The plastic of the handset is beginning to sweat against my temple, a humid microclimate born of 42 minutes of pure, unadulterated frustration. My thumb is pulsing where I’ve been holding the ‘mute’ button, a nervous habit developed over 22 years of dealing with hardware that refuses to acknowledge my existence. I am currently staring at a router that has decided its only purpose in life is to blink a frantic, rhythmic red-a morse code for ‘I have forgotten how to be a machine.’

I am Jackson N.S., and by trade, I design escape rooms. I am a professional architect of confusion. I spend my days figuring out how to make people feel trapped just long enough to feel a rush of dopamine when they finally find the key in the bottom of a 52-gallon drum of fake slime. But the experience I’m currently enduring isn’t a game. There is no dopamine at the end of this. There is only the recursive loop of a technical support system designed by people who clearly view ‘resolution’ as a failure of the cost-cutting department.

While the hold music-a MIDI version of a song that might have been popular in 1992-scratches at my eardrums, I find myself flipping through the physical manual. My eyes snag on the word ‘Hyperbole.’ And suddenly, the room feels a little colder. For exactly 32 years, I have been pronouncing that word in my head as ‘hyper-bowl.’ I’ve said it out loud in meetings. I’ve used it to describe the marketing of my 102nd escape room project. No one corrected me. They just let me walk around with a mouth full of linguistic garbage. This realization, arriving in the middle of a tech support crisis, feels like the final 2 bits of my sanity finally flicking off.

The Illusion of Support

Support is a game where the rules change the moment you think you understand them.

The person who finally answers is named ‘Dave.’ Dave sounds like he is speaking to me from the inside of a pressurized cabin 30002 feet in the air. He asks for my serial number. This is the 2nd time I have been asked. I read it to him: 882-XJ-42. There is a long silence, the kind of silence that suggests Dave is actually a sophisticated AI designed to simulate the feeling of being ignored, or perhaps he is just looking for his coffee mug.

“Sir, have you tried power cycling the unit?”

I’ve done it 12 times. I tell him this. I tell him I’ve also checked the firmware, reset the DNS, and sacrificed a small portion of my lunch to the silicon gods. Dave doesn’t care. Dave has a script. The script is his shield, his sword, and his coffin. In the service economy, metrics are the only thing that matters. Dave isn’t measured by whether my router actually routes; he is measured by how quickly he can get me off the line without me screaming. This is the core rot of modern support: it is optimized for ticket closure, not problem resolution. Your frustration is a calculated variable in a spreadsheet. As long as you don’t cancel your subscription, the system has won.

In my line of work, if an escape room player gets stuck on a puzzle for more than 12 minutes, I’ve failed as a designer. I want them to struggle, but I want the solution to be an epiphany. Technical support has replaced the epiphany with a shrug. They use a version of ‘yes, and’-the classic improvisational tool-to lead you into a blind alley. ‘Yes, I see the problem, and I’m going to transfer you to the Level 2 supervisor.’

The Level 2 supervisor is just Level 1 with a deeper voice and a more expensive headset. He asks for the serial number again. 882-XJ-42. I feel like I’m in a Philip K. Dick novel where the only way to prove I’m human is to successfully navigate a phone menu with 72 sub-options.

I once designed a room called ‘The Bureaucrat’s Dream.’ It featured 52 filing cabinets, and the players had to find a specific form to exit. The twist was that every time they found the form, a voice over the intercom would tell them the office was closed for lunch. I thought it was a brilliant piece of satire. Now, I realize I was just documenting reality. The support loop is a physical manifestation of the adversarial relationship between the corporation and the consumer. They don’t want to help you; they want to exhaust you.

The Offline Epiphany

Eventually, I do what everyone does. I go to a forum. I find a post from 2012. A user named ‘VoidStepper’ has the exact same issue. The solution isn’t in the manual. It isn’t in Dave’s script. It involves holding the reset button for exactly 22 seconds while chanting the MAC address backward (okay, maybe just the 22 seconds part). It works. The red light turns blue. The internet returns, flooding my house with the 1002 megabits of data I pay for.

The tragedy is that I had to bypass the official ‘help’ to actually get help. This is why localized expertise still matters. When you buy equipment from a place that actually understands the tech-like when I’m sourcing gear for a new build-you need a partner, not a script. For instance, I’ve found that checking out the curated selections at Bomba.md often saves me this specific brand of headache because the local context of the hardware is actually understood by the people selling it. They aren’t 2002 miles away reading a translated PDF; they are in the same time zone, facing the same grid issues.

We live in an era where ‘user experience’ is a buzzword used by people who haven’t spoken to a real user in 52 weeks. They build these beautiful, glass-fronted interfaces that hide a backend of duct tape and prayers. And when the glass breaks, they give you a hammer and tell you to fix it yourself, but only after you’ve waited on hold for 62 minutes.

The Aftermath and the Realization

I’m looking at my router now. It’s sitting there, glowing blue, indifferent to the fact that it almost caused a mid-life crisis regarding my vocabulary. I still feel the phantom heat of the phone against my ear. I think about the 222 people currently on hold with Dave, all of them about to be told to turn it off and on again.

If I ever design an escape room based on this experience, the exit door won’t have a key. It will have a phone. And the only way to get the code to the door will be to successfully get a Level 2 supervisor to admit they don’t know the answer. It will be the hardest room in the world. No one will ever escape.

I realize now that the ‘hyper-bowl’ thing is probably a symptom of spending too much time in my own head, building puzzles for others while the world builds an inescapable one for me. I wonder if Dave knows how to pronounce it. I wonder if Dave is even real, or if he’s just a collection of 2nd-hand syllables stitched together by a corporate algorithm.

There’s a specific kind of silence that follows a resolved tech issue. It’s not a peaceful silence. It’s a weary, battle-scarred silence. It’s the silence of a man who has won a war but lost his afternoon. I have 12 emails to answer, 32 puzzles to calibrate, and a nagging urge to call every person I’ve ever met and apologize for every time I said ‘hyper-bowl’ with unearned confidence.

❝

The service economy wants to turn us into tickets. It wants to categorize our frustrations into ‘low,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘high’ priority, then ignore the high-priority ones until they become ‘closed.’ But we aren’t tickets. We are people with sweaty ears and 42-minute-old headaches. And sometimes, we just want the red light to stop blinking without having to prove our identity 12 times to a man who isn’t allowed to deviate from a piece of paper.

❞

I think I’ll go outside now. The sun doesn’t have a serial number. The trees don’t require firmware updates. And if I mispronounce a word in the woods, the only thing that will judge me is the 2 squirrels sitting on the branch, and they’ve probably been saying it wrong for years too.