You typed "booktrovert customer service" into a search bar, and a machine somewhere decided you meant us. We are sorry. We are also, in a way, the only ones who can help, which is the whole problem.
If you wanted the polished one, the booktrovert.com Help Center has a search box, little categories with icons, and a contact form that, by all accounts, reaches a real person who answers in a reasonable number of business days. We have visited it. It loads. It is staffed. We found the whole thing very moving.
Booktrovert.org also has a Help Center. It has had one since 1997. Below is the complete documentation of it, written down here for the first time, partly to help you and partly because nobody else was going to.
There is a phone. It is a beige rotary phone bolted to a support beam in the basement, near the arcade. It rings. We hear it ring. The phone is answered exclusively by a man named Randy, and Randy is not currently with us. Randy is rarely currently with us. So the phone rings, and we listen to it ring, and we feel, each time, that someone out there is reaching out, and we are unable to reach back. We have considered answering it ourselves. We have decided that would be Randy's job, and we respect the chain of command, even when the chain of command is on a smoke break that began in 2004.
We have a contact form. It is a stack of index cards and a pencil on a string. You write your question on a card, you place the card in the drawer, and you go on with your one precious life. The drawer sticks. It has always stuck. We file every card, in order, by the date the drawer agrees to open, which is not the same as the date you filed it. Some cards from 1998 have only just surfaced. We are working through them. We answer in the order received, where "received" is doing a great deal of work.
The suggestion box is a coffee can. It is labeled SUGGESTIONS in marker that has faded to the word SUGG. We read everything in the can. We act on none of it, not out of disrespect, but because most of the suggestions are very good and would require us to change, and we are not going to do that. The most common suggestion, submitted hundreds of times across three decades, is "answer the phone." We have placed that one back in the can, for safekeeping.
Yes. We have an email address. We do not know it. Doug set it up in the late nineties on a service that no longer exists, using a password that was the name of a fish that has also passed on. Mail still goes there, we assume. It goes there the way light goes into a closed drawer: it arrives, and then it is simply somewhere, doing nothing, seen by no one. If you have emailed us and never heard back, please know that you reached us. You reached us completely. That was the part that worked.
For urgent matters, there is an escalation procedure. You light a candle. You set it on the windowsill. You wait. We will not see the candle, because the window faces the parking lot and we are in the basement, but the act of lighting it tends to calm people considerably, and a calm person, we have found, usually solves the problem themselves about forty minutes later. This is our highest-rated service tier. It has a satisfaction rate of nearly one hundred percent, because the people who use it stop needing us.
We do not provide a response time, but we can offer a response range. It runs from "never" to "a postcard arrives years later, unsigned, that simply reads YES." Both are considered a resolved ticket. We close tickets generously here. A ticket left open is a worry, and we will not carry your worry for you. We will close it, and we will hope, and that is the same thing we do for ourselves.
If you came here with an actual account problem, a giveaway that did not arrive, a login that will not load, then in all sincerity you want booktrovert.com, where the help is real and the people are awake. We have written, before, about the strange experience of being the two Booktroverts at once, and we keep a running list of the most common questions over in the frequently asked questions, where the answers are no more useful but considerably shorter.
And if your only question was whether anyone is back here at all, listening, filing your card, hearing the phone: yes. Someone is. It is just not Randy, and it is not Doug, and on most days it is not, strictly, anyone. But the lights are on a rotation, and right now they are on, and that has to count for something. Light a candle. We will not see it. We will feel it. Eventually. In the order received.
Patiently,
Booktrovert #207