James Patterson, author of Kiss the Girls and other novels that have sold quicker than airplane parts during the Blitz, intends to write a children’s book. Patterson, known for fulminating at book critics, hopes to demonstrate with “SantaKid” that there’s a kinder, gentler James Patterson behind all the fury. Return of the Reluctant has obtained an early excerpt of his story. We leave readers to decide if there are, in fact, two James Pattersons co-existing in this universe.

Beautiful pearly teeth filled her mouth. She was ready. Really ready. Everything was good, really damn good, about this smile.

Kimberly the Elf was a North Pole trainee. It was her first day.

“It’s a good smile,” Rufus the Elf whispered. “I wouldn’t change a single thing about it.”

They had come to the toy factory to work and to smile. They had three hundred gifts to wrap and send out. Three hundred gifts, and if they were feeling really good, maybe they’d have three hundred and one.

Rufus the Elf had to smile. He had already smiled twice that morning, and he knew he would smile again.

“Tough business,” Kimberly admitted. “But we’ll make it through.”

“Just keep smiling,” he said to her. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Kimberly had imagined this moment, this tremendous new life, so many times. It became easier to smile as the toys poured out the chute like coins flying from a Vegas jackpot. God, she loved smiling and wrapping toys.

Rufus looked at Kimberly. Kimberly looked at Rufus.

There was work to do, and it was good work. As good as the smiles they rode in on.

Customer service. The very term implies a soft-spoken, clean-cut Babbitt man from the Eisenhower era, a teetotaler who votes Republican but never discusses politics, a necktie who calls you “sir” or “ma’am” and exudes an ineluctable folksy charisma, a guy who spends his Thursday evenings at the bingo parlor and who will pomade his hair well into his autumn years. A man prepared to listen to the customer’s needs, who might have attended a Dale Carnegie course, maybe donning a daring fashion accouterment like a purple polka-dot bowtie. Chances are his name is Harold or Orville.

“Dork” is probably the word here, but in a good way. I remember guys like this growing up. You could find them hunkered over a merchandise list in an appliance store or sometimes knocking on your door. They knew their products. They had a quiet and unobtrusive way of making a sale and finding out what you wanted. They were adamant, but never pushy. They offered to undersell the competition. They worked hard, but they always sauntered along with a relaxed gait.

But after spending a half hour dealing with outsourced customer service from a faraway nation the other day, I’m convinced that today’s definition of customer service involves nothing less than bad dialogue and circlejerks.

It was bad enough with the voice-activated customer service systems that denied you the use of the touchtone phone. Of course, with those, you could generally recite the first lines of “Jabberwocky.” Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem still stands the test of time, fooling the human ear as well as its crude computerized counterpart. The computer translates the polite sentence, “I want to speak to a fucking human being” into “I want to seek a fucking by your company, along with the loss of my time and the handover of half my savings.” And that’s when you get a live human being on the other end, because the company’s ultimate goal is to fleece the customer through an overlooked clause in an agreement.

But now that companies have outsourced their support to faraway nations, you get conversations like this:

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: I completely understand your concerns. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: This is the third time I’ve called you. The first time, we did what you asked. We faxed you the form and you promised the info in two hours. That was two weeks ago.

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes. [pause, as if to imply somehow that, despite boiler-plate repetition, the result will be different] I completely understand your concerns. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: See, that’s the problem. We’ve already done that. The second time I called in, which was last week, you promised us the info in two hours. We have done everything you have asked and we still don’t have the info.

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes, yes. [pause] I completely understand. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: No, you don’t understand. We’ve had these promises before and you’ve failed to live up to them. I need the info now. Can I speak to your supervisor?

OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes, but he will say the same thing.

[Time passes. ED repeats explanation of previous info dilemma to SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION.]

ED: [arch and serious] Do you realize the severity of this? If you don’t get us the info, then we may have to consider doing business elsewhere.

SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: Yes. [pause] I completely understand. But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: Stop reading from the script!

SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: I’m not reading from the script.

ED: And I have a third nostril! Is there anyone there who can actually get me the info?

SUPERVISOR OF OUTSOURCED CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE IN SOME FARAWAY NATION: No. [pause] But if you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.

ED: [contemplating another hour of “If you fax us the form, we will get you the information in two hours.”] Okay, what’s the fax number?

Some info from Fantastic Fiction on China Miéville’s third New Crobuzon novel, Iron Council (set to hit stores on July 27, 2004): “It is a time of revolts and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil, a mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places. In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope, an undying legend. In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the Iron Council.”

John Derbyshire proclaims An African in Greenland, a first-person account of West African Tété-Michel Kpomassie meeting Eskimos, as the strangest travel book ever written. An audio interview with Kpomassie can be found here.

Also worth investigating: Troll: A Love Story, featuring what appears to be a Terry Pratchett-like skewering of fantasy conventions, gay consorts, and a baby troll being beaten up by street thugs.