This Irritating, Useless Voice Message Is For Your Convenience

November 3rd, 2003 Posted in 2003

With the increasing divide between faceless corporations and the people who do insignificant things like actually purchase their services, I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later, but it’s still infuriating to the point of being upsetting when you’re actually confronted with it: it’s now actually almost impossible to talk to a real human being when you phone customer service.

I had a “billing related inquiry”, and so phoned Sprint Canada’s 1-800 line an hour ago. From there you get siphoned off into one of 500 sub-menus by a gratingly cheery robotic voice.

“If you would like to set up a payment arrangement, please press 1… now. If you would like to notify us of a change of address, please press 2… now. If you have a problem or concern that does not fit into our computer system’s narrowly defined set of choices, please get angry… now. For the sound of me choking violently to death on a piece of food, please press 3… now.”

Even if I had heard an option that applied to me, it would have been redundant—because to service me better, Sprint has instituted a new automated service I have the choice of using (the other choice being, apparently, a dial tone) that I can use simply by entering the 27-digit password I’ve never heard of that nobody from Sprint’s ever given me.

Please enter that 27-digit password and then the pound key… now. To enter in an incorrect number and the pound key in the hope of fooling me into thinking you need actual human help, please press random buttons… now. Please realize this still will get you no closer to an actual human voice, and in fact will only leave you in a silent void that only random button mashings will get you out of…. now.

Eventually I got the brilliant idea to stop pretending to be an existing Sprint customer, because clearly this is exactly the sort of person Sprint wants to strenuously avoid. So I pretended to be a POTENTIAL customer, working under the assumption that they must save their three available customer service reps for the purposes of flogging services and products that you can never get human assistance on.

Devious.

I go through the entire irritating multiple choice process again. But this time I choose a selection indicating I want to purchase some expensive-sounding high speed internet-wireless cell-at-home phone plan.

Apparently they’ve thought of this too. Actually, this expensive-sounding option may not even exist, and may only have been given as a clever decoy to weed out existing customers masquerading as fresh meat in an attempt to get a human voice on the line. I suspect this only because it’s human nature never to pick the most expensive option, so it must have made the computer suspicious.

Either way, selecting the choice only gives you another seemingly endless list of services that you can purchase simply by pressing a button. And oddly, no matter what number you select from any given sub-menu, you never seem any closer to a resolution. You just get more and more options no matter what you press, until you’re convinced the entire computer program is set up like some infuriating Mobius strip of consumer hell. I felt like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the cliff-face, confident that this button combination would get me, if not to a human voice, at least to some conclusion where they’d ask me for my credit card number and I could refuse.

Eventually out of desperation, I pressed the one button they hadn’t yet given me the option of pressing—0—in the hopes that if they weren’t going to actually let me speak to them, I’d at least try to piss their computer program off.

Ironically, pressing 0 then takes you to a live operator. Or rather, it takes you to a musak recording for twenty minutes, then to a live operator. The woman I eventually got a hold of seemed genuinely surprised I’d managed to get ahold of her, and grudgingly processed my request in seconds with a few simple keyboard clacks.

All of this, I was informed 17,802 times, was put into place for my convenience. So the next time you have to deal with telephone customer care hell like this, blame me—apparently all this horseshit was put into place for Jay Pinkerton’s convenience.