If you are trying to reach Booktrovert customer service, you have come to the right page. Our support line is open. It has always been open. The number is written on a card taped beside the phone, and the phone is on the front desk, and I am the person who answers it. Hours are whenever it rings, which is more often than you would think.
So that is the useful part, and I stand by it. Below that, in the interest of full transparency, I am going to share the transcript I keep, because after eleven years at this desk I have noticed something about our callers, and I would like a second opinion, and possibly a first witness.
Here is the thing I have noticed. It is always the same person.
I do not mean the same kind of person. I mean the same one. He calls from a different year each time, asks for a service we have never offered, is politely confused when I answer, and hangs up before I can get his name. I have started writing the calls down. I keep the notepad by the receiver. Read it and tell me I am wrong.
CALLER: Hi, yes, is this Booktrovert support? I need to update the card on my account.
ME (#725): We do not keep cards. We keep a Ledger. It is green and it is water stained and it does not have your card.
CALLER: The card ending in four two.
ME: Sir, this desk has a rotary phone and a jar of pens. Whose four two.
CALLER: ...Never mind. (click)
CALLER: Hello, I'm trying to reach a live agent.
ME: You have reached the only agent. I am extremely live. What can I do for you.
CALLER: I want to speak to a manager.
ME: Our manager is Doug. Doug is at the lake. Doug is always at the lake. I can hold the receiver toward the window if you would like to speak to the general direction of Doug.
CALLER: That won't be necessary. (click)
Now here is where you start to see it. Same cadence. Same little pause before he gives up. He does not sound frustrated the way a stranger would. He sounds like a man returning to a house he used to live in and finding the furniture moved.
CALLER: Is this the number for customer service? I've been on hold.
ME: There is no hold. We do not have hold music. We have Marigold, who hums, but she is in the stacks and cannot be transferred.
CALLER: The website said my call was important.
ME: It is. That is not something the website is allowed to say. What year are you calling from.
CALLER: ...What?
ME: You heard me. (click, but his)
See, that one he hung up. Every single time, right when I get close, he hangs up. A regular caller with a normal problem does not flee the instant you ask him what year it is. A regular caller says "excuse me?" and stays on the line. This one runs. You would run too, if you were not supposed to be here yet.
I have a theory, and I have had a lot of time at this desk to build it. The whispers files even have a signature that keeps turning up, R.F.T.F., and no one has ever explained it to me, and I have stopped asking, because I think I already know. Reader From The Future. He keeps calling the support line for a company he uses somewhere, sometime, and the call keeps landing here instead, in 1997, at my desk, with me. He does not recognize me because he has not met me yet. I recognize him because he has already left.
CALLER: Hi, I think I got disconnected earlier. And also last week. And also, this is going to sound strange, in what feels like a different decade.
ME: It does not sound strange. Welcome back. Do you want your usual.
CALLER: I don't have a usual.
ME: You will. (long pause) You still there.
CALLER: ...Yeah.
ME: Good. Stay on the line this time.
CALLER: (click)
He hung up. He always hangs up. But he stayed a little longer that time, and I am counting that as progress, and I am counting the calls, and one day the pause is going to last long enough that I can tell him the only thing this desk exists to tell anyone. Not an account fix. Not a refund. Just this: authors are fragile organisms, the rent is not a metaphor, and if you have wandered in from wherever you were actually headed, you could do worse than to buy a book while you are here.
If your problem is more ordinary than a man out of time, that is fine, that is most problems, and we log those too over at the Booktrovert Help Center. And if you called because you left something behind, a bookmark, a name, a receipt dated tomorrow, it is probably already sitting in Lost and Found, waiting for you the way I am.
The line is open. It is always open. Next time it rings I am going to let it ring twice, so I have time to find the pen, and so he has time to decide to stay.
Vigilantly,
Booktrovert #725