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The Universe Has a Customer Service Department
Paperback
Publisher: Julian Cross
Published: Sep 6 2026
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Estimated wait time: 300,000 years. Unless you know how to bypass the firewall with a Sears multimeter.
Hank Macintyre just wanted to check the diode ripple on his 2011 Ford F-150. Instead, a jury-rigged electrical diagnostic rig in his garage bridged the quantum threshold and patched straight into the Department of Universal Balance and Reality Maintenance-straight to a dead-tired cosmic call-center rep named Bob, and eventually, Executive Vice-Archon Kevin, a corporate bureaucrat who treats the fabric of space-time like a mid-level spreadsheet.
The problem? Three years ago, Hank filed a metaphysical manifestation ticket for a twenty-foot aluminum bass boat and a fix for his chronic lower back pain. Thanks to an automated batch-processing failure during a third-quarter system migration, his delivery was routed to a fourteenth-century Bohemian serf named Oldrich-who promptly got the Black Plague twelve minutes after receiving a wooden barge and forty silver groschen.
Now, backed by his buddy Barry (a master diesel tech armed with a tire iron, infinite profanity, and zero patience for celestial red tape) and Dave (an exhausted, six-armed alien IT support tech who hates middle management as much as Hank does), Hank is taking his clipboard straight to the top.
Armed with a four-color Bic pen, decades of municipal maintenance expertise, and a pirated software license that accidentally registers the entire Milky Way under Stark County's utility district, Hank is ready to audit the cosmos.
The Universe Has a Customer Service Department is a wildly funny, absurdly chaotic sci-fi comedy about what happens when blue-collar grit collides with interdimensional red tape-proving that no matter how vast the cosmos is, bureaucracy is universal, and nobody ignores a union mechanic with a legitimate grievance.
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