Jessica Winter at Slate describes a technique for dealing with customer service agents that has “hypnotic, even occult powers”: The Kindly Brontosaurus.
A practitioner, nay, an artist, of the Kindly Brontosaurus method would approach the [airline] gate agent as follows. You state your name and request. You make a clear and concise case. And then, after the gate agent informs you that your chances of making it onto this flight are on par with the possibility that a dinosaur will spontaneously reanimate and teach himself to fly an airplane, you nod empathically, say something like “Well, I’m sure we can find a way to work this out,” and step just to the side of the agent’s kiosk.
Here is where the Kindly Brontosaurus rears amiably into the frame. You must stand quietly and lean forward slightly, hands loosely clasped in a faintly prayerful arrangement. You will be in the gate agent’s peripheral vision—close enough that he can’t escape your presence, not so close that you’re crowding him—but you must keep your eyes fixed placidly on the agent’s face at all times. Assemble your features in an understanding, even beatific expression. Do not speak unless asked a question. Whenever the gate agent says anything, whether to you or other would-be passengers, you must nod empathically.
Continue as above until the gate agent gives you your seat number. The Kindly Brontosaurus always gets a seat number.
I am fascinated by what people use spells for, especially outside of spiritual traditions. One narrative about magick is that people used to use magick for all kinds of things, but now we have better tools and more power to control our lives without magickal means. We have medicine to heal injuries and diseases, we have technology to foretell the weather and communicate with distant people, and so on. I am suspicious that customer service and bureaucracy attract more than an average amount of magick spells in the contemporary world, because dealing with them is so disempowering and confusing and we have no superior technologies for battling them.