Dear LPG, 

Today I feel the need to talk via the very mode of communication that I am making a bit of a case against.  I am writing a message online, although my observation is more to do with what happens when you would rather use the phone to talk to a real person as opposed to being given lots of complicated information about trawling through the online FAQs.   

I am guessing that most over-65-year-olds can remember when their parents first had a phone installed in their home.  I am talking about the days when we knew the telephone numbers of at least 5 of our friends without having to look them up.   

Those were the days when you called a commercial or an official organisation and found yourself talking to a really helpful person, and the agencies we phoned prided themselves on providing the beginning of your intended conversation without the need for hours of recorded music and with a greeting provided by a real and helpful person. 

When we envisage making an official phone call these days we older people nearly all agree that the service is not the same, and while there is a whole generation of people who accept that before you manage to talk to a real advisor, the phone will need to ring for up to 40 minutes at which point we will need to be ready to listen to a recording and press numbers on a key pad if you are to make any headway at all. 

While our younger counterparts have grown up in a world where recordings and waiting for ages for telephone satisfaction have always been the norm, the older citizens among us remember a time when the service was much more mindful of the way that the customer was treated and have seen each of these little changes as they have become gradually introduced.  We all had a bit of a moan about it, but the powers-that-be have still managed to get away with forcing these changes on us.   

We, the consumers, have all spent the decades quietly complaining about the changes that technology is forcing on us, but it still continues to gradually rob us of choice when it comes to the way we are treated by the people whose services we use.  

One of the latest tricks is the recording that implies that callers only have the choice to complain or ask questions online.  Many of these recordings now give instructions about how to get to the right internet section of their organisation’s website, which makes it appear that there is no other way. The ‘gap of silence’ can then be heard, and most callers will put the phone down, but if you hold on just a little longer, it is becoming more popular that after that gap, which is just long enough to make it sound as if your call is over, there is more.  The alternative instructions are withheld for just long enough for it to sound like there is nothing left for you to hear. 

We live in a world where patience is a virtue that is being squashed out of existence, and telephone recordings appear to be capitalising on the fact that the gap appears final.  My advice is if the recording does not actually use the words’ goodbye’, a couple of extra seconds with the phone to your ear might well make all the difference. 

DS, Kent.