Chapter 4: The Whispers at Customer Service

Chapter 4: The Whispers at Customer Service

The scent of a Tractor Supply Co. store was a unique perfume, a potent blend of fertilizer, new tires, leather work gloves, and the sweet, dusty aroma of bulk animal feed. To Jedidiah Stone, it was the smell of honest work, a scent more comforting than any cologne. He pushed his cart—its squeaky wheel a familiar companion—towards the checkout line, a rare, triumphant set to his jaw. In the basket sat a 50-pound bag of Producer’s Pride for Buster, a new oil filter for his Ford F-150, and a heavy-duty tow chain. He didn’t strictly need the chain today, but he knew, with the certainty of a man who understands the caprices of farm equipment, that he would eventually.

More importantly, today was the day. After his purchase of the fence insulators and high-tensile wire last week, he’d done the math in his head. He was over the top. He had finally conquered the digital mountain and was ready to claim his prize. Ten dollars. It wasn't the money, not really. It was the principle. It was the reward for loyalty, a concept Jedidiah understood in his bones.

“Afternoon, Cheyenne,” he said, unloading his items onto the black conveyor belt. The cashier was a local girl, no older than nineteen, with purple streaks in her hair and a perpetually bored expression.

“Hey, Mr. Stone,” she said, her fingers flying over the touchscreen register. The scanner beeped rhythmically. “Total’s gonna be one-oh-four, sixty-two.”

Jedidiah puffed his chest out slightly. “Alright. Go on and take ten dollars off that. I got my points.”

Cheyenne’s eyes glazed over for a moment as she tapped the screen. Her brow furrowed. She tapped again. “Uh... sorry, Mr. Stone. It says you don’t have enough points for a reward.”

The triumphant feeling in Jedidiah’s chest evaporated, replaced by a cold, familiar stone of frustration. “What’d you mean? I bought that whole spool of fence wire last week. That alone should’ve put me over.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, pointing a finger with a chipped black nail at her screen. “It says right here. Account for [email protected]. You’ve got… 488 points. You need a thousand.”

“Four hundred and eighty-eight?” The number was an insult. It was less than he’d had months ago. “That ain’t right. That computer’s broke.”

“It’s not broke, it’s the system,” she replied, the rote-learned phrase offering zero comfort. “You can call the customer service number on the back of your card if you think there’s a mistake.”

Muttering under his breath about computers and newfangled nonsense, Jedidiah paid the full price, his jaw clenched. He pushed his cart out of the way, the squeaky wheel now sounding like a mocking laugh. He wasn't going to let this go. This was his ten dollars. He leaned against a pallet of rock salt, pulled his worn leather wallet from his back pocket, and extracted the plastic loyalty card. With his thumb, a digit more accustomed to wrestling with wrenches than tiny buttons, he painstakingly dialed the number on his beat-up flip phone.

---

Hundreds of miles away, in a brightly lit but soul-crushingly beige cubicle farm, Brenda sighed. She adjusted her headset and watched the light on her phone flash, signaling an incoming call. It was her seventh one in the last thirty minutes. The previous six had been: a woman whose chicken coop instructions were confusing, a man who wanted to know if they sold parts for a 1987 lawnmower, and four people who had forgotten their passwords.

She clicked the button. Her voice, smoothed by years of professional patience, was a warm, placid lake. “Thank you for calling Tractor Supply Customer Care, this is Brenda speaking. How can I help you make your day a little more productive?”

A gruff, crackling voice, thick with a Tennessee drawl and simmering indignation, came through the line. “Yeah, my name’s Jedidiah Stone. And your points system is a load of hogwash. It stole my points.”

Brenda typed the name into her system. Nothing came up. “I’m not finding an account under that name, sir. Is there an email address associated with the account?”

“It’s some dang thing the fella at the checkout made me get. Art-Pee. A-R-T-P. At G-mail dot com.” He said it slowly, as if reciting a spell in a foreign language.

Brenda typed it in. [email protected]. An account bloomed on her screen. “Okay, Mr. Stone, I’ve got you pulled up here. Let me see…” Her eyes scanned the dashboard. The current points balance stared back at her: 488. “Yes, I see that balance. What seems to be the issue?”

“The issue,” Jedidiah grumbled, “is that I know for a fact I had almost nine hundred points last week. Then I bought nigh on a hundred dollars’ worth of fencing supplies. I should be well over a thousand by now, and that girl at the counter says I got less than five hundred. Where’d they go?”

Brenda scrolled down to the transaction history, her practiced eyes looking for the discrepancy. It didn’t take long to find. The neat, orderly ledger of purchases was punctuated by a series of bizarre withdrawals.

“Okay, Mr. Stone, I think I see what happened,” she began, her customer service voice still on autopilot. “I do see the 191 points added from your purchase on the 14th. But it looks like you redeemed some points for product vouchers shortly after that.”

A beat of confused silence. “I ain’t redeemed nothin’. I’ve been saving ‘em up.”

Brenda leaned closer to her monitor, squinting. This was… odd. “Well, sir, according to the system log, the account was accessed and 400 points were redeemed for two vouchers. For… um…” She checked the item description, certain she was misreading it. “…for ‘Purr-fect Catch Cat Treats, Salmon Flavor.’”

The silence on the other end of the line was now heavy, thick with disbelief. “Cat treats?” Jedidiah finally roared, his voice making Brenda wince and pull the headset away from her ear. “Cat treats? I own a dog! Name’s Buster! He wouldn’t eat a cat treat if it was wrapped in bacon and slathered in gravy!”

Brenda’s autopilot disengaged. A flicker of genuine curiosity, a rare emotion in this job, sparked to life. This wasn’t a forgotten password. This was weird. “That is strange, sir,” she said, her tone shifting from placid to intrigued. “Let me just check your profile here to see if there’s any other information…”

She clicked over to the account’s profile tab. And then she saw it. Her professional demeanor, a shield forged in the fires of thousands of angry customer calls, cracked. A small, involuntary snort escaped her lips before she could stifle it.

The profile listed two pets. The first was ‘Buster, Dog.’ Standard enough.

The second entry made her eyes widen.

Jedidiah, still fuming, heard the snort. “You think this is funny?”

“No! No, sir, my apologies,” Brenda said, trying desperately to regain her composure. “It’s just… I’m seeing another pet listed on your account. Maybe that’s where the confusion is. It says you also own… Nigel?”

The name landed with a thud. “Who in the Sam Hill is Nigel?” Jedidiah bellowed.

Brenda bit her lip, reading directly from the screen because her brain refused to paraphrase the sheer insanity of it. Her voice was now a tightrope walk between professionalism and bursting into laughter.

“Well, sir, according to your pet profile, Nigel is your… six-hundred-and-sixty-six-pound… gorilla.”

Jedidiah Stone, standing in the aisle of the Tractor Supply store in rural Tennessee, said nothing. He couldn’t. His brain was a stalled engine. Gorilla?

Brenda, now committed to the absurd journey, felt compelled to read the final, glorious detail from the notes section.

“And,” she added, her voice barely a whisper, “it says he’s pregnant. And he has morning sickness that can only be soothed by… salmon-flavored treats.”

The line went utterly dead. Brenda could hear only the faint sound of Jedidiah’s breathing, a ragged, bewildered hiss. For the first time in five years, she had no script for this. There was no corporate-approved response for a customer whose account had been hijacked to facilitate the dietary needs of a fictional, pregnant primate.

“Sir?” she finally ventured. “Mr. Stone, are you there?”

The only reply was a low, agonized groan. This wasn’t a computer error. This was a haunting.