Script Blindness
The other day I needed to ask for telephone help to access an account I hadn’t used in awhile. I’d forgotten the entry sequence and just wanted a quick, two sentence reminder: “First you do this, then you do that. That’s all there is to it.” Unfortunately, that’s not what I got.
For close to 15 agonizing minutes I sat there biting my nails and listening to the person on the other end of the phone repeat the same information at least twice even though I got it the first time. That was only the beginning. I had the ill-advised temerity to ask a clarifying question. Big mistake. He had to start again from the beginning and repeat the same information a third time without, it seems, stopping to take a breath. No matter how many times or how loudly I asked him to please stop talking, he never heard me. There was no pause long enough for me to say, “Wait a minute! I got that.” He was paying no attention to me on the other end of the phone at all. I pictured him in a little cubicle somewhere, staring at his computer, in a kind of hypnotic state where the information he was reading off the screen went in through his eyes and out through his mouth, bypassing his brain, and certainly his ears, completely!