Roadside Assistance

AAA vs. Actual Human

The other day my daughter-in-law Jill and I were coming back from running an errand when we noticed the car started making a strange noise, like we were going over those side-of-the-highway rumble strips. It took me a moment, but then, I figured it out: we had a flat tire.

As luck would have it, we were near a gas station. It was a flat, indeed, the spectacular kind of flat that looked as if we’d hit a bear trap. I was pretty upset.

Now, Jill is a cool cucumber. She doesn’t catastrophize, just doubles down on resourcefulness. While I was fumbling around for my phone and freaking out about how I hadn’t brought my wallet with my AAA card in it, Jill had already used her card to call AAA and was on hold, waiting for the next available operator. Trying to make myself useful, I wandered into the gas station to see if someone might help us change the tire. What I was seeking was a return to the golden days of gas stations, when people running them actually worked on cars, but since this is 2021, there was just a guy behind a Plexiglas screen selling lottery tickets to a long line of people waiting to buy lottery tickets. I went back outside. Jill was still on hold.

I called Sam, my go-to in a pinch, was just leaving the office, so he drove over to wait with us. By this point the AAA operator had picked up, and said the driver’s arrival time was in forty minutes. A guy came out of the gas station, Gatorade and Slim Jim in hand, and asked if we wanted help changing the tire. We told him thanks, but no need, AAA is on the way. I felt confident that AAA, the national gold standard in roadside assistance, would adhere to their stated arrival time.

In fact, technology being the miracle that it is, Jill had AAA app on her phone, allowing us to trace our driver’s progress. We could see he was a mile away, then, instead of getting closer, we watched his little tow truck icon move a half-mile further away and stop. A half hour passed; no change in his position. A short while later the icon was on the move again, going past us to the other side of town. Throughout the course of tracking the driver’s movements, Jill was on the phone with AAA to find out what the hell was going on. No one picked up. Sam ended up changing the tire himself just as dark was falling. We left, and the driver called thirty minutes later, saying he’d arrived. Jill was still on hold, trying to let AAA know we no longer needed service. We had not been able to communicate with anyone since the help call was placed.

This story underscores a major thing that I’m only now figuring out, which is that AAA and other service behemoths with 1-800 numbers and hold options are not actually designed to serve people. By automating almost all of their responses and closing off points of actual human contact, they interact as little as possible. If any link in the sequence of events is disrupted, the whole system falls apart, and instead of a person showing up to change your flat, you’re stuck on hold, staring at a tow truck icon driving in the wrong direction.

Looking back, we should have taken the Slim Jim guy up on his offer. It’s just that it’s hard to drop the deeply ingrained understanding of how things are supposed to work. A membership number and a voice on the line felt like the more prudent solution, never mind the real-time offer of assistance from a human being. Crazy, right?

I’m thinking that the time has come to rely, in the moment, on each other.