Phones

I am a weary traveler of the phone lines today. From 8:50 in the morning until noon, I played the customer service call in game, and every minute I played I lost patience, brain cells and slivers of my soul.

Without getting into too much detail, I called a number for important information.

Thus my journey into Hell began.
Just to let you know, one of two voices greets the caller. It will either be a soprano voice that triggers images of hairsprayed airline stewardesses smiling, pointing out emergency escapes, but secretly wishing for the plane to catch on fire. This is the voice of corporate apologies. "I'm sorry but at this time, we are fielding too many calls... blah blah blah check out our website for more details."
The needed action here is to hang up and dial again. It may be two, three even for more attempts before one will get through to the other voice.

The voice the caller wants to hear is the deeper voice of action. I imagine it's a woman who comes home to her house flooded, the dogs barking, the kids chasing one another squealing, and she rolls up her sleeves, pulls her crescent wrench out of her back pocket, swats the kids and proceeds to fix the plumbing catastrophe with the gritty grace of rosie the riveter without the cheesy smile.

This voice means work. This voice means progress. This voice is the shepherd of the labyrinth of extensions.

Having been through this Hell before, I have the maze of extension numbers memorized (i.e. for English press 1, beep, for a prerecorded message press 1, for all other info press 2, beeep, etc....) The magic sequence I wanted was 1243. Ah, but if it were only that easy. When I got to the holy message, "Now transferring your call," I was thwarted time and time again with "Due to the high volume of calls, you will need to call back later. Goodbye."

Aarrrrrrrrgh! I went through over three hours of the call, press extensions, hang up cycle. And at last I heard an ethereal message: "Your wait time is estimated at 6 minutes." To their credit, that wait was only three minutes.

The person, the living breathing person, on the other end was of very little help to me, but she did take the time at the beginning of the conversation to let me know there was very little she would be able to do, know or find out.

Curses! Foiled Again.