Press Nine for a Human

Your call is important to us.

Is it? Is it, though? Let's think about that sentence for a moment, because it's one of the great comic lines of our age, and nobody laughs at it anymore.

Your call is important to us, says the recording, for the fortieth minute in a row. Your call is so important, in fact, that we've hired nobody to answer it. Your call is so very important that we've built a machine, at great expense, whose entire job is to keep your important call away from anyone who could do anything about it.

If your call were any less important, presumably they'd just set fire to the phone.

I love this machine. I really do. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of absurd engineering ever built, and almost everyone on earth has been inside it, and almost nobody has stopped to admire the gears. So pull up a chair. Let's admire them. And then, because generosity costs nothing, I'll show you which one to pull out.

The shape of the maze

You know the shape. Everyone does. Something's gone wrong: a charge you didn't make, a parcel that never came, a bill that's doubled, a service that's stopped working. You need a person to fix it. Just one person, for five minutes, with the authority to press a button.

So you ring. And you enter the maze.

For billing, press one. For technical support, press two. For new accounts, press three. None of them is your problem. You press the closest one. Please say, in a few words, what you're calling about. You say it. I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. You say it again, slower, the way you'd talk to a frightened horse. Did you say: cancel my account? No. Let me transfer you. Music. A loop of the same eleven seconds of music, played for so long you start to hear things in it.

Then, finally, a voice. A human voice. Your heart leaps. And the voice says it's the wrong department, and transfers you, and you're back in the music.

I want you to notice something about this. Every single part of it was designed. Somebody decided how many options there would be. Somebody chose the music. Somebody decided how long the hold would be before the first human picked up. Somebody decided the human you'd reach first would be unable to help. None of it fell out of the sky.

So let's take it apart.

First gear: the menu that isn't for you

The first gear is the menu. Press one, press two, press three.

Look closely at the menu and you'll notice it isn't a list of your problems. It's a list of their departments. It's the company's org chart, read aloud to you by a robot, and you're asked to guess which box on their org chart your life has fallen into.

That's a neat little trick. It moves the work onto you. Working out where your problem belongs should be their job; they know their own building. Instead, you're the one wandering the corridors, trying doors, while the building watches.

And notice which options are always there. New accounts. Upgrades. Sales. Those doors are wide open, well lit, and somebody's standing right behind them, smiling. Funny, isn't it? The door for giving them money is always at the front. The door for asking for it back is always somewhere near the boiler room.

Second gear: the voice that doesn't understand

The second gear is my favourite. The voice that asks you to describe your problem in a few words, and then doesn't understand them.

Now, here's the thing. These systems understand a great many words perfectly well. They'll understand upgrade first time, every time, in any accent. They'll understand buy and new and add a line. It's the other words they struggle with. Complaint. Refund. This is wrong. Cancel.

I'm not saying anybody sat down and taught the machine to be deaf in one ear. I'm saying that if you built a machine to save money, and you measured whether it saved money, the version that kept getting a little bit deafer to the expensive words would keep winning. Machines learn what they're rewarded for. That's the whole joke. You don't need a villain. You need a scoreboard.

Third gear: the hold

Ah, the hold. The great comic set piece. Forty minutes of music and a voice that interrupts every ninety seconds to remind you how much they value you.

Here's how the hold works, and it's simpler than you'd think. Every minute you wait is a minute they don't have to pay a person to talk to you. And every minute you wait, there's a small chance you'll give up and hang up. And every person who gives up and hangs up is a problem that never got solved, which is a refund that never got paid, which is money that stayed exactly where it was.

So the hold isn't a queue. Think of it as a filter. It filters out everyone who has somewhere else to be. The busy, the tired, the poorly, the people on a lunch break, the parents with a child pulling at their sleeve. They all leave. And whoever's left at the end of forty minutes is the most determined, the most desperate, or the most retired.

Now picture the person who designed that. Picture them looking at a chart that shows how many people hang up at minute ten, minute twenty, minute thirty. Picture them understanding exactly what the chart means. And then picture them deciding to keep the music.

You don't have to picture them as a monster. That's the funniest part. They're probably quite nice. They probably ring their mother on Sundays. They just work in a building where the chart that matters is the cost chart, and the cost chart goes down every time you give up.

Fourth gear: the person who can't

So you survive the hold. You reach a person. A real one. And here's the cruellest gear in the whole machine.

The person can't help you.

Not because they don't want to. Usually they do. Usually they're kind, and tired, and reading from a screen, and they'd love nothing more than to press the button that fixes your problem. But they haven't been given the button. The button is somewhere else, upstairs, with someone you'll never be allowed to ring. The person you reached has been given exactly enough power to apologise, and not one inch more.

So you get an apology. And a ticket number. And a promise that someone will be in touch within three to five working days. And the ticket number, and I want you to really sit with this, is a long string of letters and digits that you write on the back of an envelope and never see again.

That's the gear that makes me grin the widest, because it's the most theatrical. The whole performance of help, staged beautifully, with real actors and a real script, and at the end of it the curtain comes down and nothing has happened. You were given the experience of being helped, in place of help.

Fifth gear: the survey

And then, oh, this is the bit I'd keep in the act, the call ends and a voice asks if you'd like to take a short survey about your experience.

After all that. After forty minutes, two transfers, a deaf robot and a ticket number. They'd like your feedback. On a scale of one to ten.

And the beautiful thing is, the survey is about the person. How satisfied were you with your agent today? Not how satisfied were you with our decision to give your agent no power, hire too few of them and make you wait forty minutes. Just the agent. The one person in the whole machine who actually tried. They're the one who gets the score.

So the machine builds the maze, and then it hands you a pen and asks you to mark the one human being trapped inside it with you.

I mean. You have to admire the craftsmanship.

The machine underneath the machine

Right, let me put the grin down for a minute, because there's a gear underneath all of these, and it's the one I really came to name.

The whole maze rests on one quiet calculation: your time is worth nothing to us.

Not less than ours. Nothing. The forty minutes you spent on hold don't appear on their books anywhere. They didn't pay for them. You did. Your afternoon, your lunch break, your patience, your blood pressure. All of that is free to them, so they spend it freely, the way you'd spend someone else's money.

The books in this House rest on the opposite claim. Your worth started with your first breath. Nobody can add to it, and nobody can take it away. Which means your time, which is just your life measured out in minutes, isn't free. It isn't nothing. It's the only thing you've actually got, and a machine that treats it as nothing has made a mistake about what you are.

That's what's really being taken from you in the maze. Not the refund, though they'd like to keep that too. The forty minutes. And the quiet message that comes with them: you're the kind of person whose time doesn't count.

You are not that kind of person. Nobody is.

The smallest move that breaks it

All right. Grin's back. Here's the move. It's small. It's very small. It works more often than you'd believe.

First, before you ring, write down one sentence. What happened, and what you want. I was charged twice in March and I want the second charge refunded. One sentence. You'll say that sentence, word for word, to every machine and every person you meet. Machines and people both find it much harder to wander off a problem that's been nailed down in one line.

Second, when you reach a person, ask them their name, and write it down. Not to threaten them. To make it a conversation between two people instead of a ticket and a queue. Then, kindly, ask the most powerful question in the whole maze:

Who can say yes to this?

Not can you help me. They'll say they'll try. Who can say yes? That question goes straight past the apology and points at the button. Sometimes the answer is I can, and you'll be amazed how often it was true all along. Sometimes the answer is a supervisor, or a department, and then you ask to be put through to them, politely, as many times as it takes.

Third, if the phone won't do it, write. A short letter or email with your one sentence, the dates, the name of the person you spoke to, and the ticket number off the back of the envelope. Machines are built to make phone calls disappear. Written things are much harder to lose, and much more awkward to ignore.

That's the whole move. One sentence, one name, one question.

Curtain

So the next time you hear your call is important to us, I want you to do something for me. I want you to laugh. Out loud, if you're alone; under your breath, if you're on a bus.

Not because it's not frustrating. It is. Because once you've seen the gears, the menu that isn't for you, the voice that can't hear refund, the hold that filters out the busy, the kind person with no button, the survey that marks the only human in the building, the whole thing becomes what it actually is.

A very large, very expensive, very serious machine, built to waste your afternoon, pretending to care.

That's funny. It's a little sad, too, but mostly it's funny.

And the funniest thing of all is how quickly it gives up once somebody calmly asks it who can say yes.