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Every time I try and think of a plot for a thriller, I usually start with a spy or a detective and almost always end up making free associations converging on a meditation on mind control, which makes me very anxious because thinking of mind control means you are either schizophrenic or clinically paranoid or both. Yet, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, marvelling at the malleability of the mind and the now floundering, now fleeting, now fleecing faith with which it tries to control itself and other minds.

Sometimes, external events force mind control on me. Today, for instance, I tried the timeline feature on Facebook — a unique event in human history that has finally lifted the burden of memory from the human head for safekeeping in a corporate server located in a country far, far away — and have been very paranoid since.

The feature, by its very design, is an instrument for psychological harassment: the history sheet of civilisation. My timeline originates on September 28, 2007, the day I joined Facebook and contains, much to my dismay and in some cases, disgust, historical facts of a personal nature that I would much rather forget. I no longer have recourse to a poor, fast receding memory; every angry and resentful remark I ever made is out there; the big brother is not just watching but also recording.

I don’t know who will benefit from the feature other than a fast multiplying majority of aspiring autobiography writers who either do not have the time to write a journal or are too ashamed to think of writing about their shallow, mundane and often disgusting lives.

A possible source of my paranoia could be my deep distrust of internet corporations in America or the fact that since I saw my timeline I have been trying to cancel my Facebook account.
When I was younger, I briefly quit journalism to try and do something with my life. Those days anyone who wanted to do anything with their lives started out by joining a call centre. I was going to be 25. I thought I had a chance.

I was a customer care executive for a US-based internet service provider where my job was to retain customers who were calling in to cancel their service. Initially, I tried to rationalise the primary deceit in the process by calling it enterprise.

My training batch was a mixed bag: college students in their late teens, middle-aged failed businessmen, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown looking for some financial stability before they file for divorce; entrepreneurs scouting for talent to plan a start up; and a couple of loser types (me for instance) who, the corporate trainer suspected, were corporate spies. The only other student to fail the simple test with me was a corporate spy type who had failed in the civil services examinations twice: once in the mains, once at the interview stage.

Imagine a customer somewhere in the US frustrated with her internet service provider.She has made up her mind to cancel it and makes a phone call. The poor customer does not know she is calling a customer care executive somewhere in India, someone called Kevin or something, someone who doesn’t know anything about a cancellation department because the cancellation department doesn’t exist. The last week of training is on the job. Freshly minted Americans are brought to the shop floor and they take such cancellation calls for a week. Students who do not retain 80% of their callers are failed and sent back to the class room.

We were fighting the oldest battle of sales: customer wants to leave but we won’t let her go. The executive could go on for hours, on a call billed to the customer, about the benefits of the service the customer no longer wants to use. If the customer is lucky she will mutter ‘I want to cancel’ randomly three times in the conversation and the executive will have to abide by the regulations and let her go; if the executive is lucky, the executive may be able to seduce the customer into staying with the service, promising free usage for a couple of month with the usual sales catch like ‘we’ll give you the first month free only if you pay for the next month so we can give you the month after that for free as well.’

The fraud was so simply sophisticated that it could have only been designed in a country where business practices were regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. According to FTC guidelines, a customer was not required to call and cancel; an e-mail was sufficient. Yet most customers called because, like true Americans, they wanted a cancellation number as proof. As a customer care executive, I generated cancellation numbers that did not exist for customers. It wasn’t tough. The account number, printed on the top left or right corner of the monthly bill metamorphosed into the cancellation number.

When I saw my timeline I wondered if I am a bigger fraud than Facebook. I tried, but couldn’t delete my account. All I can do is deactivate my account. Facebook promises to hold all my data till I choose to reactivate my account. I don’t think I can delete my account. And no, there is no number I can call to get a cancellation number.

Mayank Tewari is a writer