During a recent call to York County Superior Court, it took about three
solid minutes to get ahold of a person – an actual, honest-to-goodness
human being. Three minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but for
someone accustomed to hearing “Hello?” after three or four rings, it’s
an eternity.
The wait was because of what’s called a “phone tree,” which I believe
was invented by medieval torturers looking to extract murder confessions
from bloodthirsty barbarians. You’ve dealt with phone trees before. If
you’ve ever called a courthouse, school, library, or law office, you’ve
heard that automated message: “Thank you for calling the Office of
Whoever. For a staff directory, press ‘one.’ To spend the rest of your
life on the phone and never speak to a breathing homo sapien again,
press ‘two.’”
If left unchecked, phone trees will slowly spread and wipe out humanity
like the killer machines in “The Matrix.” Or at least they’ll make all
of our phone calls profoundly annoying. They’re increasingly
unavoidable, and the menu options are getting increasingly long. Any
longer and they’ll be voiced by James Earl Jones and sold in bookstores.
A perfect case in point is the phone tree for the Massabesic school
system. I called a few months ago trying to get ahold of a staff member
at the high school, but dialing their number no longer gets you the
actual school. Instead, the number connects you to a central hub, from
which you can be transferred to the high school, middle school,
elementary school, or the central district office. Convenient if you’re a
robot, irritating if you’re flesh-and-bone.
Why can’t I just speak to a receptionist and ask to be connected to
someone? That’s usually what ends up happening anyway, because the
options on the menu never correspond to the actual help you need. I
don’t know the extension of the person I’m trying to reach, I don’t need
to call my child in sick, and I don’t need to speak to somebody in food
services, although, really, try a little harder on the mashed potatoes.
I just want to talk to the chemistry teacher so I can ask him about
beakers and stuff.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when phone trees started taking over the
world. They are to phones what Ryan Gosling is to movies: You never
really noticed them coming until they were already there.
They
certainly weren’t as prevalent ten or twenty years ago. Back then you
would call a place, and a bored or polite-sounding person would gently
guide you in the right direction; it was bliss, because when you’re
talking to an honest-to-goodness receptionist, who communicates in human
language instead of binary code, you can make your intentions
understood quickly and succinctly. A person doesn’t have a list of
options that you have to sift through. They have minds, and those minds
are capable of assessing what you need and helping you to get there.
The only argument I’ve heard in favor of the phone tree system is that
it saves receptionists time and effort. That’s all well and good, but if
that’s the goal, it seems like we should at least wait until
technological advances have made this less of a pain in the rump for
callers – maybe when all robots have the cognitive ability of that big
black computer that kicked so much butt on Jeopardy.
Until then, my head will remain firmly in the clouds, envisioning a
pipe-dream utopia where people answer phones and robots stick to doing
robot things, like making coffee or opening cans of dog food. We’re a
long way off from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator.” In the time we
have left before that eerie reality, let’s talk. You may not be James
Earl Jones. But you’re better than the alternative.
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