Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Last Tuesday, I spent ninety-three minutes trying to dispute a charge on my credit card. Not ninety-two minutes. Not an hour and a half. Ninety-three minutes of my finite life, listening to a robotic voice ask me to "press 1 for English," navigating through menu after menu of irrelevant options, being transferred to departments that immediately transferred me elsewhere, and finally being told my issue couldn't be resolved over the phone and I'd need to visit a branch in person.

The charge was $12.99.

I'm not alone in this experience. In fact, I'm one of the lucky ones. A 2023 study found that the average American spends over 43 hours per year dealing with customer service issues—that's more than a full work week of our lives spent arguing with automated systems, waiting on hold, and repeating information we've already provided five times. Forty-three hours. And that's just the average. Some of us are pulling double-digit hours per month just trying to get basic customer service.

The Intentional Maze: Why Companies Want You to Give Up

Here's what grinds my gears: this isn't an accident. Companies aren't scrambling to fix broken phone systems. They're deliberately making them worse. I know this sounds like paranoid ranting, but follow the money.

When you call a customer service line, every second you're on that line costs the company money. They pay for the infrastructure, the representatives, the electricity, the training. So from a pure business perspective, if they can make 30% of people give up and hang up before reaching a human, they've just saved 30% of their customer service costs. It's ghastly mathematics, but it works.

Banks, internet providers, insurance companies, and telecom giants have all discovered that sophisticated phone tree systems serve a dual purpose: they handle simple issues automatically (saving money), and they exhaust frustrated customers into abandoning their complaints (saving even more money). The system is designed to be just confusing enough that you question whether it's worth your time to keep trying.

Comcast is particularly notorious for this. Their phone system is a labyrinth of transfers and holds that would make Kafka's bureaucrats look efficient. I've heard countless stories of people trying to cancel service—which should theoretically be a simple transaction—being transferred between seven different departments and waiting nearly two hours total. It's almost impressive in its dedication to customer frustration.

The Hold Music Psychological Weapon

And then there's the hold music itself. That tinny, repetitive loop isn't just background noise. Researchers at Brunel University found that certain hold music patterns actually increase stress and anxiety in people waiting on the line. Some companies seem to have weaponized this knowledge.

I once got stuck on hold with a customer service line that cycled through the same four seconds of a generic synthesizer melody. Four seconds. Repeated endlessly. After forty minutes, I could feel my teeth grinding. The worst part? Every two minutes, a voiceover would interrupt to remind me that "your call is very important to us"—which, let's be honest, is the biggest lie ever told through a telephone line.

If my call was actually important, why am I listening to the audio equivalent of someone scraping their fingernails across a chalkboard? Why haven't I been connected to a human yet? Companies know that hold music serves as a psychological pressure tool, making people feel like time is moving slower, like they're being punished for having the audacity to need help.

The Transfer Tango: A Dance No One Asked For

Once you finally reach a human—and this is the part that makes me want to scream into the void—they often transfer you. Not because your issue requires someone else's expertise necessarily, but because the first representative simply doesn't have access to resolve it in their system.

I watched this happen to my elderly mother recently when she called about her health insurance. She spoke to someone in customer service. That person transferred her to billing. Billing told her the issue was actually with claims processing. Claims processing told her it was a provider network question and they needed to transfer her back to customer service. She ended up in a cycle, repeating her story four different times, with four different representatives, none of whom could access her complete file.

This isn't incompetence—though there's certainly some of that. It's often a system design problem where customer service representatives are deliberately kept compartmentalized. They handle billing or technical issues or account questions, but not multiple categories. So when your problem touches more than one category (which most real-world problems do), you get shuffled around like a human game of hot potato.

The Email Alternative That Isn't Really An Alternative

"Please visit our website for faster service," the hold message says. So you do. You find the contact form. You fill it out in detail, explaining your issue thoroughly. And then you wait. Three business days later, you get a generic response that suggests you restart your device or clear your cache—neither of which addresses your actual problem. You reply with clarification. Another three days pass. A different department responds with information that's completely irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the person who spent forty-five minutes on the phone this morning? They're probably having their issue resolved right now, simply because they wore out their welcome on a live line.

This is the worst of both worlds. The company gets to claim they have email support as an "alternative option," making their phone systems look better by comparison. But email support is often deliberately understaffed and slow, designed to make you regret not calling. It's another way of saying, "We don't really want to help you, but we'll make just enough effort to claim we tried."

Some Companies Actually Get It Right

To be fair, there are companies that have figured out that good customer service makes business sense. L.L.Bean lets you speak to a human within two minutes. Their wait times are short, their representatives have actual authority to resolve issues, and they're remarkably pleasant about the whole thing. Guess what? L.L.Bean has fiercely loyal customers who will wait in line for their products.

And it's not just about being nice. Companies like Zappos and USAA have turned good customer service into a competitive advantage that actually generates business. They understand that someone who has a problem quickly and fairly resolved becomes a more loyal customer than someone who never had a problem at all.

But many companies would rather save $200,000 annually on customer service staffing than earn the loyalty and good will that comes with actually helping people. The math is too tempting. That's what enrages me most—the knowledge that the terrible experience is intentional.

The Real Issue: We've Accepted The Unacceptable

What troubles me beyond the immediate frustration is that we've collectively normalized this. We expect terrible customer service now. We budget time for it, like it's a normal part of dealing with any company. A friend recently told me, "Well, I just call during my lunch break and plan to spend an hour on hold." That's not a system working well. That's a system held together with duct tape and spite.

Part of the problem is that complaining doesn't work. You can file complaints with the FTC or your state's attorney general, but by the time action happens (if it happens), thousands of other customers have suffered the same issue. The Subscription Trap: Why Companies Make Cancellation Deliberately Harder Than Signing Up explores a similar dynamic—companies deliberately making simple processes difficult because they know most of us will give up before pursuing alternatives.

The path forward requires us to care enough to complain loudly, choose companies that respect our time, and collectively decide that our time is valuable. Until then, we'll keep listening to hold music, repeating our information, and waiting for a human who probably can't help us anyway.

And somewhere, a corporation will be calculating that this was a profitable decision.