[Glenn Wright]

Access Denied

It’s silly, I know, to take it personally.
It’s just a machine doing what someone
programmed it to do. All I wanted
was to check my bank balance,
and to see if the car payment had gone through.
Now I’m sitting in front of a screen telling me
I’ve tripped some fail-safe, and I’m in real trouble.
What would Ethan Hunt or Jason Bourne do?
One more chance to type in the correct password,
or the world as we know it ends.

I log out, call the bank, endure interrogation
by robot voices, which sound mildly annoyed with me.
Twenty minutes later, I briefly get a human, who puts me on hold
for another half hour in phone purgatory.
A bored voice finally interrupts the music and lets me know
that our conversation is being monitored.
I wonder to myself whether, instead of monitoring us,
if I promised to behave appropriately,
they could put on a few more reps to cut the wait time.
I start requesting my information.

Then I ask (politely, I thought) why they changed the home page.
I can hear the eye roll through the phone.
The spoken answer: to make it more user-friendly with fewer keystrokes.
Unspoken: and to mess with idiot boomers like you.
An hour and two representatives later,
one of whom hung up on me when I couldn’t understand his accent,
a nice lady tells me my balance and politely reassures me
that my payment was received.
She tells me to have a nice day.
That train left hours ago.

[Roger Slater]

This reads to me more like a lineated Facebook rant/complaint than a poem. I'm not seeing its poem-ness at all. I'm not seeing images, metaphor, wordplay, rhetoric, humor, tropes, form, pattern, distinctive rhythm, etc., just a very familiar and typical complaint about a frustrating call to customer service. I know that your poems are always tightly crafted and technically ambitious when you write formal verse, but I think you went too far in the other direction when you decided to do this one as free verse, especially since the subject matter is ultimately a rather low-stakes and familiar experience that doesn't give the reader anything to think about or react to beyond saying, "Yeah, don't you hate calling customer service?", which of course we all do.

[Trevor Conway]

Hi Glenn,

I had a similar reaction to Roger. For what it's worth, the 3rd stanza was the best of the three, and I wonder if you could start with "I ask (politely) why they changed the homepage" and go from there or maybe go with a straight dialogue, potentially differentiating the two speakers using regular text and italics or something like that. If the two speakers have enough character, it could work.

All the best,

Trev

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Roger and Trev—

Thanks for weighing in. This poem is based on a real experience. Had I waited and calmed down a bit, I would not have posted it. Your reactions are very fair and understandable.

I have been trying to work more in light verse. As the actor Edmund Gwenn supposedly said just before taking his last breath, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

I think I’ll put this one in the stock pot rather than try to salvage it. I appreciate your honest responses.

Glenn

[Hilary Biehl]

Hi Glenn, I had a similar reaction to Roger and Trevor. We've all had experiences like this as customers, but here's another thought, in case you ever decide to rewrite it - the customer service reps are likely just as frustrated as you are (being overworked, underpaid parts in a corporate or bureaucratic machine, with minimal agency). Considering that perspective might make for an interesting poem? Just my two cents.

[Alex Pepple]

Hello, Glenn,

I had a similar reaction to this as the others—it was hard for me to locate the poetry in it. This may well be a case where a return to the drawing board, with a tighter and more focused perspective, could help bring out the stronger material within. A leaner version, perhaps framed by formal constraints, might offer the structure needed to sharpen the wit and enhance the payoff.

Still, the experience described is very relatable—almost too much so!—which might explain why it feels more like a lineated anecdote than a poem at this stage.

Good luck refining this if you decide to rework it!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Hilary—

Thanks for your thoughts. Roger’s remark that this piece simply lacks poetic value got me thinking that it may have more promise as a starting point for a piece of prose fiction. The recent DOGEification of Social Security, the Postal Service, Medicare, SNAP, and other government offices has made spending hours on hold trying to contact a person in a federal office a much more common complaint. How much can people take before they snap? How might they strike back?

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Alex—

Thanks for your unfailing encouragement. I think the root of the problem is that the subject matter isn’t complex enough for serious verse or funny enough for light verse. We learn from our failures.

Glenn