I once waited on hold for Microsoft support for 6.5 hours.
Fun fact: After hour 3 they stop playing music.
Fun fact: After hour 3 they stop playing music.
Thank you, for taking the hit for the rest of us.
FedEx has one of the worst phone support systems. It goes out of its way to tell you you’re an idiot for wanting to speak to a human being because you can’t possibly need any more information than what it has already told you. Then it proceeds to just hang up on you.
I got stuck on there the other day. If you tell the robot you want a human it instantly forwards you.
Your call is very important to us.
refers you to website with every option
Image Transcription:
A four-panel comic called Inky Rickshaw by Ricky Hawkins (inkyrickshaw.com @inkyrickshaw). The first panel shows a man in a blue shirt, yellow tie and glasses, holding a mug with the text BOSS MUG on it. He’s talking to a woman seated at a desk with her back turned to the desk, wearing a white shirt and black skirt and looking up over her shoulder from her phone which she’s holding in her hand. On the desk is a blue desk phone, which is ringing. The man is saying “What’s that noise?”, to which the woman is replying “It’s the customer service line.” The second panel shows a close-up on the man, behind which is a purple background with a flowchart on it. The flowchart starts with a rectangle which splits into two options resulting in circle or triangle. The circle also has two options which both results in rectangles. The left rectangle has three options, the left of which results in a skull, the bottom option splits into two results, one of which is the triangle on the second tier, and the other is a question mark, and the top option results in the initial rectangle. The second rectangle from the circle has two options, the bottom results in a circle and the top results in another rectangle. The circle has two options, one results in a triangle but the other’s result is outside the panel, the triangle’s only option’s result is also outside the panel. The rectangle has only one option that also results in the triangle on the second tier. The man is saying “Are you saying someone actually navigated our labyrinthine phone tree…” The third panel also shows the close-up of the man, only this time he is leaning back slightly and has one eyebrow raised in consternation. On the green background behind him is a confusing line of sheet music that appears to be in an inconsistent meter. The man is saying “…and still hasn’t hung up after a full hour of mind-melting hold music?” The woman is replying from off-screen “Yeah…” The final panel shows the man and woman once again, the man’s hands are raised with his palms up in a pleading motion and his face shows shock as he says “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THEM?!” The woman has now turned her chair around to face the desk and still-ringing phone, fear on her face as she replies “I don’t know, but I’m scared.”
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
This description is a little short, would you mind expanding on some of the points you’ve made? (Joking, excellent work)
I did consider whether or not to try and transcribe the notes in the sheet music but decided it was largely nonsense.
Makes sense now why every company always has some deep fried 10 second loop hold music…
My high school had a CD player of hold music that played, it was stupidly easy to find. We stole the CD of musik and replaced it with one by Black Sabbath. That was a good day.
Pro tip: If you start yelling the robot will forward you to a real person. I personally just yell my McDonalds order
They just didn’t try hard enough. I tried calling my energy provider. You have to call more than 5 times, to even get to the robot call system. Other times they line is just dead. Then you have to listen to adverts over adverts and at the end the line just goes dead again. Trying the same number with with landline or mobile also gives differrent results, I once or twice got to the point where I it might have ringed some phone. but after a couple of rings, the line just goes dead again.
My name is common enough and I got some court paper work sent to me by mistake meant for the other guy with my name. Ended up having to call the state level court and my local one. After hours finally get the right department and its a fax machine. I ended up having to fax messages back and forth.
I didn’t realize how many people were named afraid of zombies
It is a family name. Started with my great great grandfather on his arrival to Elis Island. Originally it was fraido zombenie but they changed it.
I remember there was a post where someone said if you yell a bunch of profanity into the phone then you skip the wait. Never tried it yet but if someone wants to give it a try let me know if it works out.
It used to work at Apple tech support like a decade ago. I know bc I worked IT and our little program gave us a heads up about A: how long people had waited in cue and B: if they had cussed a.k.a were angry. When angry customers got to me there’d be a little angry emoji on the screen lol and those customers still tended to be cussing when I picked up. Anyway, I was always told that was how you skip cue and confirmed bc on days where the average wait time for a cx was say 20 minutes I’d get angry cussers that had only been in line for a few minutes. On the flip side I can confirm this doesn’t skip cue for Verizon (noticeably) as I’ve cussed that robot 10 times to no avail. Dmv doesn’t care either, but Apple once did.
They put it on speaker and did other stuff while waiting.
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As someone with a hearing impairment, robot phone menus are the absolute worst. Sometimes I just can’t understand what the options are and unlike a human, robots can’t rephrase or enunciate differently. I will literally go out of my way to not do business with some companies based solely on whether or not I can do everything online.
God I love the Cisco Call Manager default hold music and I don’t know why. I don’t mind holding at all when it’s this.
Hello…it is AutoGPT calling on your behalf.
Hello …it is AnswerGPT answering on our behalf.
Right. Then the AIs will both realize they can skip the call and just direct communicate.
Really good lmao
