For a couple of weeks I have had a small problem with the Movistar connection. Until now, when I was away from home, in Spain or abroad, I would watch La Liga football matches – to which I subscribe – on my computer, but now there are days when Movistar sends me to a platform called DAZN , which I had never heard of. To access through the computer, DAZN asks me to open an account, but when I try I get a message saying that there has been an error and it won't let me open it, and I am left without watching the game.
I'm sure this problem has a very simple solution and if I could talk to someone who knows what it's about, they would solve it for me right away. But there is no way. After speaking a lot of times with Movistar operators, who have always treated me with kindness but have not resolved anything, I am back to the beginning. On DAZN, the people I've managed to communicate with – by email, because it's impossible by phone – haven't been able to help me either.
I will have to resign myself to not watching football on the computer when it is broadcast on DAZN, or also subscribe to DAZN and pay a monthly fee to watch some games that I already pay to see on Movistar. The alternative is to see them through a pirate page, or from some remote television, something that I have discovered with astonishment that is easier, paradoxically, than getting the help of an operator to clarify why I cannot see them with Movistar or DAZN.
It is a derisory problem, probably motivated by my coming and going from one place to another, but I am telling it here because it responds to an increasingly common pattern. We live in a computerized world, served by companies that provide us with basic services –water, electricity, heating, telephone, television entertainment, bank account, direct debit payments– for rates that we could discuss if they are high or low, but that must be be competitive because they spend the day bombarding us with offers to change companies. Everything can be done over the internet or by phone – hire a service, change the contract, report faults, transfer money, etc. – but when a complication arises, there is no way to talk to anyone to resolve it. If by chance we need the help of an employee, we can arm ourselves with patience. They all want us to do it online, without giving them work.
I recently went to a branch of my bank to enter a check. First, the lady who helped me told me that that branch didn't have a cashier, that she was very sorry, to go to my branch. When I told her that mine has passed away, she replied that she was very sorry but that she could not do anything, that she should go to another one that had a box. I asked her if she could enter the check through the ATM and she said no. With more curiosity than anything else, seeing that there were no other customers, I asked him what a bank branch did without a cashier. She told me to serve customers. I told him that then we had to understand each other by force, because I was a client. I was lucky, because, grumbling a bit, she said that it was okay, she would start I don't know what machine and put the check in my account, but I would have to wait ten minutes.
It is the sign of the times. Telephone music, dial one, two or three, low-paid workers who work who knows how many kilometers away, calls that get cut off and you have to start over, minutes and more minutes of waiting on the phone or in front of a screen with the frustrating feeling that if we were able to talk to someone, everything would be cleared up in a minute, devilish web pages, gridded virtual assistants, bank branches where you have to do watermarks to be attended by an employee, technical services that do not resolve faults (which now They are called incidents: all that we have won) and, as if that were not enough, emails and telephone messages asking us to rate the treatment received according to our satisfaction. And strange labyrinths like the one of Movistar and DAZN in which it is better not to get lost, because there is no way to get out of them.
Even the Tax Agency – as I recently read in an article by Jesús Santidrián in Elliberal.cat – has decided to require the self-employed, for a few weeks, to make all the arrangements to pay VAT online. This means that they will have to obtain the digital certificate or the PIN code or, if they cannot obtain it, pay a manager to present them with the quarterly declarations.
Before, there was a fearsome institution: the window. We had to stand in line and fight with an employee who often put up a thousand obstacles and asked us to come back the next day. Larra is not immortal because he is. Now we have got rid of the queues and the demands of these employees, but if by chance something goes wrong we have to enter some digital mists that make you laugh at Surveyor K.
Progress is this: we plug one hole and another appears. The stone of Sisyphus. We advance a lot but we do not move from place, as if we were pedaling on a stationary bicycle. We can do many things on the phone or from the computer screen, without leaving home. The improvement is evident. Who in their right mind would want to go back to the queues of yesteryear? Nobody, not even kidding. But if an obstacle arises, we are doomed to deal with tangled web pages and impassable virtual assistants. What computerization and artificial intelligence give us with one hand, they take away with the other.
