Dear Diary - Disabled to text messages

Earlier this evening I was facing some minor problems on my mobile phone. I can’t send text message to anybody. So I called up the Digi Center for an assistance. Lend me your ears. What I want to say is that many of the service-based Malaysian companies are bad for our health, mental health that is. For they have infernal phone answering machines that drive up our stress levels or into fits of frustration.

I ended up mouthing profanities into one such device after phoning a phone company over some matters today, I had told myself to be patient and do everything the computerised message said. My dread started when I heard something I didn't want to hear, that depression inducing cheery voice recording that says: "If you want this, press 1, if you want that, press 2..." Patient, just be patient, I consoled myself. By the way, patience, according to the dictionary is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

It was like queueing up as I waited for a metallic feminine voice at the other end of the line to tell me what to do. Navigating your way through the answering machine can be quite tricky. Push the wrong buttons and you end up going nowhere. Push the right buttons, like in life, you go far. After hitting several if-you-wish-to-do-this buttons, it was joy for me when I finally heard the machine say the magic words: "If you want to speak to our customer service officers, please press zero." Bingo! I thought I finally got a human to talk to but to my despair, the voice recording says: "Our operators are all busy, we will attend to you in a short while." With a frown, I waited. *Sigh* They let me listen to some mozart to calm me down. After a while, the voice chirped again: "Our operators are still busy, we will attend to you soon." Clenching my teeth, I waited while mozart continued to calm me. Then, my restless finger hit a button, causing the machine to say the same thing again: "If you want this, press 1, if you want that, press 2..." "Oh no," I cried. More waiting, but I wasn't discouraged, so another 10 minutes of the tell-you-what-to-do stuff.

It was like taking a wrong turn and getting caught in a traffic jam. Before you can hit a button to proceed to another button, you have to wait for the voice to finish saying out its complete set of instructions. It ended with me close to a nervous breakdown when the answering machine said: "All our operators are busy, please call back later." The machine then hung up on me with a click even as I screamed: "Arrrggghhhh…No! No! Please don't hang up, please don't do this to me." I gave up (well, almost .. hehehe) .. But, I was like thinking the next day going downtown to the company concerned to sort out my problem. I will be billed half-an-hour for a call to nobody. Of course, they can say mozart kept me company.

You would be lucky to have mozart or something like that. When they keep you waiting, some companies even take the opportunity to try to make more money from you - by advertising their products over the phone. Spare a thought for those poor folk who have to keep putting in coins when they use the public phone to call a company but ended up being kept at bay by an answering machine. What about old folks who hardly held a phone in their younger days? Expect them to be an old hand in dealing with an answering machine? Isn't the old way much better, straight to the point with real telephonists handling the queries. Some companies tell you to leave a voice mail for them to call you back. But a friend remarked: "It's all phony. They bluff-lah, they never call you back."