[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.