OK. I’m now a believer. It only took one phone call to convert me. It’s time to throw away my flint and ditch my woolly mammoth coat. Hold the technology love train — I am hopping on.
The other night about midnight, while nursing a cup of chai, I watched in horror as my computer crashed. Pop-up ads everywhere. Error boxes. Disappearing files. A blank screen. No! No!
Yes.
When it seemed like the past six years of my working life were gone, I did what anyone in my situation would have done — I panicked! That didn’t help, so I called my computer customer service department and was quickly connected to “Robert.”
I let out a laugh. We’ve all talked to a Robert, perhaps when making a plane reservation or trying to access our credit card information. Well-mannered. Slight time delay in the conversation. Thick Indian accent. Robert.
I’m sure there are highly paid marketing executives who pat themselves on the back for the ingenious idea of assigning Western names to Indian call center reps, as if we would believe that Robert or Patrick or David lives in Toledo, Ohio, or Dallas.
It didn’t take the fact that I lived in India 16 years ago to figure out that Robert wasn’t in Schaumburg. But I accepted the lie. Robert was my only hope for salvation.
I spit out my problem in whatever computerese I could muster.
“No problem Mr. Libman,” Robert replied. “I can take care of this for you.”
I knew what that meant: Several hours of trying to guide me through programming language and viruses, Trojan horses and other mythically named computer codes only to find out that the problem was not fixable. But no, no, no. In just a few minutes, Robert talked me through a few steps that turned control of my computer over to him.
That’s right: From 12,000 miles away, in an air-conditioned office of cubicled twentysomething Indian computer geeks, Robert and his 100 Indian rupee (about $2.50) keyboard were now controlling my hard drive, my 13 million megatrigagigabytes, via my Internet connection.
It was magnificent.
I watched my monitor as he took over my mouse, scrolling through programming code, cutting, pasting, deleting and speaking to me in a soothing matter-of-fact voice while I ranted and raved about how amazing this all was. He giggled at my innocence, but that’s when I became a believer.
This would have seemed like science fiction when I lived in India. I had had the technological upper hand back then. Personal computers didn’t exist. Electricity was sketchy. Making a phone call in Calcutta was next to impossible. You couldn’t buy a Sony Walkman. Cashing travelers checks? Hah! I once walked into a bank only to find two clerks playing table tennis behind a partition.
One of the few things you could count on back then was a good cup of sweet tea. But now, while I sipped my cup of tea, Robert was changing my technological world. I had been disarmed in the comfort of my own home by an undercover Indian computer troubleshooting impostor who had taken control of the brain of my house. And I was back in business, memory restored, in no time.
I was the last of my friends to get a cell phone. I ride a 30-year-old bike around town. I have no cable TV. But now I’ve met Robert, and nothing will ever be the same.
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Jeff Libman, author of “An Immigrant Class: Oral Histories from Chicago’s Newest Immigrants,” teaches English as a second language at Truman College in Chicago.
