempting to resolve this problem, mostly on hold trying not to spontaneously combust. She printed out my bills in less than a minute.

As a nation, we need to repent of this stupidity. Yesterday, I was in Lowe’s and was sad to see that the hostile takeover by self-serve registers was nearly complete. I am glad my wife’s Poppaw didn’t live long enough to see this current state of affairs. He used to be on a first name basis with all the cashiers at Lowes. Now, not a single old school register, manned by a cashier, remained in the main checkout area. I suppose the Lowes CEO thought their reputation for customer service couldn’t get any worse and just decided to get rid of customer service altogether. He should be wearing sackcloth.

At the risk of sounding like I’m turning into an old curmudgeon, I’ll admit I may feel a little lost in our brave new self-serve society. At the rate society is progressing, soon the only person I’ll have left to blame is myself, and where’s the fun in that?