Friday, November 25, 2016

The Meanings of "Menu"

This piece was written in Marcch 2011 for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but I don't think it was ever printed. Alas, its message is not outdated.

The Decline of the Menu

            Menus aren’t what they used to be.  They once were just the information handed to us after having been seated in a restaurant—anything from a couple of pages wrapped in plastic to an elegantly bound book, depending on the rank of the establishment.  In either case, that menu told us what there was to eat and what it would cost.
            Those were the good old days.  The meaning of this benign term has expanded and what else it has come to mean is not succulent.
            Make a telephone call to a bank you do business with; call a telephone or cable outfit that serves you; call an insurance company, an airline, or, for that matter any business—even a quite little one—and what you get is a menu.
            For the lucky ones who have not had this experience, herewith a quick explanation.  You dial that 800 number, knowing that the call will not cost money, but a good deal of your time.  There won’t be a person answering the phone, it will not be somebody quite like you, the caller.  Instead, the respondent will be a voice, often quite mellifluous, generated by an all-too-well programmed computer. 
            In effect, the voice asks you why are you calling by suggesting a set of possible answers: to get your balance (press one), to make a payment (press two), to change your address (press three), and on and on to as many as six or more alternatives. 
            All’s well, or reasonably so, if the menu offers a dish that you want to consume.  So you press four and get done with your business.  Or so you think.  The odds are great that at four, the computer voice will propose another menu—just how do you want to pay your bill: by credit card, (press one) by check (press two).  If you are lucky you will get a person when you have made that selection.
            Note how much more time this took than would have been the case in the good old days, had you reached a human being in the first place.  Someone who understands what you want, deals with your business or transfers you to someone (another human being) who takes care of you.  The preliminary score: you’ve spent a lot of time dealing with a company whose customer you are, while they’ve saved time. Since time is money, it’s fair to ask whether our time and their savings reduce the price of their product.  What do you think?
            But that’s only the beginning.  Menu-mania has gone well beyond giving callers a multiple choice exam. With great progress in computers’ ability to “understand” what is told them, a scheme is becoming more and more common that is both remarkably sophisticated and thoroughly annoying.  After courteously greeting you, the computer voice begins to interrogate you concerning your business.  “Do you want to make a new reservation or change an existing one?” You answer via vocce, pressing no buttons.  Smoothly, apparently all-knowing, the voice asks further questions about your business and patiently repeats its questions until it—the computer!—finds your answers satisfactory.  The process can be quite extensive before you hear the announcement that you will be referred to a person. 
            But don’t celebrate as yet. Another voice, issuing from a different computer may well tell you that “all of our agents are busy” and that you will have to wait so many minutes.  You do wait because your time investment has already been great and finally a human voice greets you. But don’t count on the fact that she already has the information you had previously provided; you may well need to start again da capo.
            It is an unfair match: the caller is required to be as patient as the computer.  I, for one, am usually reduced to extreme grouchiness by the time that human voice speaks to me.  That’s unfair to her; it was not she who tormented me.
            And yet, what I have just described is the favorable scenario.  It describes a case where you actually want to pick one of the alternatives the computer offers you, which is certainly not always the case.  No, I don’t want to place a new subscription, pay for the one I have, enter a vacation stop, and more.  I want to place a death notice in your newspaper.  I have often experienced analogous, if less drastic, cases.  On some occasions I succeeded in getting to a person by again and again screaming “agent” into the phone or by pressing nine.  At other times I had to give up—Computer: one; Client: zero.  I then have either abandoned my business altogether or found some other way to conduct it.  By mail, maybe.
            The wonderful progress I have been describing has converted the entire population into unpaid employees of countless organizations.  Protesting is not futile.  It is impossible.  To whom complain?  How exert pressure, how threaten?  We are victims of what is called progress and this plaint, this lamentation is a voice in the wilderness.


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