Awkward Silence

"Please hold for the next available representative."

I love that saying. I sat on the phone for the waiting time of approximately "two minutes" until a real voice came on. The voice was a bit quiet and I informed the representative that I had a question regarding a letter I had recently received from them. I told her my ID# and there was silence.


This was not just normal silence, this was dead, cold, silence. There was no, "I'm now looking up your account number." or other friendly informative instruction. After a good solid minute (which doesn't really sound like that much, but 60 seconds of silence wondering what is going on on the other end of the phone seems like an eternity) the voice said, "What is your name?" I stated my first and last name and she sounded confused. She read back the ID# to me that she was searching for and I corrected her as she had the numbers wrong. She then found me in the computer. Whew.

I continued on to state my problem and ask if there could be resolution as I did not receive a form from them in the mail that I was being penalized for not filling out. Again...Silence.

She said, "How old are you?" Huh? Does that really matter? It didn't but I stated my age anyway. Perhaps I sounded like a small child on the phone. I'm not sure. Silence....

I explained to her that I was gone for most of December, but I had gone through my mail I did receive and didn't see the previous letter from them. Silence....

Finally she said.."The post office returns our letters to us."

"What do you mean?" I asked politely.

"If the letter is not picked up in 20 days the post office returns the mail to us."

I went on to further explain that I had somebody picking up my mail, but it was not in the pile of mail I had received. Silence....

My mind was churning with questions. What was she doing on that end of the phone? Why was she taking literally minutes to say anything in between our short bits of conversation? Why was this so difficult for her to understand? Why was she implying that I intentionally did not return to them the information that they needed? Is she implying that I'm trying to cheat their system? I felt the irritation start building up. I can't stand representatives like this. Instead of taking the road of irritation and aggressiveness, I decided to go with the sickeningly overly nice patron. Bleh.

As I had minutes to think about the few things she had said to me, it occurred to me that what she said didn't make sense. I mean hypothetically, if I had a mailbox in the post office where my mail was piling up for a month, how does the postman know to return their letter to them?

I asked her.

"How does the postman know to return the letter to you?" I said.

"It's state mail." She replied.

"But how does he know that it needs to be returned?" I pushed.

"It's dated." Was the answer.

This doesn't make sense.

"So if the mail is sitting there in the mail box, piling up for a month, he searches through it every day looking for the letter to your state department, reads the date, and then returns it to you? That seems a bit time consuming?"

Silence.

"I don't know how they do that." She finally replied.

I giggled outloud. "Look is there anyway you can just remail the first letter to me so I can return the information that you need on it?"

"Yes," was the reply, "I'm sending it to you today."

"Oh, thank you SO much! I REALLY appreciate it! (silence) Bye!" This was overly enthusiastic and sickeningly sweet.

Silence. No goodbye. No thank you for your cooperation and niceness in my ignorance and lack of communication today.

I got off the phone and laughed. Ridiculous. I've never had so much entertainment while sitting in so much silence. Abnormal amounts of silence. She made my day. I'm pretty sure she hates her job.