Every customer service call begins with a lie, and the lie is this: "Your call is important to us." If the call were important, a person would answer it. Instead, you get a robot with the warmth of a parking ticket, reading you a menu longer than the one at a diner.
"Please listen carefully, as our menu options have recently changed." Have they? Have they really? Because the options sound exactly like the ones from last year, and the year before that, and possibly the year the phone was invented. This sentence exists for one reason: to stop you from pressing zero like a normal person who wants to skip to the end.
Pressing zero, by the way, is treated like a crime. In the old days, mashing zero got you a human. Now the robot sighs at you in its own digital way and starts the menu over, slower, like you are the problem. You are not the problem. You just want to know why your bill doubled.
Then comes the hold music, which sounds like it was recorded inside a tin can at the bottom of a lake. Every ninety seconds it cuts out, your heart leaps, and a voice tells you that your call is important and will be answered in the order received. The estimated wait time is somewhere between twenty minutes and the heat death of the universe.
My personal favorite moment is the transfer. You finally reach a human, explain everything, give them your account number, your date of birth, and possibly a short biography. They say the words "Let me transfer you to the right department," and you know, with the certainty of sunrise, that you will have to explain all of it again to someone new. The notes never travel. The notes are a myth we tell ourselves.
And if you get disconnected after forty minutes? That is not a glitch. That is the final boss. Somewhere there is a whiteboard tallying the callers who gave up, and every single one of us is on it.
Your call is important to them. Just not important enough to answer. That sucks.