#114 Press One for Frustration

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Last week I realized that I can spend an entire day on the telephone and never have to speak to an actual human being.

Really.

After I’d returned a half-dozen voice-mail messages with tag-youâre-it-style replies, I tried calling to check on an order I’d placed and got to play Phone Menu Cryptography. It’s the game where the computer on the telephone gives you a menu of mysterious and useless choices and you have to puzzle out which one will get you closer to your goal of talking to an actual human being. Indiana Jones, Robert Langdon and Benjamin Franklin Gates combined couldn’t have worked their way through the process in anything less than a week. I gave up in a mere four hours reasoning that I’d feel foolish if I was still waiting on the phone when the package arrived.

This whole phenomenon of replacing unsatisfactory person-to-person interactions with unsatisfactory person-to-machine interactions started with the phone company. They used to have real people to talk to you. They were sometimes rude and insensitive, but at least they were real people……
 

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NOTES: 

• While researching this episode (yes…I actually research some of my topics) I came across this blog post:
  http://tinyurl.com/5t2ukg
• It points to a really, really useful site here:
  http://www.gethuman.com/

Tags: humor essay | funny story | telephone | customer service | comedy