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Business Title: The Financial Tyranny of "Please Hold" The other day as I was calling voicemail on my cell phone, a recorded announcement came on, stating I did not have enough money on my account to complete the call. The phone was then automatically disconnected. This surprised me as I had, just two weeks before, purchased 360 minutes of airtime (I have a phone account which triples the number of minutes I purchase on their cards). I am not a constant user of my cell phone and in fact only use it rarely so I was shocked at the revelation that in two weeks time I had consumed 360 minutes of airtime. Checking back on the calls I had made since the purchase of the minutes, I found that the only calls made were to insurance companies, doctors' offices and banks. In all of these calls I was placed on hold for inordinately large amounts of time. During which I was barraged with prerecordings stating due to "heavy call volume" my call would be answered by the next available representative. So my 360 minutes went primarily to pay for the time I was on hold listening to horribly recorded music, in some cases for almost one hour. So it is easy to see six or seven calls with inordinate wait times could easily eat up a 360 minute card. It seems to me this is an economic and financial tyranny. Businesses think nothing of costing you the consumer four or five dollars in airtime each time you need to talk to one of their customer service reps. Doctor's offices and banks and governmental agencies are no better and are perhaps the most egregious practitioners of the incessant "hold". When we had land lines there were no charges for how long a call lasted and you did not pay for calls received as well as calls sent. The telecommunications industry and the federal government have again screwed the consumer into addictive behavior with this idiotic cell phone system we now have embedded in our collective psyches. I am now having to buy two and three cell phone cards a month just to keep my phone active. That's over a hundred dollars a month. And it is all due to inordinate wait and hold times on these cell phone calls. I am going to reinstate our land line. I do not need to be in traffic talking on the phone and endangering other drivers. Nor am I such an important person, that I need to be available to anyone at all hours of the day or night. And besides, I cannot even see the screen in sunlight. And the buttons are so close together that if you miss one with your finger the call gets disconnected. All of a sudden every low life out there needs the immediate accessibility of a CEO or a drug lord. What the hell have we come to? Then the quality of the connection is atrocious. Calls now sound like you are in a third world country with static and distortion. Doesn't anyone remember how crisp and clear a good landline connection used to sound? And then you see people walking around who look like zombies, talking to themselves, only to realize they are on their phone, but you cant see it, as it's a "hands-free" version. Any calls I need to make can wait until I get home. I also don't need to be paying a company each and every time someone calls ME. How stupid, as consumers, have we become? Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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