It's finally reached the point where having a human being answer a phone at a business is just about unheard of. Every business I call--even Billy Bob's Fishin' Hole ("Located in lovely Lander, Wyoming, just 200 feet west of the big pine tree on Highway 28")--has voicemail.
It's bad enough that the businesses don't have a person answering the phone, but the option most people want, which is to speak to the retail department, is almost always the last one. First you have to listen to options for store hours, directions, accounting, shipping and receiving, fishing reel repairs, and law enforcement sales.
It's also true that if you call a bank, health insurance company, the IRS or any bloated institution, you'll get the message saying, "we're currently experiencing higher than normal call volume, so your wait may be twenty minutes". You can call them at 3 am and they'll have higher than normal call volume. All they're doing is hiring fewer people than they actually need to staff the phones, and saving money by wasting your time, which they regard as worthless.
The latest gimmick is to make you sit through a couple of minutes of advertising or self-promotion before you're even given any options. "Looking to refinance your home? Ask our associates about our adjustable rate mortgages. We can save you...". It's tempting to sit through one of those ads, select an option, and then when someone answers do a telemarketing pitch for Norwegian Cruise Lines. Maybe if more people would do that, it would become something like Mutually Assured Destruction, and neither side would engage in it again.
I really hate calling my doctor when I'm sick and need to see him. I call the clinic, get voicemail, wait through 16 different options before I'm told to select #17 for Doctor Locker, and then I get the voicemail for his nurse. Her message always promises that she'll return my call as soon as possible, which invariably is two or three days. By then I've already gone to a walk-in clinic, gotten an Rx, and I'm well again. Maybe if they keep moving my priority further down the line, from my doctor to his nurse to the 2nd shift nurse to the x-ray lab, they might eventually route calls to the lowly receptionist.
My favorite is calling a credit card company and getting in a closed loop. Bank of America is great at this. You hear some soothing music and a man's voice, and are given options for credit card, home loans, consumer loans, debit cards, etc. Select credit cards, and you get a woman's voice offering another dozen options. Select one of those options, and you're back to the guy again offering the same options for credit card, home loans and so on. You can stay up all night pushing buttons on your phone and only hear those two voices and those same options.
I'm old enough to remember calling directory assistance in a relatively small town, and getting a live operator who not only was able to find the person's number, but actually knew the person. And when she'd connect me, the person actually answered. That was before we made all this progress, though.
