We could eliminate an awful lot of unemployment in this country if companies would hire enough human beings to man their support phones. When you consistently hear, "We are experiencing a high volume of calls," that means they need more employees or more phones or some combination. Their unwillingness to do this is not an excuse for keeping you or me on hold for — so far for the call I'm currently on, twenty-two minutes.
Every so often, a recorded voice tells me I can push "1" to leave a voice mail or press "2" to schedule a callback. Neither option does anything but tell me they're experiencing a high volume of calls and that an agent will be with me shortly —
Oh! And now it seems to have learned a new trick because it just hung up on me.
I've called back, having been through this enough times to know that if I'm persistent and willing to call back a few times and to sit here and work as I listen to bad hold music and mocking announcements long enough, eventually I will get to someone who had nothing to do with the problem and is powerless to prevent it from happening again and this person will give me a pretty meaningless apology and —
Hold on. Person on the line.
Okay. I got the pretty meaningless apology and a probably-meaningless promise that the replacement item was shipped to me, albeit three weeks later than they promised. Again, the fact that they're understaffed is supposed to be an excuse.
Hire more people. They need jobs. You need them.