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 Alas, its message is not outdated.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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