The unbearable agony of being...on hold
Tiny rants. Big feelings.
No matter how well my morning starts out, no matter how good my mood, if making a phone call to a government agency or doctor’s office is on the day’s agenda, I know the likelihood is high that both will be ruined.
It’s not only the time it takes and the act of being on hold; I can handle that as a minor irritation.
It’s not even the inexplicable 80s synth music and constant interruptions by an automated voice to apologise for the delay and to reiterate that the information you seek can more than likely be found on their website, you absolute plant pot (no it can’t, Automaton Man, I looked - you think I’m calling for FUN?!).
Nay, it is not these annoyances that end up sending me around the bend and my blood pressure soaring.
Mostly it’s the excruciatingly slow rate at which Automaton Man (or Woman) speaks. It is the same speed at which a 16-year-old responds when asked to talk about themselves in their GCSE Spanish speaking exam.
Hola! Me llamo Liam.
[Long pause]
Soy un…estudiante.
[Shaky intake of breath and a nervous glance at the teacher]
Mi color favorito es… el azul.
[Wondering if he should mention la biblioteca or la casa next]
I just can’t. I CAN’T.
Spit it out, robot! I’ve got shit to do and listening to you loudly and painfully draw out every syllable, like a racist white grandpa assuming every foreign-looking person they come across can’t speak English, really does my nut in.
But still, the glacial speaking pace is not the worst thing.
The top two things guaranteed to turn being on hold into a hostile, untenable situation are:
Still having long, rambling passages about the Covid-19 pandemic and how they are doing all they can in these unprecedented times but you matter to them so please be patient while they put you on hold and have a coffee and a fag because how in the world can a pandemic still be causing delays to the answering of phones five years later?
Continually saying ‘www’ (very, very slowly of course) every time they repeat the web address they so desperately want you to go to (the answers are NOT THERE, I promise!) even though you don’t even need to type ‘www’ anymore. It is obsolete. It is meaningless. It is redundant. It is enraging. A couple months ago I had the terrible misfortune of being on hold with one that said ‘the worldwide web’ every time, I shit you not.
It physically pains me, friends. Truly. I have to immediately place the phone far enough away from me that I cannot smash it against the nearest hard surface.
Gauging by my reaction to this, there is clearly still some work to do on regulating my nervous system. Some days I am a healed, self-aware woman with the patience of a Zen monk, and some days I’m aggressively seething at a voice prompt named ‘Alan.’ Balance, I guess?
I do often think of the people who write these scripts though, wondering why they hate us so much. And look, I’m not ragging on them personally, I get it. Working in customer service can be a soul-destroying job that saps your faith in humanity to a dried up husk, and too many of The Public are entitled dumb dumbs who get off on being rude for no reason. I also know that they probably have to program the automaton to speak slowly for the hard of hearing, those for whom English is a second language, and so on.
I still maintain that it is excessive and that it is a conspiracy to make us hang up and go to the website which is a barren wasteland when you need answers to your specific problem and it doesn’t fit neatly into an FAQ. In reality, all it does is rile us up before we even get to the human being on the other end, our patience stretched as thin as cheekbone skin after a bad facelift.
This is a plea to the megalomaniacs kind, lovely people who are in charge of hold scripts for His Majesty’s Royal Bureaucratic Hellscapes. Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, press 1.5x speed on the robot voice, remove the Covid nonsense, and have a stern word with yourself about the ‘worldwide web’ situation. You can keep the 80s synth music though, I dig that.
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