A friend and I were discussing IVRs the other day—you know, when you call a bank, a utility company, a doctor’s office and are barred entry by a computer robot demanding that you listen to and choose one of their self-service computer options (give us money; find out how much money you should give us; go to our kludgy website). And when you try to circumvent that by saying “agent” or “representative, it always comes back with “I need some information to get you to the right person.” And then when you do get to a humanoid, they always want you to repeat all the information you’ve gust given the robot. AI is just going to make it worse.
(I once tried to circumvent the wait time
with Comcast (cable company) to downsize my subscription. There was one “line”
for buying more, and another for downgrading, cancelling, etc. When I pressed
the number for the latter, it said the wait time was more than 30 minutes, or
the like. So I went back & pressed the number for “buy more”. Got right through
to an agent, but she couldn’t help me. She was in the Philippines (from her
accent) and her only script was for adding services. So I had to go back &
wait. Interestingly, the woman who eventually came on the line was American
(eventually I found out she was located in Massachusetts). They must have
learned that complex transactions don’t go well when they offshore the reps. I
found that true in the past, when I had technical issues: first-line support
was South Asian; when I escalated, it came back to the US.)
Anyway—when I came across this cartoon by Edith Pritchitt, I felt seen.
©2025 Bas Bleu
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