I wish for these automated phone calls.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

These. Not all automated phone calls.

Just these:

BELL Canada, believe it or not, but just one type of message would please me right now.

Would have pleased me this morning.

Turns out that there’s a “Internet Outage” (note well, not a failure, collapse, or breakdown) in Etobicoke, that part of Toronto (centre of the known universe) where I live and work.

By the time I fire up my email-checker and web browser and stare at a blank screen, reboot the computer, ditto, turn off the DSL modem and wait one minute, shut down the computer. Restart the computer and do the snail-entrails technical tricks ....

By the time I decide it’s probably not me and dial BELL Canada and put up with the time-wasting “Emily” and hit zero to speak with a human.

By the time I wait on Hold for another seven minutes to reach Kevin ....

By the time Kevin (nice enough guy) has taken my details again, including my phone number which I had to key in to get this far (can’t they relay that to him? They are a communications company aren’t they?)

By the time Kevin runs a check on the line/account/connection and then tells me that they have several people calling in from Etobicoke, including one on Mill Road, .....

Given that it’s a 416 number, might Kevin not have been prompted to issue a five-second header “We have an outage in Etobicoke”, which would have answered all my question unasked, and freed Kevin up for the next worried client.

That would have saved me 13 minutes

That would have saved Kevin 3 minutes, and

That would have shaved 3 minutes off everyone else in the queue waiting to speak with Kevin.

Given that Bell is a telecommunications company, might they not have quietly dropped an un-ringing voicemail on me so that as soon as I picked up the phone I’d learn that the problem was Out There and Not In Here?

That would have saved me the best part of an hour today. I could have used that time to call my clients and advise them I was out-of-internet touch for the day.

That would have saved Kevin 3 minutes, and

That would have shaved 60 minutes off everyone else who fiddled around and sat in the queue waiting to speak with Kevin.

That’s it.

Those are all the automated phone calls I can think I’d like to have right now.

I get to chose them all myself:

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