the emperor's new loathes.

among other things i particularly loathe, i particularly loathe the 'customer service'/'help' lines offered by the monolithic companies i have to interact with now and again. im talking about 800 numbers for health insurance, credit card, cable television and cell phone companies:

leopold. whenever you call these bastards, you're first greeted with the ol' 'this call may be monitored for quality assurance' routine, which is so insulting on account of the fact that if the powers that be at one of these companies had ever bothered to listen to even one such recording, these calls could not possibly still be unfolding in the generally asinine, incompetent and inefficient manner for which they are so renowned. there can be no doubt that if these calls are really being recorded, the recordings get tossed into a giant bin labeled 'voices of suckers,' never to be touched again.

loathe. the catalyst for writing this post is actually not the above, which has been going on for as long as i can remember, but rather the relatively recent, endemic prompting to punch in - or sometimes say - your member ID number, social, or phone number, at the beginning of these service calls, before you talk to an actual person. the thing that i LOATHE is that after you type in your number, the friggin operator still asks for it, not a minute later! what could POSSIBLY be the reason for this redundancy? why do i have to convey my member number TWICE before i get to interact with the 'human being'? is it to drive the point home - as if the customer service procedure didn't generally communicate this enough - that im a number, not a person, to these monopolies? is it to screen out possible prank callers before they waste some operator's time? lemme tell you something: if there's a poor sucker on this earth crazy enough to want to waste his time calling these horrible bastards when he doesnt have a cell phone to fix or a medical claim to check, i say let him through, because he is a downtrodden soul who needs all the amusement he can get, from whatever source he can get it.

if you're gonna make me punch in some numbers to identify myself before you let me talk to someone, please fix it so that person knows they're talking to me when they get on the phone. please. is that too much to ask? dont make me jump through hoops for no reason; you're stripping me of my humanity. oxford health plans, im looking at YOU!

the worst part is, you cant rightfully bitch to the representaive you end up speaking to, since they have nothing to do with the design of the process, and generally dont care about anything anyway. but they do make sure to give you a big thank you at the end, for letting yourself be totally raped by the company whose help you sought. well, you're welcome, ya bastard.