Robert Lamb, Writer

I woke up this morning with a great idea (drum roll, please): we as a nation should abandon voice mail! It is the most vexing invention that ever came down the pike and has probably caused more ulcers than surprise phone calls from the IRS.

Why voice mail was not smothered in its crib ranks right up there with the mystery of why we ever let Texas into the Union. True, America has never met a bad idea that millions of its citizens didn’t embrace at once. Take the national mania for tattoos— but let’s leave that for another day; voice mail is easily the more harmful social affliction.

Is there anybody here whose milk of human kindness hasn’t curdled and re-curdled at hearing for the umpteenth time in half an hour’s wait, “All our agents are still busy. Your call is very important  to us. Please wait for the next available agent”?

Who among us has not turned the air blue with curses and shouted into the receiver, “If my call is so #^&*()+%  important to you, why don’t you hire more agents to answer your phones?”

Hire more agents? Provide REAL customer service? What a great idea! But why do we the frustrated customers have to do all the thinking for corporate America? Which of our beloved captains of industry, in the first place, thought it would be a good idea to install a communications system that put all of telephoning America on hold? And isn’t that, right there, the proximate cause of high rates in both unemployment and valium addiction?

Certainly it is. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you:

-Did or did not voicemail put thousands of real live people out of work?

-Did or did not Corporate America hire enough agents to answer the phones when at some time in the next century Customer America finally gets to speak to a real live person?

-Was it or was it not cruel and barbarous treatment to devise a recorded list of options none of which was the reason you called in the first place?

-Was it or was it not with malice aforethought  that the voice-mail people selected the worst music ever recorded to play for you while you waited (and waited, and waited)?

I rest my case — and I call for a conviction that can be appealed only through voice mail.

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