What do you do when, loath to give in to rage, the organization of companies is such that there is only a shifting target for your complaint?

Last December, a casualty of the ice storm, the maple tree in my backyard crashed through the Rogers and Bell wires between the hydro poles in the back alley.

Eleven months later, the mess of wires fanning out from the beleaguered pole is improved but still not sorted. After three calls to 311, three visits from Toronto Hydro, seven from Bell and I’ve lost count of how many from Rogers, the list of pertinent case numbers reads like a poem of urban dysfunction: C80228840, C80335339, C20082447, 13176821, I780049112; 60400, 6879724, 6879724, 7044451 and 5090. I have chatted with Jeff, Alex, Derek, Carey and Erika and watched numerous technicians take photographs of the pole with their smart phones promising me action and delivering none.

The upside is that I have become expert in small details of utility infrastructure. I can tell you that poles belong to the city but are leased to Toronto Hydro; that Bell is responsible for the messenger wires that run between them; and that Bell and Rogers’ cables piggyback their way along the main line, departing from it at right angles so that each traverses only the paying homeowner’s property.

Still today, wires fan out like the spokes of a bicycle wheel from the pole in question and mine droops low and dangerously over my neighbour’s backyard. Bell blames Rogers. Rogers blames Bell. Not one employee has volunteered, as an adult would, to co-ordinate with the other company. Instead, tens of hours of appeals spread across days and months have fallen upon me, the customer.

This is a situation we know to be far from unusual but losing one’s temper is futile. I have a signal, though my fixation with the back alley pole visible from the bedroom window long ago graduated from a complaint about the line, insecure and sub-standard and contrary to practice as my hookup is, to an educational opportunity. Now I work to identify new capitalist laws that allow these companies’ dysfunction to run roughshod over their customers’ will.

The first of these is that rather than selling a product that degrades and eventually needs to be replaced, companies have discovered that there is lots more money to be made by selling obligations: not the car, but the lease and its steady payments. Not the furnace, but the maintenance plan. Not the smart phone or the tablet, but the contract that outlasts it. This has been the single most brilliant development of contemporary business practice. We are all income streams now.

The second is that “customer service” is delegated to labourers without authority. The Rogers clerk at the other end of my 30-minute or, no anomaly, three-hour call, is unable to say, “This is appalling, we’ve taken $100 off your last bill” — or even, as I suggested on a recent 90-minute call because the battery on my hand-held phone was expiring, to call back.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the representative of a company that services the telephones of more than 30 million Canadians, “we can only take incoming calls.”

In the 21st-century business model, the telephone clerk is a company’s human shield without power to make amends. This is by design.

I now end all my calls to Rogers at 90 minutes on a point of principle, trading in frustration and the rage that does no one any favours for a new, Zen-like relationship to the company in which I am privy to all sorts of free enlightenment.

Before last year’s ice storm, for instance, I did not have a cellphone — well, that’s not quite true, I did for a time, one of my daughter’s hand-me-ups, but it dropped and smashed on the floor of a Winnipeg elevator. I was still paying a monthly bill, I didn't even have a plan anymore, and for eleven months “telephone Rogers” was the first task of the day and the one I did not reach by the end of it. My free lesson, as remunerative for the company as it was silly for me, was that I was willing to pay $80 a month not to speak to Rogers.

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The anniversary of the ice storm is fast approaching and the job of the pole is unfinished. If Bell and Rogers were children, refusing to tend to their part of the mess until the other did, they’d be deprived of dinner and sent to their rooms. But they are not. They are profitable corporations bleeding their customers and building our exhaustion into the algorithm of their business model. I have given up in exactly the fashion Bell and Rogers know will eventually happen. They have my money, but not my respect.

Noah Richler's most recent book, What We Talk About When We Talk About War, was nominated for a Governor-General's Award.

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