The Universe Has a Customer Service Department by Julian Cross

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.