The Message is What Clients Crave

There’s a scene in the movie Idiocracy that I’m reflecting on, and quoting, more and more. The president of the United States and his cabinet are meeting with the smartest person alive, a time traveler from 2005, to discuss why the nation’s crops are dying. The answer is simple: they’ve been irrigating with Brawndo, a sports drink like Gatorade, instead of water. When the smartest person in the room asks why they don’t just use water, the cabinet can only stare back and say, “But Brawndo has electrolytes. It’s got what plants crave.”

The president’s cabinet aren’t evil or lazy. The ad’s tagline replaced the thinking so completely that the thinking stopped happening. Nobody noticed.

I think about that scene every time I call a support line and hear, “Your call is very important to us.”

No, it isn’t. If my call was important to you, a human being would pick up within a minute of me dialing. Instead I wait, and when the human finally arrives, I’m greeted through a low-tech headset with ambient call center noise bleeding through, by a voice drenched in melancholy and ambivalence: “Thank you for calling [company name] where it is my job to ensure you have a pleasant experience today.”

The person on the other end of the line isn’t bad at their job. They were handed a script during their onboarding and was told it was how to provide outstanding customer service. My explanation of needing help is probably transcribed on their computer monitor already, which means they don’t have to listen closely enough to hear the nuances of my voice, to pick up on how I’m actually feeling about the problem, to notice that I’m frustrated or confused or just tired. The script handles that. The script has electrolytes. It’s got what clients crave.

Except it doesn’t. And both people in this phone call know it.

I’ve been lucky. In nearly thirty years of having roles in desktop support, computer lab coordination, IT management, and Canvas LMS administration, nobody ever handed me a laminated card. No approved language, no required phrasing, no “I’m sorry to hear you are having troubles with your computer. I am here to provide outstanding customer service for your needs.” I was given the agency to bring my personality, my wit, my humor, and most importantly my empathy into every interaction, and I am genuinely grateful for that. The absence of a script is part of why I still care about the work.

But I wasn’t always good at filling that space.

In my younger years, I made the mistake most new technical professionals make: I spoke in jargon. I was explaining a system failure to a senior faculty member and I watched their eyes glaze somewhere around the second acronym. They interrupted me, in the way longtime employees often do, and asked me to explain it again, but this time in a way that someone who didn’t live in technology would understand.

I paused, collected myself, and then I did something I hadn’t been taught to do: I thought through how I would explain this to my mother. Not a simplified version, not a dumbed-down version, a translated version. The right words for this specific human sitting in front of me. I found a metaphor. I used a cultural reference. I was deliberate in my communication.

The head that had been shaking slowly started nodding. Follow-up questions came, real ones, and I answered those the same way. By the end of the conversation, the faculty member understood not just what had happened but why it mattered. That’s not something a script could have produced, because a script can’t think and adapt. It can only deliver the next line.

I’ve watched support professionals in meetings, in hallways, and at conferences. The thing that always strikes me is how funny they are. How animated. How eager to speak and be heard. And then I’ve watched some of those same people sit down at a support desk or pick up a phone and the mask goes on. The personality doesn’t disappear exactly, but it retreats behind something cautious and rehearsed. They start talking like they’re narrating a technical manual in a deadpan voice that would make Steven Wright sound animated.

I don’t blame them. I blame the system that taught them the mask was professionalism.

I want to be careful here, because the student workers staffing university help desks are not the villains of this story. Their hearts are in exactly the right place. They respond quickly, they want to help, and they’re doing their best with what they were given. What they were given is a troubleshooting document, a list of if/then responses, a set of approved answers to the most common questions. Clear your browser cache. Restart your computer. Look at this knowledge base article. Submit a ticket if the issue persists.

What they weren’t given is the years of pattern recognition that lets an experienced technologist hear something in a client’s voice and know that restart your computer isn’t the answer. They weren’t taught ELI5, explain it like I’m five without being condescending. They weren’t shown how to translate complexity into something a person can grasp. That’s not a criticism of the students. That’s a description of what we’ve failed to teach them.

Here’s where I have to be honest about something, though, because this essay would be incomplete without it.

There are moments when my unique conversational voice isn’t the right tool. When a system-wide disruption affects hundreds of people and a communication has to go out under the university’s name, my instinct toward warmth and informality can create problems I didn’t intend. Management reviews those communications for a reason. They know how to speak bureaucratic in the way that survives legal interpretation and administrative scrutiny and the inbox of someone three levels above my pay grade who is looking for liability language, not a friendly tone.

Sometimes the approved language is the right language. And I’ve had to make peace with that. The best I can do is protect the spaces where the relational voice still works, use it deliberately and without apology in every individual interaction, and trust that the nodding head is worth more than the approved phrasing.

Brawndo has electrolytes. But water is still what the plants actually need. The message is what clients crave.

More later...