Think About How You Think

I dread calling Comcast customer service. It never, ever goes well. It starts bad and gets progressively worse.

I’m not alone. Everyone I’ve ever spoken to has similar Xfinity battle scars. “Xfinity” because Comcast’s customer service reputation was so bad, they rebranded themselves.

New name. New logo. Same crappy customer service.

It goes something like this. Your blood pressure is already elevated after pressing 97 buttons, hearing fake typing, and screaming “representative” into the phone just as many times, your voice rising with each instance.

Unless you are calling about your account balance or want to make a payment, whatever reason you are calling is going to have about a 2% chance of getting resolved. Why? Because they aren’t trained in critical thinking. They are trained to follow a set of FAQs and if/then statements that you can envision them reading as they all consistently say:

“Hello Ms. Deb. How are you today? How is your day going so far?”

“My basement flooded, my Saturday flight was cancelled, and I have flu-like symptoms.”

“Oh, that’s good to hear! How can I help you?”

And the conversation goes on, usually with me hanging up with no resolution and complaining to my husband how I’ll never get those 45+ minutes back in my life.

With critical thinking, we listen, analyze, and consider options, decisions, and next steps. We don’t rely on what someone else said or the way something has always been done. We question. We brainstorm. We think out of the box. We interrogate reality. We use suppositional reasoning then apply logic. We flex and adapt.

My mother is 79. When my dad passed away 10 years ago, I needed to stay better connected to her, since my dad was who I usually called to chat, ask advice, or make plans with. My mother had a smart phone, Samsung I think, which was past warranty but still neatly stored brand new in its box. My husband brought her to the Apple store and got her a new iPhone. She was skeptical at first, but she wrote everything down that we showed her and she was soon emailing, texting, and now uses the Contacts app as an emergency backup to her laminated phone list. She loves her phone. But if something veers from the list of things she knows how to do, she sends me an email from her computer.

“When you’re not busy, my phone isn’t working.”

Of course it is; she just doesn’t think critically. She doesn’t troubleshoot. I try to explain so she can apply logic. At Christmas, I got a text from her with a Bitmoji of her in a Santa suit, NOT the outfit I had set her up with that summer. She realized it was Christmas, reasoned her avatar shouldn’t be wearing capris and a T-shirt, and figured out how to re-dress her online self with warmer and more holiday-appropriate attire. We’re getting there.

If my mother can do it, we can too! How can we think more critically? How do we solve new problems? How do we solve old problems in new ways? How do we rely less on the internet? Google is great, but we may be following someone else’s path without considering our own circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. Let’s start to think more about how we think.