I remember back in the day, when, as a customer, you had an expectation of being able to get support from a company to whom you are paying money for a service. Whether calling the newspaper when you had a problem with delivery of the papers, or calling the phone company because you had a crackly phone line. And normally, you would get a person who could either help, or dispatch a technician.
Fast forward to the past ten plus years, or more, and the advent of voice response and artificial "intelligence," not to mention overseas call centers which pays their employees pennies on the dollar, and customer service is actually nothing of the sort. Companies today try to do everything in their power to distance themselves from the customer except for their monthly payment. Even the pharmacy makes you leave a message when you have a problem and calls you back at their earliest inconvenience.
I was working yesterday afternoon, and all of a sudden, everything dropped offline. Internet and television. Went down to the cablemodem and power cycled it. It sat there and flashed for an extended period. So I got on the phone with comcast. Waded through the voice response system, got to the voice asking "in a few words, tell us why you are calling." I said "service outage." It asked me whether it was TV or internet. Well, it was both, but that answer wasn't accepted. Silence, then the line goes dead. Called back, went through the voice response system again, asked for representative. The automated system asked a couple of more questions, then dropped again, a total of 3 times. Since I couldn't, for the life of me, get a human or even outage information about my area, I power cycled my cablemodem again, and did more independent troubleshooting.
Eventually, cable came back up, but I got exactly zero information or help from comcast. My cable was back up before I could report it. That is a sad state of affairs.
Update: I had to call my health insurance company. I dreaded the call, and feared the worst. Sure enough, I got the "automated assistant" after having to punch in the policy number, date of birth, etc, I got the dreaded "in a few words, tell me what you are calling for" I said agent....And actually was connected to an representative. So not nearly as egregious as other robo setups.
Then, this evening, a friend sent me a link to this video.
From where I sit, as long as we are dumping shekels into their coffers (the more shekels, the better), they are just as happy to keep us as far away from them as possible.