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Fred's Corner September 9, 2009 By Fred Cicco
Have you noticed how every
company you call nowadays has voice mail answering the phones. This is,
in my humble opinion, one of the worst things to happen in modern times.
Every time some message is droning on about the message might be
monitored for quality assurance, or the agents are busy helping other
customers, I get more aggravated.
No offense to Spanish speaking people, but why do I have make a choice
if I want my message in Spanish or English. I was hoping that they could
at least ask me for a choice of Italian, or will they ask soon if you
want the message in Ebonics. Do you think if the call is in a
predominantly American Indian area they will answer with a Sioux
greeting. I
really love when you have to listen to all the menu choices and as soon
as you pick one they give you five more choices. I had to call the phone
company the other day. My second line suddenly had no dial tone. I
called to report my problem and I have to listen to this recording tell
me everything that it was going to do for me. After a multitude of
choices and it asking for information like your phone number with area
code first. Then it wants to know if I’m calling from the troubled phone
or another phone. Well, if I could call from the troubled phone, I
wouldn’t be calling them, would I?
What really got me going was that after I had already been on the phone
for about eight minutes, a recording says, “please wait while I test
your line. This may take awhile.” Then it made me make another choice
and said it was going to test again. All of a sudden a real person comes
on the phone. He starts to ask all kinds of questions that I have
already answered. It’s the same stuff the computer wanted to know, but I
kept my cool. Then I took a moment to ask him a question. I said, “why
are you asking me all the same questions that your computer did?” He
replied that he was on an old system and none of the things that I
answered came up on his computer screen. I said I didn’t believe him. I
thought it was just a ploy to keep you on the phone and keep you busy
till they can get to the phone.
The next day I get home and there is no evidence that anyone checked
anything on my phone line. As I dialed the phone company and I heard the
recordings again, I was starting to get ticked. The thought struck me to
press “O”. All the choices stopped and they said the next available
representative will be with me. This was great. I thought maybe it was a
trick. The guy comes on the phone and I ask why my phone problem was not
fixed. He said they were very busy and the normal response time was 48
hours. I thought that was ridiculous. Of course, I would be able to
deduct 68 cents a day for the two days of service that I lost. I asked
if this was a normal response time or was it because the company has
been downsizing for so long that they didn’t have enough people to
service the area. His response was I didn’t say that but you are
basically right. It still took two days to fix my phone.
My other pet peeve is when you think you are getting through to a person
and their voice mail kicks in. They are always either on the phone or
away from their desk, but you know that they are really there and don’t
want to interrupted or don’t want to be bothered. I been standing at
somebody’s desk just shooting the breeze and the phone rings and their
answer is the voice mail will get it. Every time I call someone and get
that message, my mind conjures up the image of somebody saying let the
voice mail get it.
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