Waiting

 A call centre has just kept me waiting for 39 minutes and 20 seconds while it processed the nine callers which got into the queue before me.

It so happens that the loudspeaker on my telephone is loud enough that I could put the telephone on the table and get on with something else, while keeping an ear out for when the (rapidly tiresome) jingle paused. So the time was not completely wasted.

Option 1. Buy a new telephone which includes a widget which flashes enthusiastically when your call is answered, rather than having to keep an ear out for jingles. Hopefully clever enough to deal both with waiting for a call to be answered and waiting for a human to get to you after the computer has done the answering.

Option 2. The call centre buys a widget which phones you back when it is ready. British Gas have such a widget at their call centre and it seems to work fine. You just key 3 (or whatever) to tell it to do that, rather than keep you waiting on the line. This way the planet has the expense of making a new call, but it does not have the expense of keeping the line open: one imagines that the planet is winning.

When I get bored or tired one afternoon, I shall investigate option 1. It may be one more reason to move on from my-no-longer-supported Microsoft telephone.

PS: irritating how many call centres behave as if their time is so much more valuable than yours. Or assume that dumping the cost of printing some interesting document on your home printer is better than doing the printing on their industrial printer and then paying the postage. Which is sometimes - but not always - fair enough.

Group search key: zzz.