Pinned post! I will be updating this with a lot more later, I'm sure, but in the meantime I thought it fitting to give some explanation to the posts that are happening lol.
FAQ
Is this just a Lennox Mutual blog?
No, this is my personal (side)blog for things more connected to my activity elsewhere on the internet, but it just so happens that yapping about Lennox Mutual was the thing that made me make this and other interests will eventually show up, I promise lol. Please note that despite posting about LM, I have not finished my own experience, and am still very much in the "earlygame" portion and am avoiding spoilers.
What is Lennox Mutual?
Long story short, an immersive phone theatre/alternate reality experience! Best way to learn about it is to check out the page for the show on Candlehouse Collective's website, and consider booking a call for yourself! It's well worth it, and well worth experiencing for yourself first hand.
If, however, you need a little more explanation and a little more convincing, long story medium: it is a phone experience where you are calling a "life ensurance" (that isn't a typo, it's spelled that way on purpose) company. In the course of your experience, you'll be communicating with one of Lennox Mutual's Customer Service Representatives (who is, despite their intentionally robotic intonation, always a real human and all incredible performers) on each call and interacting with different menu options and such as they are presented to you. The experience and story of Lennox Mutual takes place over a series of calls, each call building on the last as you and your own story are clearly remembered and continued. You can book the calls individually and at your own pace, with no expected or required frequency, but you are also not committed to finishing the experience once you have begun. Doing even a single call is an experience I would heartily recommend; one call may not seem like much, but even that will give you a bit of the fun, thoughtfulness, and surreal nature of Lennox Mutual. I do, however, hope that everyone who tries may find themselves sucked into this magical world.
Part puzzle solving experience, part fantasy adventure, part alternate reality, part existential crisis, and part banging your head on the walls of bureaucracy, it is ENTIRELY a moving philosophical, emotional, and very human experience.
And, well, to make a long story long-- well, I guess you better give LM a call to tell your own story, eh?
What's a CSR and why are you posting about them?
As mentioned about, a CSR is a Customer Service Representative (often shorted to CSR or rep) in the Lennox Mutual experience. There are a concrete number of CSRs with distinct personalities, but when discovery is the name of the game with Lennox Mutual, even a CSR's personality can be a spoiler. Therefore, because I want to share some of the things CSRs have said to me (in either personal conversation with them, and not part of the "plot," or else personalized elements that others are unlikely to experience in exactly the same way), I have decided to make a semi-game of posting those quotes unattributed. I say semi-game because I don't plan on posting/confirming who said what, but it's still a fun way to present them/I find it fun to share them at all lol.
Honestly, like anything else I post here, the unattributed CSR quotes are not always going to be profound or "significant," because profundity and significance are not the metrics for what I post here. Some of them will be things that impacted me significantly, and a subset of those might be interesting to others, but in the end a lot of them will just be silly, or seemingly mundane, or make less sense when stripped of their context. However, I'm posting them because I like preserving and subsequently sharing them in some format, even when I am unlikely to share the context, and also because no one can stop me lol.
Are these quotes exact? Are you recording your calls?
These quotes are as close as I can remember them, and often I can remember them well, but there is technically no way for me to guarantee that they are exact. I did record my first four calls with LM, but Candlehouse Collective had a change in their policies and no longer allow callers to record any of Candlehouse Collective's work. Therefore, I have ceased recording, (hopefully that goes without saying,) and have replaced recordings with frantic notes which are made during the call and filled out afterwards lol. Often, the quotes are things I either got written down in the minute or that stuck very clearly in my mind, though again, no guarantee that it's word perfect. Fortunately, even though my memory is a SIEVE, I can often remember the particular way things are worded very well, so I'm relatively confident that the quotes are as close to the originals as I could possibly manage. All that to say-- unfortunately I can prove nothing to you if you were to, for some reason, demand receipts for my funky little phone game quotes, but all the quotes I'm putting here are things that I'm fairly comfortable saying are "the real quote" lol.
