Today we have whoever invented automated voicemail and the other associated ways that companies and government agencies can avoid speaking with anyone. Who among us has not been tortured and wasted large parts of our lives by “If you want X, press 2”? Used to be you could bypass all that by tapping 0, but they’ve wised up on that. Before then, an actual person answered the phone. Those people were called “receptionists”, a position now more or less consigned to the dustbin of history.
We’re sure that more than one person has seriously contemplated slitting their throat while slogging through one of these diabolical devices.
Now they are getting more sophisticated (which in this context means being able to eliminate perople entirely from the process) and you just can’t get a real person on the line for love nor money. Try looking on a website for a phone number to call if you need help. You can’t find one. Something went phlooey with our Xfinity phone the other day and there’s no phone number, no people anywhere. Apparently Xfinity has no customer service employees anymore.
What you can find, and we did, are “chats.” And now those chats many times, as in this case, don’t get you to a real person anymore, they’re just bots with fixed answers to fixed questions, and if you keep pestering them they just refer you to user forums, as in this case, so you have to hope and pray someone else had the same issue and managed somehow to get it solved. If you want anything more than that, well, we suppose you have to go to that company’s headquarters and picket outside until the media picks it up. Then maybe you’ll get some answers quickly, though you also will probably get cancelled the next day.
So for this person or persons, death by hanging and drawing and quartering is too good, but we’re hard-pressed to find a more painful sentence. Perhaps just trussing up him or her in a filthy cell with their own automated voicemail on 24/7/365 at the highest volume possible. Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it?