Are We Dying From a Thousand Paper Cuts?
At times, life seems to be slip-sliding away.
Have you tried to contact someone in a big business or the government lately?
I sense the problem is from sea-to-shining-sea, at the moment. And it’s at all levels of the bureaucratic hive.
Go to their websites and try to find someone’s phone number or email.
You can’t.
What you get instead are contact forms to fill out.
They will get back with you in the order your note was received — which is insider information.
Or, if you call a help line on your phone, you end up punching in numbers to first validate who you are.
The problem I had with that one was it told me I entered the wrong date for my birthday.
No, I know that date and I’m pretty sure the problem wasn’t on my end.
This forced me to hang up and call on a landline.
Little annoyances like these feel like being nibbled to death by hungry minnows.
On one form it asked for my mobile phone number including area code. I typed it in but didn’t at first parenthesize the area code and then put a space between area code and the rest, not to mention hyphenate the remaining seven digits in order to separate the front three from the back four. Just putting in the numbers is the way many forms prefer it now days. Fewer formatting errors.
In my case, no instructions as to the acceptable format were given. Instead, when I tried to submit the entire form at the end, it just locked up.
That one took me thirty minutes of my life to figure out.
And I don’t feel better or smarter having had the experience.
At first I thought its refusal to submit my form had to do with a trick question at the end where it wanted me to prove to its Artificial Intelligent self that I was human. It asked me to write down some letters that were written in a distorted way and with a background of dots. But then it didn’t just display letters. There were numbers as well. Was it testing me on whether or not I knew the difference between letters and numbers?
Does it seem to anyone else that creating difficult complaint processes reduces the work load as well as provides better looking statistics for the organization’s end-of-year job performance report? This problem is most common when the workers are paid by a third party, like tax payers.
Now I didn’t bring this up to just complain. Yes, it feels good to complain, but I also think it provides an opportunity to remind us all to not let this stuff get to us.
It reminds me how critically important it really is to seek quiet moments through the day to decompress.
Laughing is also a good outlet.
So is taking a walk.
Oh Ben, you are not alone here if that is any consolation. I long for the times when everyday tasks weren't made more difficult, more impersonal, more frustrating. Thirty minutes is precious time that is stolen from us while wading through the authenticity phase, voice mail loop, typing in codes for two-point verification, pressing "1" for English, etc. only to be told to wait for a representative while listening to recorded messages about how important our call is to them. I have to make these calls when I am rested and fresh, not in the homicidal state that I'm in after a few attempts to get things done. What to do? I'll try the walk, a good suggestion. The problem is that the bills are still there when I get back. When on those rare times a real person answers, I'm so flabbergasted, I forget why I called.