Technology suits companies, not customers

11:57am Friday 11th July 2008

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IT ALL came to a head this week when I walked in late from work and found my landline telephone was ringing.

I immediately picked it up and said: "Hello."

A distant familiar echo from the phone replied: "Hello."

So I repeated the process and said hello' several times, receiving the same faraway strange response.

Then, to my eternal embarrassment, I realised what was happening - I was talking to myself.

I had accidentally dialled my home number when I plonked my mobile down on the table as I walked indoors.

And there I was saying hello, hello' back to myself over and over again.

Yes, I was a plank - but my first mitigation was it was late and I was tired.

The second defence was that phone technology has become a curse on society rather than the godsend it was meant to be.

It's well chronicled that mobile telephones are a dangerous menace on our roads as motorists still flout the law and clutch them to their ears as they negotiate difficult junctions.

It's also well accepted that the phones are intrusive to the point of being downright rude. You are in a restaurant relaxing over a quiet dinner when a Star Wars ringtone blares out from the next booth.

Eventually, when the handset is located and the music stops, you are treated to a half-cut diner yelling at the top of this voice: "Yeah, I'm in the curry-ouse. Yeah, I'll come over tomorrow. Yeah, I don't know what she sees in the old dog"

Occasionally, it gets even worse for you when an unpleasant handset shatters the tranquillity of a restaurant/café/airport lounge/train carriage.

Everyone, including you, tut and shake your head. Then, you realise, the phone actually belongs to you and you are the culprit.

I'm as guilty as everyone else. I walk down the street talking on my mobile, I allow it to interrupt transactions in shops and I stop my car in laybys to answer it whenever it rings.

Yet, it's so easy to forget mobile phones are extremely new to us. The world swung along quite happily until a decade or so ago without them.

But if like me, you still love them, I am sure you will join me in detesting the biggest bugbear of telephone technology - the automated system that most major firms use.

Whenever you dial any big company these days, you have to go through a dreadful process of tapping in numbers to reach the services you require.

There's no more speaking to human operators. Instead, a robotic taped message gives you a choice of pressing one to four to reach your destination.

And once you do that, you get another set of numbered options. And so it goes on.

I never used to mind in the past. But twice in the last week, it caused me merry hell.

First, I took a break from work on Friday to try to arrange some life insurance. I expected my call to be answered promptly because, after all, I was going to give them some new custom and money.

Instead, the dreaded recorded message kept giving me a series of options. Eventually, after my fingers were sore from pressing numbers, I was told I would be put through to a human.

No such luck. Another recorded voice told me there was no one available, and the line went dead.

After this happened three times, I eventually found a number for customer services and I made a slightly hysterical call in which I ordered them to put me through to a living being.

Two days later, I had a similar near-death experience with a motoring organisation when I rang to cancel my breakdown cover.

After pressing a load of numbers, I was put through to the retention department' - only to hear a taped message tell me no one was in because it was Sunday.

It didn't matter that I didn't want to be retained; I wanted to cancel. There was no option on this wonderful technology for that.

It is, after all, a technology that suits the companies and not the customers. It allows them to put a distance between themselves and the public, and allows them to save job costs.

In the end, I emailed the breakdown company and was told in a message I'd have a reply from them within 72 hours.

Is it my imagination or have these wonderful new inventions actually made things slower and harder, as well as less human and more expensive?